© Nata Metlukh
The novelist Sam Lipsyte has been described by Time magazine as “the most consistently funny fiction writer working today.” The story below comes from his latest collection, The Fun Parts. “I imagined someone who had become ensnared in a cycle of downfall and uplift just to survive commercially, to keep his memoir business afloat,” says Lipsyte. “I didn’t want to poke fun from a distance. I wanted to inhabit the terror a little bit. But the main reason I wrote the story is because people in America always tell you that you should never write about writers—one of those silly fiction rules you should take every opportunity to break.”
Nobody wanted my woe. Nobody craved my disease. The smack, the crack, the punch-outs and lockdowns, all those gun-to-my-temple whimpers about my dead mother and scabby cat—nobody cared anymore. The world had worthier victims. Slavers pimped out war orphans in hovels hung with rat-chewed velveteen. Babies starved on the desert floor.
Once, my gigs at the big-box bookshops teemed with the angry and ex-decadent, the loading-bay anarchists and hackers on parole, the meth mules, psych majors.
Goth girls, coke ghosted, rehabbed at twelve and stripping sober, begged for my sagas of degradation, epiphany. They pressed in with their inks, their dyes, their labial metals and scarified montes, cheered their favorite passages, the famous ones, where I ate some sadistic dealer’s turd on a Portuguese sweet roll for the promise of a bindle, or broke into a funeral parlor and slit a corpse open for the formaldehyde. My fans would stomp and holler for my sorrows, my sins, sway in stony reverence as I mapped my steps back to sanity (the stint on a garbage truck, the first clean screw), or whatever semblance of sanity was possible in a world gone berserk with misery, plague, affinity marketing.
I had what some guy at an Utica book café called arc. You can’t teach arc, he said. Nobody’s born with it, either. I stood for something. My finger lingered on the somehow still-flickering pulse.
I had a good run. Bang the Dope Slowly and its follow-up, I Shoot Horse, Don’t I?, sold big. I bought a loft, married Diana, who’d stood by in the darkness, my “research” years. My old man, the feckless prick, even he broke down and vowed his love. But as a lady at a coffee bar in Phoenix put it, what goes up can’t stay up indefinitely because what’s under it, supporting it, anyway?
There are wise women in Arizona.
It was here in New York City that I first noticed signs of my decline. Standing at the lectern under those harsh chain store kliegs, regaling the crowd with the particulars of a scam I used to run on Alzheimer’s patients from a clinic near my squat, I heard a voice spear down from the balcony.
“Enough already!”
“Excuse me?” I said.
“I said enough,” said the man. He leaned past the rail, a fattish fellow with lovely corn-blond hair. “So you almost died and hurt a lot of people along the way. You got your medal. Go home.”
It was true about the medal. I’d recently won an award for creative nonfiction from a major credit card company.
“Maybe some others here want me to finish,” I said, hearing my voice strain now against some sissified collapse.
“Freaking sheep,” said the man.
“Leave him be!” called a voice. It sounded like Nate, my protégé. He’d been a homeless gay punk. Now he was my homeless gay punk protégé. Other voices rose to join him. My minions were protecting me. How humiliating. I felt like that bullied boy I’d described in Spoon for the Misbegotten, the one who ran home to weep and quaff his mother’s cooking sherry—not that my mother ever cooked, let alone with sherry.
“Yeah, back off. He’s been through a lot.”
“He’s fragile!”
“He’s a fraud!” called the man, who I saw now wore heavy coveralls splotched darkly in places with what could have been berry juice, or blood.
“He’s our friend!” somebody said.
“Thanks,” I said. “But I can take care of myself.”
There were murmurs now, mutters, maybe.
“We’ve got your back!”
“We’re here for you, and we . . .” somebody trailed off.
“Don’t you get it?” said the man in coveralls. “This guy betrayed his friends and family, he’s contributed untold thousands to the drug economy, which has probably helped get others hooked, and now he blabs about it for cash. And don’t start in about his philosophy. It’s half-baked nonsense. He teaches us nothing. You really need this guy to tell you capitalism poisons our bodies and corrupts our souls? Are you that dim you can’t figure it out for yourselves?”
Nobody spoke. I was sensing a strange mood in the crowd tonight, a balkiness I had never encountered. They were maybe beginning to be done with me.
“I think you’re the dim one,” I said.
“Weak meat,” boomed my butcher.
It was a slow, luxuriant slide, like a dollop of half-fried mayonnaise slinking down the lean, freckled back of a teen. The teen’s name was Freida, she’d designed one of my websites, but those ecstasies were over. Diana had departed. Nate had disappeared. Only my father’s faxes sustained me:
Dear Disappointment, Not dead yet? Keep at it, kid. You had all those sad suckers fooled, but not me. How long did you think it would last? The money, the women, the talks at the Y? The Y is for some vigorous cardio and steaming your nuts free of deadly nut toxins, not for listening to some junkie freak moan about his generation. Don’t you know there’s real suffering in the world? Slavers pimp out war orphans in hovels hung with rat-chewed velveteen. I saw it on the news! Didn’t you learn anything when I was promoted to vice president of sales in district seven and then got fired with everyone else the next day? When life knocks you down, don’t bother getting up. Because life will punish you for getting up. Life will bite your eyes out.
Call Me,
Your Progenitor
P.S. Dinner?
I’d pace my loft, smoke Egyptian cigarettes, drink vodka cocktails, snort any pill I could crush. Such binges once primed me for another recovery, another memoir, but I couldn’t feel the magic anymore, that rush of becoming. All was murk and a sort of moister, muddier murk. Out my window was traffic, suffering, euphoria, pretzel carts. Inside was the petty spiral. I couldn’t stop thinking about the fat dude, his wonderful hair.
I picked up my father’s latest fax. Maybe a few hours in the vicinity of his rot could put me back on track. Also, I could teach him about the Internet. I caught a bus across the river.
My father was semiretired, a freelance consultant. He drove around begging alms from men and women he’d once commanded. He got by, as many widowers do, on peanut butter and hate.
“Any booze around here?” I said.
“Why don’t you drink a pint of lye and get it over with?” my father said. “Why don’t you have yourself a nice little lye-and-hantavirus smoothie? That’ll fix you up good, you piece of shit.”
My father flung himself across the table, flapped his hand in my face. It’s true he never hit me. A father need not hit. His coughs, his smirks, are blows. Even a father’s embrace confers a kind of violence. Or so I once pronounced on public radio.
“This meat loaf is terrible,” I said now. It’s supposed to be terrible,” said my father. “This isn’t meant to be a pleasant experience. This is an intervention.”
“An intervention? Where is everybody?”
“Who everybody? It’s just me. Nobody else cares whether you live or die. And I’m on the fence.”
“Okay,” I told him. “Intervene.”
“I just did.”
“You did?”
“Just then.”
“So, what’s the plan, Bigtime? I figure you’re almost out of money. Welcome back. Maybe you could land some menial job, night janitor, say, but who’s going to hire you, especially with your background as a self-aggrandizing scumrag.”
“Bag?”
“Rag. Is how we said it.”
“I’ve got to go,” I said. “Thanks for the intervention.”
“Anytime.”
I rode back to the city, spotted this damaged-looking beauty a few seats away. The damage wasn’t just the tortoiseshell tattooed over the entirety of her shaved skull, or the stern tortoise head glaring out from between her eyes. The damage, in fact, was everything not the tortoise, not the tattoo.
“I know who you are,” she said.
“That makes one of us,” I said.
“You mattered to me once.”
“What happened?”
“You mattered to me less and less. Can you introduce me to Nate?”
“Forget Nate,” I said. “You’ve had struggles, yes? Lay them on me, sister.”
The tortoise woman told me her story. She’d been a ward of the state, a runaway, a medievalist, a personal anal sex trainer, a junior Olympic sprinter, the estranged wife of an ex–French legionnaire. Her story had heart havoc and threat, but no self-annihilation. She’d been stymied but always summoned the nerve to perdure. She was the opposite of me. I resented her and wanted to serve her. I wanted the world to pledge itself to her example.
“My God,” I said.
“You have one?”
“Please,” I said. “Let me write your story.”
I pictured us together in my loft, me with spiral-bound pads and designer pencils worn to their nubs by her inspirational tale. Critics would applaud my decision to invest my talent in this inked slut’s plight. My fans would swoon at the way I’d reached out to another wounded human. I’d get off drugs and drink for good, raise chickens upstate, produce some independent cinema.
“No way,” she said. “You’re a slimy, evil sellout hack.”
“Sure, but will you consider it?”
The bus pulled into Port Authority. The tortoise woman slipped away.
Diana lived in a building near the river. Somebody buzzed me up. A man stood in the doorway, shirtless, bleeding, words freshly carved into his chest. PEEPS PLEEZER, the gashes read.
“Nate.”
“Diana’s not here,” said Nate. “Do you want to come in? You look like hell.”
“Hell is where I’m crashing these days, Nate. But what about you? You’re the mutilated interlocutor here.”
“I’m purging my defects via ritual.”
“Is that why you’re poking my wife?”
“I don’t poke her. We’ve got something more evolved than that. Besides, you know I’m gay.”
“You used to be homeless, too. Written any more bad versions of my books?”
“I no longer cite you as an influence.”
“I can live with that.”
“I’m having a hard time believing you can live with anything.”
“Nate abandoned and betrayed me,” I said.
“I’m right here,” said Nate.
“I’m not talking to you. I’m talking to God. God is my witness. Tell Diana I forgive her.”
“Tell her yourself,” said Nate. “I’m reading downtown tonight.”
“Where?”
“It’s listed in most free weeklies. Diana will be there.”
“Are you inviting me?”
“I’m sharing public information. Free weekly information.”
I walked along the river for a while, wove through the queer skaters, the club kids, the breeding units with their remote-controlled strollers. I hated them, the gays, the straights. The races. The genders and ages. None of them loved me. I was feeling that forlorn hum. Maybe another memoir was burbling up.
Home, I called Jenkins, my agent.
“Nate stole my style,” I told him. “My wife.”
“Your agent, too,” said Jenkins.
“I feel the forlorn hum coming on,” I said. “It’s going to be the best book yet. I’ve really suffered this time.”
“It’s over.”
“What do you mean it’s over?”
“It’s Nate’s time.”
The bookstore was packed with Nate’s people. They’d been my people once. I knew their faces, their fears. The tortoise woman was there in something skimpy, predatory.
Nate vaulted to the lectern in parachute pants, a fluorescent dickey. The crowd cheered as he picked a scab near his nipple, flicked it.
“‘I was a homeless gay punk,’” Nate began. “‘I was a self-hating sick fuck, too. I beat up gay people. I set homeless people on fire. Maybe it was because of my uncle, Pete. We lived in Levittown, and when I was nine…’” Nate read on. I noticed Diana leaning against the remainder table, her eyes rolled up under her Greek fisherman’s cap, her hand frig-deep in her jeans. Behind her were stacks of my last book, going for a dollar a pop.
“Every time I looked up into the dirty night sky,” Nate read now, “I thought of each star as one more glittering taunt I had to endure—”
“This guy’s got nothing!” I shouted. “This isn’t suffering!”
Benches scraped the hardwood. Nate’s people whispered, strained to look.
“He was a homeless gay punk!” somebody called.
“He set homeless people on fire!” I said.
“It’s more complicated than that,” said another. “He was a self-confessed self-hating sick fuck!”
“But gay!” somebody shouted.
“The two are not related!”
“In a sense they are, but only in a metaphorical sense!”
“He’s not metaphorically gay,” said a woman in the back.
“Leave Nate be,” called the tortoise woman.
“He’s poking my wife,” I said. “And I have no idea why he qualifies as punk.”
“I don’t poke her,” said Nate.
“He doesn’t,” said Diana. “I only need to hear his voice to come.”
“Don’t you get it?” I said. “There are babies turning tricks on velveteen!”
“Those babies are homeless punks, too!” somebody shouted. “Nate speaks for all of us!”
“Nate’s got arc!”
Now I felt them, the great arms bunching me up, the wisps of soft hair grazing my cheek. Next thing, I’m out on the sidewalk, staring up at that face, the one I’d never shaken from my dreams. He flashed an enormous steak knife.
“Why?” I said.
“Nate’s pain is now,” said the man in coveralls.
“But I have more I need to say.”
“That couldn’t possibly be true.”
“Who are you to decide?”
“I’m the guy.”
“What guy?”
“That guy. The guy out there. The guy with the pulse. When you put your finger on the pulse, it’s my pulse. It’s my heart. I’m the guy with the heart.”
“What are those stains?” I said, pointed at his coveralls.
“That’s the blood of my heart. And other hearts. Various hearts. Also, I had some berries for lunch.”
“You should tell your story. Write a memoir. If you let me live, I’d be happy to help.”
“I respect the genre too much,” said the man, and took some practice swipes with his knife.
