www.mcsweeneys.net
Copyright © 2011 Adam Levin
Cover illustration by Walter Green.
The stories within originally appeared in Tin House (“Frankenwittgenstein”), McSweeney’s (“Hot Pink,” “Considering the Bittersweet End of Susan Falls,” “Cred”), St. Petersburg Review (“The Extra Mile”), Indiana Review (“How to Play The Guy”), New England Review (“Finch”), and Guernica (“Important Men”).
All rights reserved, including right of reproduction in whole or in part, in any form.
McSweeney’s and colophon are registered trademarks of McSweeney’s, a privately held company with wildly fluctuating resources.
ISBN: 978-1-936365-96-8
For my sisters, Rachel and Paula Levin
CONTENTS
FRANKENWITTGENSTEIN
CONSIDERING THE BITTERSWEET
END OF SUSAN FALLS
THE EXTRA MILE
FINCH
RELATING
MIXED MESSAGES // TWO CONVERSATIONS // BILLY // A PROFESSOR AND A LOVER // THE END OF FRIENDSHIPS // CRED // IMPORTANT MEN
JANE TELL
RSVP
SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN
HOW TO PLAY THE GUY
HOT PINK
FRANKENWITTGENSTEIN
Bonnie: The Beautiful Body-Action Doll for the Self-Body Image-Enhancement of Toddling and Preadolescent Girls at Risk.TM
Dad conceived her gastrointestinal mini-tract a decade ago. Back then, he was employed at Useful Modules in Grayslake, designing low-valence fibrins to lubricate the motors of their robots. We lived in a part of Waukegan that was getting nastier by the hour, but we had premium channels and a VCR, we ate our snacks off paper plates in the family room and laughed at sitcoms together, our legs overlapping under the afghan. Our bikes were worthy of their combination locks and our mom was a sweetheart, packed us lunches every day before going to work, occasionally slipped notes between the folds of our paper napkins: Who’s the smartest and the handsomest? You are!; One week till your birthday, a great day!; Basketball team, shmasketball team—you don’t need them.
And then Bonnie: The Beautiful Body-Action Doll for the Self-Body Image-Enhancement of Toddling and Preadolescent Girls at Risk.TM
We were watching an exposé on eating disorders and it made our father sad. Halfway into the opening montage—a quick-cut stream of dark eye-hollows and flesh-poor pelvic arches, thighs the width of knees and grainy close-ups of mouth-scars; the soundtrack a string of desperate self-statements spoken through echo-filters by choked-up teenage girls, I’m too fat, I hate myself, No one loves me—Dad brought his hand to his forehead, as if to shade it from the sun, and he kept it there.
By the first commercial break, the twins were sleeping soundly against his shoulders. Mom kissed and whispered them into consciousness, sent the three of us to bed. I fell straight into a nightmare about a hockey team suffocating me in a pileup. This was in the old Chicago Stadium, but it wasn’t the Blackhawks who did it. It was the Yang, a team I’d never heard of. I woke up wet and ashamed.
I stayed in my bed for a while, trying to picture good, bright things. I tried cartoons and they turned violent under my eyelids. I tried angels, but they were dead people. I wanted to lie on the couch and watch TV, fall asleep to the sound of human voices, whatever they were saying. I was sure that if I went downstairs and told my folks I’d had a nightmare, they’d let me sit with them, but I was just as sure that speaking of the nightmare would make it permanent.
I decided to go down there and tell them it was unfair how, even though I was nine, I had the same bedtime as my seven-year-old brothers. I didn’t get to tell them anything.
When I returned to the family room, a pale girl with puffed cheeks and wrecked lips was onscreen, confessing, and Mom was holding Dad’s hand. Dad was weeping. He said, “Poor girl. Poor young girl.”
I said, “Dad.”
He hid his face. I forgot my complaint and Mom sent me back to bed. I slept fine.
In the morning, Dad made us omelets and bacon. “I’m sorry you had to see that,” he told me. “No boy should have to see that. I’m gonna make you a special omelet, with extra cheddar.”
Timmy and Brian said they wanted extra cheddar, also.
Dad said, “No. Mike saw. You didn’t.”
Brian said, “What did he see?”
“He saw nothing.”
“Nothing nothing or nothing special?” said Timmy. Timmy was existential.
“Nothing nothing,” I said.
“What did it look like?”
I said, “It looked like you.”
“So then it looked like Brian, too! You’re saying we look like nothing, but you’re also saying that nothing looks like us.”
“Yes,” I said.
“Honest?”
It was the last breakfast Dad made for us. That night, he started on Bonnie’s mini-tract. Between his nine-to-five at Useful and the hours he spent in the attic laboratory, it got so we saw him only at dinner and bedtime.
After three years of weekend and evening home-lab work, Dad completed the mini-tract and, in a flush of exuberance, drove us down Lake Shore to the auto show at McCormick Place. It was a rainy day, but the sun was out, and as we passed through the Gold Coast, oohing and ahhing at the dripping high-rises and the skyscrapers behind them, Dad told us that, within a month, we’d leave slummy Waukegan and move downtown. He asked Mom which building she wanted to live in and she pointed to a clover-shaped black one next to Navy Pier. “Lakepoint Tower!” Dad said. He shot me a glance in the rearview. “You see that, Mikey? You’ll have the lake outside your bedroom window.”
At the auto show, I stood rubbing my eyes before a red Lamborghini with doors like bat wings. No one was allowed to touch it. There were ropes.
The following Monday, Dad brought the mini-tract to Good Parent Educational Toy Corporation. They fawned over it but didn’t want to buy it without being sure there was a financially feasible way to rig up the calorie-sensitive infrastructure that Dad promised was forthcoming.
Dad chose to understand Good Parent’s enthusiasm as a kind of pledge and, long since sick of manipulating gluten, anyway, he quit his job at Useful to focus all his energy on Bonnie. He cashed out his 401(k) to fund a better home-laboratory. Let his beard go wild and took lunch in the lab. On weekends, we’d put it on a wheely-cart by the door. Knock three times and walk away. Once, I went up there with Brian, and we stayed after knocking. Dad came out.
I said, “Dad.”
He said, “No.” Then he ducked back inside.
Brian said Dad was a fuckface and I told him to shut up. Then Brian punched me in the stomach and I slapped the side of his head. It toppled him. He was smaller than me. When he sat up, his eyes narrow and wet, he said we were no longer brothers and vowed not to speak to me ever again.
Two years later, I got caught with a hard-on in the shower after gym. I wasn’t even looking at anybody, my eyes were closed, but Bill Rasmussen announced the news to the locker room. I could’ve taken him, easy, and I didn’t. It was mostly true what he said about me and I froze up.
When I came home from school, Dad was singing to the twins in the kitchen. Old Beatles songs. I went in there. He crooned at the three of us, clapped beats out on the counter. At first, we held back our laughter because we liked it and didn’t want to give him any kind of victory, but he kept going so long, and he won. We had to laugh to stop him. He’d finished Bonnie’s infrastructure. “Tomorrow’s payday,” he told us. He sliced up some apples and made us triple-decker grilled cheeses in a pan.
Timmy, newly vegan, gave his sandwich to Brian. Brian said, “No way this means you get Claudia.”
Claudia Berman was a high-haired, flat-chested baton-twirler who lived across the street. Somet
imes she called and asked for Timmy. Sometimes Brian.
“I think she likes me,” Timmy said.
Brian said, “No one likes you.”
“Well, I definitely like her, even if she doesn’t like me. She has kind eyes, I think.”
“She thinks you’re an asshole, Timmy.”
When Dad brought the new Bonnie to Good Parent, they slapped him on the back and called him a visionary. Then they said they needed something much simpler: Dad had designed the mini-tract to take any type of food you could jam into the doll’s mouth—he figured that little girls would thrill to feed Bonnie the same food that they themselves were eating—but Good Parent figured they would do better with a Bonnie who was only able to digest a perishable, vitamin-enriched protein paste that required refrigeration and could be sold for five dollars a tube. So they told him to dumb down the mini-tract and create a paste. “Something that smells good,” they told him.
That night at dinner, Dad gave us the lowdown. “Spilled milk,” he said. “Another year. No big thing.”
Mom rolled her eyes.
After another couple years, Timmy’s studying the Gnostics, Brian’s a hand-to-hand weapons geek, possibly dealing, and Mom’s on a semester’s suspension from Lincoln Elementary for saying “Hispanic” instead of “Latino” at an assembly during Diversity Week. No one in Waukegan is gay and I’ve lost all vestigial interest in the bodies of women, even movie stars.
And Dad’s done just what Good Parent asked him to do, but now they have a problem with the quality of the paste: it’s too good. Good Parent needs to be able to count on Bonnie’s obsolescence. They want a paste that will slowly destroy Bonnie’s insides so that after eleven months Bonnie will break and the little girls will have to buy a new Bonnie, maybe a new and improved Bonnie, maybe even a Bonnie that can digest real food.
Dad gets back to work and, six cloistered months of labor later, he’s invented a nontoxic, corrosive molecule with which he augments the paste. With each successive paste-feeding, the plastic gaskets in Bonnie’s mini-tract dissolve a little. It’s doubly brilliant because the more Bonnie’s gaskets dissolve, the less she can “digest,” which means not only that she needs to consume increasingly larger volumes of paste to stay out of the caloric red zone, but that her gaskets wear away at a higher rate as time marches on. When Dad graphs “Paste Consumption over Time” and superimposes it on “Mass of Gaskets over Time,” the effect is gorgeous: a lopsided X.
In the week between his completion of the paste and its presentation to Good Parent, he prints out hundreds of these graphs and papers the walls of the house with them. For the hell of it, he adds a speculative z axis titled “Geometric Escalation of Concern” to the graphs he hangs in the family room. It’s the most promising gesture he’s made since singing “Please, Please Me” in the kitchen, and we all fall under the spell of it. Even Mom. That Saturday, she breaks into her savings to take us shopping for jeans at the outlet mall and we share food-court Chinese off styrofoam platters.
“We’re fine,” she says. She buys herself new lipstick and gets it all over our faces, our necks.
Good Parent tells Dad that the paste smells too good, that their initial idea of an entirely good-smelling paste lacked foresight, that since the gist of the Bonnie doll is that she’ll help prevent girls from acquiring eating disorders, Bonnie’s food should definitely smell good at the outset (though not so good that Bonnie would want to binge on it), but when the food is processed and turned into “excrement” or “vomit,” it should smell bad—or at least not like strawberries—lest the Bonnie product send a mixed message to its at-risk consumers, which could mean lawsuits. They tell him that as long as he’s going to take the time to fix the paste-smell situation, he might as well also figure out a way to cause an excess of hair to form on the bodies of Bonnies who refuse to eat and won’t cut back on their overzealous exercise routines.
By now, it’s been four years since Dad finished the mini-tract. Our savings are gone and our family is living off my mother’s teaching salary. Mom’s well on her way to a blackboard-related repetitive-motion injury, the twins are about to turn fourteen, and I’m at the peak of my adolescence and I need Zoloft and better Levi’s and I can’t stop thinking about cars and how all the other kids get cars when they graduate high school, which isn’t true at all but feels true. I’ve never kissed anyone with tongue and I doubt I ever will.
Dad seems fine, maybe a little sleepless, but otherwise fine, and then he goes out for smokes one day and forgets to wear pants. The bulls haul him back to us. Timmy and I meet them out front.
“This poor, sick man your father?” says one of them.
“Get some fricken slacks on him or we charge his ass,” says the other one.
Timmy runs inside.
“Leave our property,” I tell them.
“Listen to this pillow-biter! Doesn’t know when he’s getting a kindness done to him.”
“Have a little mercy. He’s the son of an indecent exposer: apple and the tree.”
“Fruit and the tree’s more like it. Stay off the streets of Waukegan.”
The cops drive away. Dad goes straight to the attic.
Despite the brush with public indecency, he finishes designing his revolutionary Mustache & Happy Trail SkinStrips the very next day. For his edification, and to show our allegedly continuing support for the Bonnie project, Mom uses her discount to buy him a new hardcover bestseller called Beyond Fat and Thin: Dispelling the Myths Surrounding Eating Disorders by eating-disorder specialist Russell Randbert, PhD.
This turns out to be a mistake.
In his book, Randbert argues that girls acquire eating disorders when they feel out of control. He explains that binging, purging, starving, and reckless exercise are not symptoms of a negative self-body image but means by which girls can gain a temporary sense of autonomy over their bodies. The negative self-body image, Randbert says, comes after the dysfunctional eating behavior manifests: “I’m too fat” is the easiest explanation a girl has to offer herself for why she is engaging in behavior that only happens to make her thin. “I’m too fat” is not only a “delusion,” Randbert quips, but a “delusional motive,” as can be inferred by observing that psychotherapies that address body-image issues invariably fail, whereas those that focus on control tend to succeed.
Once Dad’s finished with the book, I read it. His marginalia are crackpot for the most part: frowny faces and hanging stick-men, short-fused sticks of dynamite, mathematical equations containing exclamation points. On the inside covers are 3-D diagrams of alien digestive systems, their labels done in block letters: A NINE-CHAMBER YOU-LOSE STOMACH, THIS STUPID ESOPHAGUS, THE WHEREFORE ART MY BOWEL. But then, at the end of the book, fountain-penned in the half page of white space under the acknowledgements, I find this: “Although a given toddling-to-preadolescent girl will, to a certain degree, control her Bonnie, the manner in which Bonnie obsolesces will undermine any sense of control the girl could have otherwise acquired through the exercise of Bonnie as self-metaphor. I fail I fail I fail them all.” The handwriting is deceptively neat.
I pass the book on to Mom. She skims it. Then she throws it in the fire.
My father—like Nobel, I’d like to think—becomes fatalistic. His creativity gets blocked.
He locks himself in the attic laboratory and bleats, and sometimes there are smashing sounds. He can’t figure out how to make a paste that starts out smelling good, ends up smelling bad, and corrodes the mini-tract all the while. He drinks, fights with Mom. He becomes impotent. Mom, in her loneliness, has made of me a reluctant confidant is how I know that. She and I start scarfing pints of ice cream together at midnight. I get cavities, she gets heavy. All of us dread dinner. Dad comes to the table and refuses to eat, saying, “I don’t deserve it, I don’t deserve your food,” while Mom looks to me for shrugs of allied contempt. Our father gets so skinny, the neighbors start talking cancer. We let them talk, fearful that any sympathy they might have for us
will lessen if they find out he’s insane. We despise him and we don’t even fear him.
What makes it worse is how so much of his falling apart gets realized through the attempts he makes to put himself back together. Like some pop-eyed Manson Family ascetic, he invents rules about watching television. For example: he must change the channel once and only once every ten minutes, whether or not a commercial is on. Next it’s his bowels: he has to sit on the toilet from 9:30 a.m. to 9:50 a.m. and cannot sit on the toilet at any other time of day, regardless of his needs. Every morning at eleven, he plugs the bathroom sink and fills it with near-scalding water, then plunges the first joint of his pinkie in, holds it there for thirty seconds, and doesn’t breathe. He’s no fool, my dad. He knows he’s making self-destructive gestures and, worse than that, he knows that nearly scalding your pinkie is a half-assed way to go about self-destruction. One morning, I come across him in the hallway outside the bathroom and he puts his arm around me, says, “Mike, your dad’s a pussy. A real pussy.”
Brian, at the bottom of the stairs, overhears this. “Yeah!” he yells up. “And a fuckface, too. You want to slap me, now, Mike, you scrawny bitch? I don’t forget.”
Dad says, “Son.”
Brian says, “What? You’re gonna protect him?” Then he skims a ninja star at the ceiling and tears the stair carpet with a bowie knife.
By the third year of his inventor’s block, Dad can’t find the deep end he’d otherwise go off of and he becomes obsessed with the origin of the phrase, convinced that deep end refers to the deep end of a pool, which is not a thing he can reconcile with off-ness or on-ness. It’s all he talks about, if he talks at all. He doesn’t show up at the dinner table anymore. He plucks a rusted chain-mail blouse from a dumpster by the theater and wears it all day without an undershirt, eye-droppers lemon juice onto his chest before bed. One afternoon, he bites a small chunk of flesh off the back of his left hand and, every succeeding afternoon, rips the scab off with his teeth, then breaks out the dropper and does the raw red derm like it was his nipples.