You

23

EVERY time I approach an exit, I want to pull off and find a gas station and change out of this musty costume. But I don’t. I am paralyzed behind the wheel. I am so panicked that I can only go forward. And the reason is horrifyingly simple: You have called me four times in the last hour since the ferry docked and this can only mean one thing: You saw me.

“No!” I shout and I feel like I’ve been driving forever and I punch the steering wheel and the Buick veers into the right lane and I cut off a truck and the trucker blows his horn and I open my window and I roar, “Go fuck your mother!”

If he responds, I don’t hear it and I roll the window up by hand (Mr. Mooney is a cheap old bastard), and I gotta slow down because it would suck to get pulled over right now. And it’s not like this is my fault, you know. You lied to me. Your father is not dead. I was on that boat because you lied to me.

Maybe I don’t know you as well as I think I do. But that’s ridiculous; we have a connection. It’s just that you messed up. You were supposed to tell me all about your dad, no matter how ashamed you were. And I was supposed to listen and love you and tell you that you were good. And then you would ask me about my life and I would tell you and you would listen to me the way I listened to you and then we would have been closer.

I ride up on a girl going too slow and she flips me off hard. She has a bumper sticker TAILGATERS FLUNKED PHYSICS, and a Boston College sticker and I hate driving and I would like to ram this car into her Volvo and watch her bleed out but no, Joe, no. She’s not the bad guy and she won’t pay for your mistakes.

This is on you, Beck. You messed up big time and you know I followed you and you know. You know. I lay on my horn and tailgate that bitch until she puts on her blinker. When I pass her I slow down so I ride right next to her with one hand on the wheel and one hand giving her the bird. The bitch laughs and I move on. Fuck her. Fuck you.

You will never forgive me and I need to never see you again and I need this family in the Land Rover to fuck off with their skis and their brand-new tires and I ride up on them too, hard, and my phone rings.

You.

The kid in the backseat disobeys his father and turns around and you know what I know about that kid? That kid will wind up at Choate Rosemary Hall (alumni sticker in the rear window), and that kid will be smoking dope and popping pills before his thirteenth birthday and everyone will think it’s so fucking glamorous because he’s popping pills in the woods off in Connecticut. I give him the finger. I give him a memory. I know what that kid will become and I know he won’t pay for his bad choices. He’ll get sympathy and respect and I veer around them and jump in front and slam on my brakes and the father beeps, pissed now, alive now, and I rev up and I’m out of there, fuck them and their skis and their snow boots. The heat in this car is broken and I’ll never get over the cold from the ferry. I’ll never be able to look at Dickens without going back to this day and I pull over to a rest stop and I shut off the engine. It’s so fucking quiet. It’s so December and it’s so over.

My phone rings, again. Loud. You.

I ignore (again), and I delete the message because I can’t bear the idea of you screaming in fear at me and accusing me of being a stalker. No. This is all wrong and I punch the wheel again and my knuckles are bruised and the bruises will heal but you will never forget the time that guy followed you to Connecticut and put on a costume (a costume!) and stalked you at a festival.

I am probably already an anecdote in the hopper in your head, fodder for a story, a thing of the past, just another suitor. I cry. You call. I shut off my phone. I shut off your phone before your mommy shuts it off, which she probably will, eventually. It is a dark day. Literally.

I drop off Mr. Mooney’s keys and he’s got his oxygen tank and his bowie knife and someday I’ll have a oxygen tank and a bowie knife because you’re never speaking to me again and I know it. He means so well and he’s such a stand-up guy, a veteran in overalls and here I am and I can’t look him in the eye right now because it’s so hard to admit that as much as I admire him, respect him, well, I don’t want to be like him. I’m a terrible person and he’s a good man and he’s holding the door open and old people are painfully lonely when they’re alone. It breaks my heart how obviously, badly he wants me to come in and have a Pabst with him. A good guy would go in, but we all know I’m a fucking tool.

He tries to joke around. “What’s with that outfit, Joseph?”

I forgot about my costume and I think. “I went to a costume party.”

He doesn’t want to know about the party. “Shop’s good?”

“Yeah, real good, Mr. Mooney, real good.”

I offer him the keys but he shakes me off. He’s still holding the door open. He’s not the kind of man who would ever verbalize the fact that he wants company. But he gets it, the way I tuck the keys into my pocket and step back. He retreats into his dank molding home.

“You hang on to those keys,” he tells me. “I never use the car anyway.”

“You sure, Mr. Mooney?”

“Where am I going?”

“Well, I can take you there if you need.”

He waves me off and he won’t need to go anywhere. There’s a dude from church who takes him to the doctor. And at this point in his life, there is nowhere else to go. I should go inside. But I just can’t right now.

He turns around. “I’ll bump into ya, kid.”

“Thanks, Mr. Mooney.”

The door shuts, quietly, and I walk, aimlessly, but somehow I reach my place. One of my typewriters is laughing at me, I swear, because of my costume. I pick it up and I throw it at the wall. Fuck it. It’s not like the landlord’s ever fixing anything anyway. I strip out of my costume and I want to burn it but I put it in a shoebox and tape it up. I don’t want to look at it anymore and I write the address and when I have to put Bridgeport, I lose my grip on the pen. I throw on my worst comfort clothes: a raggedy Nirvana T-shirt that my mother left behind and nasty fleece pants from a rummage sale on Houston a hundred years ago. I want to look as miserable as I feel and I tear into the Twizzlers I bought at the Korean deli by Mr. Mooney’s place. The new hole in my wall says it all.

There are two Twizzlers left and I’ve lost time like I sometimes do in here, and I am listening to Eric Carmen’s “Make Me Lose Control” on repeat, self-destructing, cutting myself with sappy lyrics about a time in history that I’m too old to remember, about summer love and convertibles with huge backseats. There is a knock at the door and there is never a knock at the door or a hole in the wall and there is another knock. I stop the music. There is another knock.