Last Bender

9.4

Roy pulled into the driveway. Our father moved a lot. This place was typical of his suburban phase. A fifties ranch on a mature cul de sac. The yard bordered woods. Behind the house was a kidney shaped pool and a putting green. There was a perennial border around the house with a white pebble path and birch and apple trees. We parked between the brown Mercedes and the 1972 green Pontiac Bonneville my father drove and went up the slate walk to the front door. My father came crunching through the gravel towards us from the pool, beneath a canopy of pine boughs, in his dripping swimsuit.

“I was worried to death!” He smiled. “Come in, come in.” Even in his mid fifties his ribs stood out. He could not put on weight because of the TB he got in Germany in 1945, during the occupation. He was already weak from months of fighting. He had a girlfriend, and spent nights at her home where her parents, children and grandparents were all living. Somewhere in those close quarters the bacillus entered his lungs. He had a long, narrow face with a large nose bent in the middle. The hair curled like whitecaps on the back of his head. Reading glasses made him look wiser than he was, as his eyes, focused on a piece of paper, became intent. Then he would raise his eyebrows and look out over the tops of those glasses, both amused and worried by what he had seen. He was deeply tanned as he always had been, since ‘72 anyway, when he first caught the bug for Miami, at the convention where his man got the nod.

His presidential record is impressive. The only one he worked for who managed to get elected was murdered 3 years later.

It started with his first love, Henry Wallace, in ‘48, who in his naiveté was crushed by communist conspiracy: “They took it over. Our last chance to stop this madness of the cold war, and they take it over and like everything else they touch, they fuck it up. It was a real political education, I can tell you. In England they elected the Socialists. Why couldn’t we do that? I ask you, is it so impossible? Bah. Fuck it. I’m not a fanatic, I’m not like that putz Podhoretz, but let me tell you, you can’t trust a Communist. At some point, I couldn’t tell you when exactly, they decided that the truth was not important, winning was, being right. So to them it doesn’t matter what they say, or what tactic they employ so long as it advances them on their way. Now, you could say that Marx is ethically neutral. But I never read him that way. If all you have to rely on is the historical necessity of socialism, not the fact that it is a more just way of doing things, you’re lost. There is no science of history. The only pattern is the pattern of life. What goes up, must come down. You know who was fond of saying that about politics don’t you? Richard Fucking Nixon, Quaker.”

Next he went for Kefauver, “Despite reservations, very severe ones. It cost me friends, not for the last time either. But there was Harriman, who was weak, and Stevenson; everyone wanted Stevenson but he wasn’t running and Truman acting like a crazy man, one day in, one day out, like Johnson did. Always playing with their dicks. So I figured Kefauver’s winning. People like him. He’s against organized crime, corruption, monopolies, and he’s a smart operator, and a good guy to have a glass of scotch with. My friends in the movement thought he was basically a southern racist politician. I didn’t think so. He was persuadable. Without the persuadable you got nothing. That’s how you get to a majority. If you want to get elected, do for the people. The democrats don’t understand this anymore.” Kefauver won all the primaries in 1952 but lost the nomination to Stevenson.

He backed Stevenson in ‘56 but sat the election out. “I can’t work for a loser.” Right. Then Harris Wofford brought him into the Kennedy campaign in 1960, at first very much against his will, but it was where he had been heading. He was tired of the abuse, of living in motels and pleading before judges who hated him. “John Kennedy was the slick child of a rich son of a bitch who helped bring on the crash of ‘29, a bootlegger, anti-Semite pro-Nazi, Boston Irish bastard. And this guy, what the fuck did he ever do? I don’t think I ever hated anyone more than McCarthy, except maybe J Edger Hoover and Nixon himself. I could never hate Johnson outright. I was disgusted by him. But McCarthy? The guy’s a fucking scumbag. Oh Jesus, and for him to be the one democrat who didn’t vote to censure, didn’t even show up. The guy’s back never hurt so much he couldn’t fuck a Mafia Don’s wife or an East German spy, right? That’s just bad character. Well, I figured if he was going to have a civil rights group in the campaign, he might as well have the real thing. I was tired of getting my head kicked in, and mobs, and bombs and shootings, tear gas, hoses and dogs. It’s surreal to think about now. I wanted to go to Washington and push paper in a quiet office somewhere. Some joke that, huh?”

At first he was their eye against the pane that separated them from CORE, SCLC and SNCC. He worked for Burke Marshall at the Justice Department. He was beaten unconscious in Montgomery in ‘61. But he took to Washington and even came to like Kennedy.

He followed RFK back to New York, a place where he had friends and family but no connections. “Until Bob ran for Senate in New York, the Jews on his staff never had the same influence as the Irish. That’s to be expected. Especially in those days. It was their culture, their political culture. Politics for the Irish is like Talmudic argument for the Jews. It’s endless. It never stopped, even on the train. You were there, you remember. The guy’s lying dead, the Jews and the blacks are crying their eyes out and his closest and oldest friends are getting drunk and handicapping McCarthy against Humphrey and trying to figure out what Johnson will do.

“We get to the city and suddenly the Jews are important. Ah, it was the war. We weren’t as complicit; we didn’t have to cover our asses. Even good people find it hard to admit they had fucked up with Vietnam. He’s a Liberal, but the NY liberals don’t like him too much, they never regarded any Kennedy as a true liberal. You’ve got nothing but factions, on the Upper West Side, there were 3, 4 factions sometimes factions within factions. And Lindsey changed everything except for the fact that you always had to kiss some non-entity’s ass because a guy upstate made a deal. Crangle of Erie County, Steingut from Brooklyn, Buckley up in the Bronx, or Carmine DeSapio. Guys you never fucking heard of. It’s dizzying. It still is. Have a talk with my friend Sonny Carson out in Brooklyn some time and then drop in on Meir Kahane.”

In 1967 Lowenstein approached him about his Dump Johnson project. “It was quixotic. Who was this guy? Everyone said you could never do it. Not since Franklin Pierce in 1856. You know what Pierce said after losing the Democratic nomination? ‘After the presidency, there’s nothing to do but get drunk.’” By January of ‘68 he was within an inch of quitting and joining the McCarthy campaign, but in the end he stuck it out with his boss.

For two or three years after that, nothing but sullen outbursts of irrational anger and recrimination. He sounded like Nixon on the tapes. “We’re going to get those bastards,” he’d say, fixing his tie in the Commodore mirror. He ran about his warren, weary, ashen, semi-shaved. Except for trips up to Westchester he was confined to his passageways. It was McGovern who pulled him out of it, when he asked him to be counsel to the McGovern Commission, which was changing the rules of the ‘72 convention to cut out the bosses. The same bosses who threw it to Stevenson in ‘52, who in ‘68 planned to give it to Humphrey no matter what McCarthy won.

He was back in the saddle. “McGovern, good man. Look, it’s impossible to talk about this with him. The enormity of the landslide. You, when you’re going to lose, knowing you’re going to lose big, possibly set a record, it doesn’t help at all. You still feel like shit. Absurdity is no balm. Whoever said so must have been a comedian.” But after the debacle of ‘72, he merely had to lick his wounds and did so with a man he’d first met in the fifties in NY through King, Albert Shankar. They had moved in adjacent circles for decades and they began their fruitful collaboration in ‘73.

In ‘76 he turned out for Fred Harris and went up to New Hampshire again. In ‘80 of course he took on Ted Kennedy. That really hurt him with the party. “They won’t take my calls! I was being loyal! Carter was taking the country in the wrong direction. And we needed to put a real liberal with a big name up against Reagan. Boy was I fucking wrong. I’ll tell you, ego. Everyone is an ego maniac but nothing clouds your judgment more.” I wondered who was next.

He slapped Roy’s shoulder. “Roy! Where ya been? Who’s this? What’s your name, Dawn? Was it Dawn? I got it right. Alex,” he hugged and kissed me. “How are the books and cappuccinos? Don’t they always go together? The friars and the scrolls. Come on back. You can go into the house from there. I’ve got the grill fired up. Let me get you a gin and tonic.” He bustled ahead and we followed him under the Nordic wood and around behind the house. “That boy can really swim now, you gotta see. Much better than last year. He made the team. Hey!” he yelled, waving at Barry who was by the side of the pool looking adenoidal and miserable in a wet bathing suit. Barry frowned and waved and headed out on the diving board.

“Go on up to the house and change into your suits.”

The sliding doors opened into a modern living room with Scandinavian furniture, puce pillows and mauve throws and dove walls. It looked purchased. My father was indifferent to many things. He had not always been rich and to him it didn’t matter one way or another. He drove a car till it dropped dead and never stopped working. And none of it, till he met Shankar, paid a dime.

We used to go to Cook’s on the Post Road and Rye Playland. Or we’d drive up to Bear Mountain and take a hike. He took us to Laguardia to watch the planes take off and we once drove out to see the World’s Fair Globe. We went to auto wreckers and climbed around in the old buses and cars stacked and piled up, the smell of hot corroded rubber and weeds in the air. There was a cemetery we went to also to go on the rope swing.

We stood around the pool, all four of us scrawny and unhappy in the blazing light. Roy and Dawn were in black suits with dark glasses, their skin puckered and pink. My trunks hung down to my knees and I was wearing a pair of new flip flops because the flagstones in past years were so hot they burned my feet. Elaine, my father’s second wife, was lying on a redwood chaise in a tiny bikini she burst out of and a big straw hat and oval sunglasses. Barry, in a blue racing suit, knock-kneed and trembling, stood on the end of the diving board.

“Go on, you can do it,” Elaine shouted.” She sipped a gigantic plastic cup of iced tea through a straw. “Don’t mind me if I don’t get up,” she said, smiling in our direction.

“Hi,” Dawn said, shielding her eyes, two blinding dazzles of sun playing on each dark lens of her glasses. “I’m Roy’s wife Dawn.”

“My wife, Elaine,” my father said, beckoning us to a table under an umbrella next to the chaise lounge. On it were four gin and tonics perspiring and in foment with a wedge of lime stuck on the rim. “I forgot who takes lime with theirs so I just put it on there. Lechaim.” We toasted. There are worse things than a gin and tonic on a hot day by the pool, like Jim Beam in a jelly glass. He nodded in Elaine’s direction. “She was made for days like this. You know how there are snow bunnies? Well she’s a sun bunny. She puts that oil on her and gets darker and darker. Me, I’d get skin cancer before I turned that color. I put it on a little at a time. Miami, just walking around, right Roy?”

“Yeah.”

Elaine lifted her head but otherwise remained flat out and said, “I said Go on. What’s to be afraid of? Look, the coach said if you can’t do a racing dive you can’t be on the team.” She propped her self up on her elbows and held up a magazine to block the sun. “Go on. Don’t be afraid, just do it. Oh my god. Say something!” she said, turning to my father. “Izzie.”

“Barry, just look at the water and fall in.”

“That’s a dive, not a racing dive.”

“I thought that’s what you meant.”

“Racing dive! He knows how to dive.”

“A cannon ball’s not a dive,” my father said.

“In any event, the type of dive he needs to learn is a racing dive.”

“I can’t help with that one there. You’re doing a terrific job Barry.”

My father was a man pretending to be a father, I think. He knew he was supposed to do certain things, and he had all the love of a father, which he could not show except to act like one who does. The whole ritual of the day down to the inane chatter had been repeated many times. He had a compulsion to repeat. It was not the same as what is so brutally reduced by the terms OCD, or PTSD, or ADHD, though certainly he was or had or had had all three of these. So if at one time we drank a gin and tonic and it was good he had to have a gin and tonic with you for it to be good again. The same with the pool and the kid. And the well charred porterhouse steak and claret for dinner. Barry flopped into the pool and started to swim back and forth.

“So,” my father said, “What were you boys doing, why were you late?”

I looked at Roy. He was grinding his teeth. If we waited long enough and smiled ambiguously he would move on to something else. Dawn said, “It’s my fault sir. I just had to watch the rest of Apocalypse Now. It’s my absolute favorite movie in the world.”

It was a favorite of his too. Roy must have prepped her. “No kidding?” he asked. “Do you know the scene where they give him his mission. Harrison Ford’s in it. Willard takes the Marlboro and lights it?”

“Extreme prejudice.”

“Come on Roy, help me burn a steak.”

I stood at the edge of the pool and looked at the water. Bugs struggled against the pitching waves. Reflections bloomed and broke. The chlorine smell mixed with the smell of lawn care products, lighter fluid and coconut tanning oil. The flagstones burned my feet. I dove into the pool. Barry was still swimming back and forth, underwater now. But he kept banging his nose into the walls because they were irregular. Elaine shouted from a full sitting position, “Oh my god will you stop it already?”

I lay back and swam around for a while feeling the sun on my face and letting my feet hang in the cold water of the deep end. I got out and dried off and watched my father and Roy at the grill. Roy looked tense and bored. He kept gazing off and didn’t smile. Normally they’d be yucking it up together, even if he were high. He must have done too much. He stared grimly at the grill while our father laid down a monumental slab of beef. It hissed and spit and flames started to lick the edges. “Out here, you have to show them how to cut the meat. The butchers in the city know what they’re doing. Everything is an education now. Anyway, that’s for you. For me I got this.” He slapped down a naked chicken breast. “No bones and no skin. Nothing to grind and suck and no crunch. All my life I can’t put on a pound and now they tell me I got high cholesterol. This is a stupidly run universe I can tell you that. What kind of a racket is it when a man like me has to go on a god damn diet?”

“Won’t it cook too fast?” I asked.

“Who the fuck cares?” He laughed. “If it burns maybe it’ll acquire some flavor. So what do you think of that son of a bitch Reagan now, huh?” He slapped Roy’s back and grinned at him demonically, showing all his teeth like a Wyndham Lewis drawing. At some point in the remote early days of our history when it was still a mythology, still malleable, he had decided to treat Roy like a gregarious colleague. It was shallow and yet it was evident how much he adored Roy and craved his love in return, which Roy repaid with everything from petulance to indifference.

He banged Roy’s shoulder again. It was like a block of wood. Roy swallowed hard and said, “That’s a big piece of meat, dad.”

He chuckled. “I may not be able to eat it, but,” he paused and covered his mouth with his hand and whispered, “I can tear off all I want. –But that doesn’t mean I can’t cook it. I know how to enjoy a thing if someone else is. Now that side looks done.” The smoke was racing up off the grill and the steaks were engulfed in flame. Roy took the tongs and flipped it and put the kettle lid on. Smoke gushed from the three vent holes.

We took the meat inside on a wooden platter. The dining room table was next to a sliding screen door. It was set with china, silver, grey and white linens and napkins and tea lights. Elaine had made tabbouleh and a salad of feta and cucumbers and olives. “Ain’t it beautiful?” my father said. He put the platter with the steak and the charred, shriveled chicken breast down and carved off slices of pink meat. Every minute or so he’d he’d pop a piece or two into his mouth and chew quickly, taking sips of red wine. In that way he consumed an entire portion of meat before we sat down.

“I thought, why always a baked potato. Let’s have a grain and salad,” Elaine said, seated at one end of the table. My father sat at the other. Roy and Dawn sat across from Barry and me. The air smelled like evening trees and cornsilk. There were fireflies and firecrackers going off. Roy and Dawn stared at their plates and slowly cut their meat into a hundred little pieces which they chewed a hundred times and swallowed down with wine.

He asked me about Sally and I filled him in on her itinerary and then unfolded my plan for going to library school.

“And you say you’re working at Butler?” he asked.

“Just a few hours a day. I met this old socialist, English conservator, and he put me on for the summer shelving books.”

“I spent a lot of time there. I can smell them now, the smell of all those bindings, and the light. Isn’t that good what he’s doing, Roy?”

Roy grunted. Dawn’s eyes were fixed on space.

Elaine said, “I worked in the library at Rutgers. I had to sort those cards. You shook these bars. God it was boring.”

“McBee cards, they’re very cool. I do those sometimes, when there isn’t much too shelve. And I fix bindings. So who do you like in ‘84?” I asked. “What do you think of Hart?”

“Tell me the difference between Hart and Reagan. He won’t make it. They’ll give it to Fritz. He’s their sacrificial lamb, their Stevenson. I’m thinking Jackson. He’s talking about running. Would you believe it, the guy’s popular in northern Wisconsin. That’s Wallace land.”

“Kennedy too,” I said.

“Be a prick. Jesse’s the only one who shows up for their strikes. He gets out on the picket line. He’s out there doing something, while this criminal boob makes a mockery of an office that was severely imperiled to begin with. It’s like kicking a sick dog. Things just keep getting worse. It’s unimaginable, as if the bottom had dropped out. If he weren’t so evil he’d just be ludicrous. Nixon was ludicrous in his way, and Johnson too. Johnson was a big baby, like Kruschev. The point is, they were tragic figures for crissakes, savage clowns, it wasn’t a farce. This is a farce. What did Clark call him? An amiable dunce, that’s the president of The United States of America! As if we could afford such a thing.”

We cleared our plates. Dawn started to stack them in the sink and was about to load the dishwasher. “Nah,” Elaine said, “I do them first. I don’t trust those machines to get things clean.” She pushed Dawn gently out of the way and said to me, “Now go with your dad to play pool, go on.”

We followed him to the lower level where there was a knotty pine paneled den with a pool table and small wet bar. He put on the light and a ceiling fan began to whirr.

“What’s everyone having?” he asked, stepping behind the bar.

I felt bloated with dead flesh and my skin was itching from the chlorine. The room was cool and airless. There were sliding glass doors and we looked out on the back lawn and the pool, which was lit up and placid.

“Whatever single malt you’ve got,” Roy said.

“And I have some cigars. I was in Canada a couple of weeks ago and picked these babies up.” He took out a wooden cigar box and handed Dawn and Roy one. They sniffed them and smiled. He rummaged around the cabinets and said, “What about you Alex.”

“If you’re smoking those I’m opening the door, OK?”

“Don’t do that,” he said, “you’ll let the bugs in.”

“There’s a screen?”

“So? It’s hot out. And the screen isn’t that good. But open them if you must.”

“Just, when you light up. It’s a beautiful night. When it’s steamy like this, out here, it smells so good.”

“So what are you having?”

“Do you have beer?”

“Sure.” He put a bottle of Glenlivet down on the bar and said to Roy, “Rocks?”

“Two,” Roy said.

Roy went over to the pool table and started taking the balls out three at a time, forming a loose herd. Whenever one took off he would reach over and retrieve it without looking.

“None for me,” said Dawn. “I mean scotch. I’ll take whatever bourbon on the rocks you have please sir.”

“O.K.,” he laughed. He found a bottle of Wild Turkey and screwed the cap off. “So where are you from?” He poured it over a couple of cubes in a highball glass.

“When Roy and I met I was living in Athens, Georgia but my hometown is Dallas.”

He handed her the drink and raised his eyebrows. “Nice place that,” he said. “Haven’t been in years. What do your parents do, what are they?”

“Well sir Mr. Ploomis–”

“Please, Izzie.”

“Izzie sir, my father’s an accountant at an accounting firm and my mother sells real estate, or rather, she’s getting her license now that I ran off and my brother doesn’t live at home anymore. He likes to say that the last Democrat he voted for was Richard Nixon.”

My father smiled. “Well drink up everybody and let’s shoot a rack.”

Roy racked the balls and rolled them into place. “You break,” he said to my father.

“I’ll take Dawn, you take Alex,” my father said.

“She can play better’n he can, if she’ll just stop talking for minute.”

“Yeah, I’ll tell you about that later,” she said under her breath, flexing her nostrils. She put the cigar in her mouth.

“Ah, allow me,” my father said, putting down his pool cue and taking out a disposable lighter and lighting it. She puffed three times and blew smoke rings. The ceiling fan dispersed the silver foxtail of smoke curling up to it. Roy and my father lit theirs up. It smelled like Julian’s on 14th Street. I slid open the doors and the puff of warm, humid air engulfed me. It smelled strongly of the night, of wet vegetation and trees sighing into the windless air. My father leaned down over the table, narrowed his right eye and drew the cue back with his left arm. Then the knock of the cue ball followed by the break and we watched various balls approach and miss the pockets. The clinamen of billiards. “Ah,” he said. “Your turn Roy.” He turned his back on the table and faced me. “You don’t know what your missing with these cigars, Alex.”

I choked loudly, and weighed a few cues in my hand. I liked a little weight in the back, something to hold onto when trying to make a shot. “I’m not missing a thing. I find the smell of even the finest cigar to be repugnant.”

“I see.”

“I don’t like the smell of cigars. It doesn’t make me want to smoke them.”

“Well anyway, you don’t,” he said. “Dawn, you go.”

She was lining the 3 up for a shot in the center pocket. It was kind of a hard angle to make. You had to aim carefully. She knocked it softly and sank the ball. Now she was surrounded by stripes. She managed not to knock any in but almost scratched the cue ball in the corner pocket. It was resting just on the edge. The eleven was sitting just on the near edge of the other corner pocket. I lined it up and hit the cue ball pretty hard, figuring it to bounce around and end up in the center of the table. It overtook the nine in the hole. They knocked together and rolled down the wooden ramps.

“It was an easy shot,” I said to Roy. “I’m sorry.”

He sat on a stool, sucking on his teeth as he had all through dinner. “Don’t sweat it. I can beat them both.”

He hopped down and made a few shots. My father said, “I’m telling you, this son of a bitch is killing us. There’ll be no unions left to back a president in ‘84. You see how this is all intentional. I mean, when you destroy the unions you don’t just destroy good jobs, you destroy the Democratic party. That’s been its base for forty, fifty years. Why don’t we shut down all the goddamn churches. You put Falwell out of business, you tax these for-profit churches and see what happens to the Reagan Revolution then.” He addressed all of this to Roy, but Roy was functionally inert. He would stand, knock in a few balls and return to his drink, grinding his teeth. He was listening to my father, but I have no idea what he was hearing, or imagining. I really think Roy didn’t give a damn about Reagan or politics, he just liked to argue.

“They put that midlevel mafia crook Ray Donovan in there. It’s enough to make me want to become a communist! I’m telling you, I never understood how Du Boise, one of the most brilliant men of this century, in the height of the cold war could become a Communist just to piss off Walter White. But now I understand, when I think about that bastard, that stupid, fucking bastard in the White House. It’s almost worse than Nixon. Nixon was both war criminal and crook but there never was any doubt about what he was. The man was an animal of power pure and simple. But this Reagan, people believe in his goodness. He’s got ‘em by the balls and he knows it. That’s why he smiles. People meet him and think, ‘Oh, what a nice man, I think I’ll put my balls in his hand.’ You’d be smiling too. They’re fascists, American fascists, and if you can call Helen Gehagen Douglas a Communist you can call this gang fascist. Look,” he counted off with his fingers, “he stages events, sets out to destroy people’s belief in the common good, in decency to the other guy, and he shows them pretty pictures of how good their lives will be. They’re fascists!”

Roy looked at our father now. When it was evident that he would take a breather Roy mumbled and then said, in a clear voice, with tears filling his eyes, “What the fuck are you talking about? You wanna see a fascist, a Nazi? Cause I have. Down in Guatemala and El Salvador and Honduras. Go there to see the real thing. Up here, people like you get paid to mouth off. Down there they’d take you out and hack you up with a machete. Then they’d come back and rape your wife and your kid. They’d cut off her tits, and beat him to death with their rifle butts. They’d lay you three out in the village square and no one would say a word. Reagan’s whatever kind of fascist it is who pays people to do shit like that while people like you sit around their pool acting tough.”

“Who said anything about Nazis? I said fascist. And I think I know a thing or two,” his voice became constricted, as he realized how pointless it was to say anything more. It had exceeded even his seemingly limitless capacity for argument.

Now we played pool in silence, me sipping a Grolsch which for some reason was my father’s favorite beer. When he became a rich man he started to buy things that had looked good to him when he was poor; he had to have that Grolsch with the fancy top and the 50-year-old Cognac. He swirled some of that around in his snifter and stared off dully. Soon it was time to go home. We shook hands at the door. Elaine was in bed, Barry was watching TV and eating a can of Pringles. Roy mumbled good-bye to our father and Dawn, looking half asleep, kissed his cheek and said, “So now you’re my father-in-law. I’ll have to introduce you to my father.” She laughed, actually, giggled for just a second.

“Something to look forward to,” he said. “Go home and get some rest.”

“Alex–”

“Dad.”

“The books sound terrific. I think your idea about library school is just the thing for you. And next year, you’re going to bring Sally, right?”

“If we’re still together.”

“Your too young to be so cynical. Love her while you still can. Tell me when school starts, I’ll send you a hundred bucks, how’s that?”

We got in the car. Roy said, “You drive, I took a Quaalude with that scotch. I’m totally fucked up.” He started to laugh and then the laugh trailed off. He made an abrupt snoring noise.

“Did you have to be such a jerk to him? I can’t believe you said that. It’s not like he doesn’t know about these things. He’s on some Central American solidarity committee, he helped start a sister city somewhere in New Hampshire. His father was killed by Nazi agents. You’ve gone too far. You’re wasted on drugs all the time and all you do is go around doing just like whatever pops into your head. It’s like the world only exists for you to use it, it’s like, your toilet. What you like you like, what you don’t you don’t. Everyone’s the same. But all you do is take. He loves you, he’s just trying to connect with you somehow and you pay it back with contempt.” It was too cold in the car. “Roy, turn off the air conditioner or turn it down, please?” There was no answer. “Roy?” I didn’t want to take my eyes off the road or hand off the stick. I was not used to driving. The way was curvy and dark. I was so afraid my mind shut down and I forgot about them and just drove and drove doing all the things you do when you drive. By the time we parked I couldn’t remember getting there. Just the tunnel the headlights cut out of the dark and the others shining into it. You don’t know what to trust. I didn’t and I don’t.