Hot Pink

  I said, “That ain’t mine.”

  “Your dad,” I said to Franco. “I don’t understand.” We were locked in back of the cops’ car, waiting. I didn’t know for what. The cops were outside.

  “It was money,” Franco said. “It had to be money. He owed people money.”

  “That’s not what I mean—I mean, we saw his ghost fifty-three days ago, Franco.”

  “I know,” Franco said.

  “But he wasn’t dead then?”

  “No,” Franco said.

  I said, “But why’d we see his ghost if he wasn’t dead, though, you think?”

  “Because he was fucking with me,” Franco said. “He was always fucking with me.” Then he started crying, so I squeezed him on the shoulder and didn’t bother arguing. He rubbed his ear around, against my knuckles, which I guess is how you signal “I need a hug” if there’s a hand on your shoulder and your hands are cuffed.

  I squeezed the shoulder a couple more times.

  An Animal Control wagon entered Franco’s alley and the fat cop and the other one got into the car.

  The cops split us up when we got to the station. I never got put in a cell or anything. They made me stand in a squeaky hallway off the lobby with a woman cop who was pretty for a woman cop. She gave me a couple LifeSavers, butter-rum-flavored, which are actually really good, and we talked about the Bulls. She didn’t know a lot about the Bulls and neither did I, so mostly what we said was stuff about Michael Jordan, and how he was the greatest because of how he dunked or whatever and had expensive shoes, and the cop thought he was handsome.

  I don’t know what they did with Franco. He told me later that they tied him to a chair and slapped him around to try to get him to confess to having a dog that would kill on command, but they couldn’t break him. After that, he told me, his ma picked him up, and on their way out of the station a “special forces homicide cop” took them aside and told them it was Finch who murdered his father. Franco’s a liar, though, and he’s crazy. I mean, a lot of bad stuff kept happening to him, and it happened in stupider ways than it should have—like I still don’t get how his ma thought he’d bond with the sleaze if the sleaze delivered him the news about his dad. About his dad being dead. I don’t get how anyone’s ma could think something like that, but especially not Franco’s. Maybe she was crazy, too. Or just temporarily. Maybe she went nuts cause she still loved Franco’s dad. Or maybe it was one of those things where you want something to be one way so bad that even though it’s the exact opposite way you’re still hopeful. And maybe I’d be the same way as Franco if all the same stuff that kept happening to him kept happening to me. But tied him to a chair and slapped him around, though? Come on. And his dad wasn’t murdered. He drove into a tree and it might have been on purpose. It was right in the newspaper that afternoon.

  I didn’t hang out with the woman cop for long. Half an hour tops. My parents got there fast. They entered the station with the ward alderman, Mikey Podesta—I only knew who he was cause the lady cop told me when the three of them walked past our squeaky hallway—but they left with just me a few minutes after that.

  At first they hugged me and checked me over to make sure I wasn’t messed up or anything, but by the time we got in the car, they were getting pissed. At least he was. My dad, I mean.

  “Why did you set that dog on the detective?” he said.

  “I didn’t know he was a cop,” I said. “I was trying to help my friend. Some guy was attacking my friend, I thought.”

  “Your friend who threw a TV at his stepdad,” my dad said.

  “He’s just the ma’s boyfriend, I think—”

  “Clifford!” my ma said.

  “What?” I said.

  “You were high on that Dirt Shooter is why you did what you did.”

  “I was what on a shooter? I was what?” I said.

  “You were high. They saw it right next to you.”

  “I don’t know what you’re saying to me,” I said. “I don’t do drugs. I fell asleep on the couch and when I woke up, there was all this ruckus, and my friend needed help—that’s what it looked like—so I went and got the dog to help out my friend.”

  “You were asleep?” my dad said. “On the couch next to Franco at eleven in the morning?”

  “Yeah,” I said. “We were watching Three Stooges. I hate those guys. You do too. They’re annoying.”

  “That’s true,” my dad said.

  “I don’t know why Franco likes that show. It put me to sleep.”

  “You weren’t on Dirt Shooter?”

  “What is Dirt Shooter, Ma?” I said. “I don’t know what that is.”

  “I told you he’d never do that Dirt Shooter, Gloria. That was all Franco—I knew it… But you don’t hang out in that fucken garage anymore, Cliff, with that wop.”

  “Why not?” I said.

  “You know why not,” he said.

  I didn’t even really want to was the thing—all of a sudden, I was pretty sick of Franco—but I didn’t like getting told not to, either. Plus I thought I’d seem guilty if I just said okay.

  “Well who’s that guy you came into the station with?” I said.

  “That’s an old friend.”

  “An old friend who?”

  “What’s the tone?” said my dad. “His name’s Mikey Podesta. He’s our alderman. I’d have liked to introduce you if the circumstances were different.”

  “Why’d Mikey Podesta the alderman go to the station with you?”

  “He didn’t,” my dad said. “He met us at the station. He’s the one who told us you were there to begin with, and he met us out front.”

  “How’d he know where I was?”

  “The cops called him up.”

  “The cops called him?”

  “Yeah,” said my dad. “What’s so hard to understand?”

  “Why’d they call him?”

  “He’s an old friend of mine.”

  “How do they know who your friends are?”

  “They know who his friends are.”

  “Why do they care who he’s friends with?” I said.

  “Cause he’s the alderman,” my dad said.

  “Why’s he a friend of yours?”

  “What kind of question is that? What’s with all the questions, Cliff?”

  “Why do the cops know who you are?”

  “I don’t even know what you’re talking about.”

  “Before, when they heard my name, one of them said, ‘This is the pilot’s son.’ How do they know who you are? That’s weird.”

  “Weird? Nothing’s weird, Cliff,” my ma said. “Your father’s a pillar.”

  “A pillar?” I said.

  “A pillar of the community,” she said.

  “A pillar of the community.”

  “I’m a pilot!” my dad said.

  We got to our house. The pillar parked the car and turned around to face me.

  “You’re not on drugs, right?”

  “I’m not,” I said.

  “You just thought your friend was in trouble, so you helped him.”

  “Yeah,” I said. “Just like I told you.”

  He studied my eyes, then he said, “I believe you. It’s been a rough morning, huh?”

  “Yeah,” I said.

  “Why don’t I take you out for lunch and an ice cream or something.”

  “Yeah,” my ma said. “You two should spend some time. Your dad’s flying again on Monday.”

  “How about maybe later,” I said. “I want to be alone right now. Think about stuff. I want to take a walk or something.”

  “Alright,” my dad said. “We’ll get ribs later, maybe. Or pizza. Whatever.”

  “Get some lunch, though, Cliff,” my ma said. She opened her purse and handed me a twenty. “You can keep the change for that. Eat something good.”

  I thanked her, and started heading to Theo’s, but then I changed my mind and got Burger King instead.

  RELATING

  MIXED
MESSAGES // TWO CONVERSATIONS // BILLY // A PROFESSOR AND A LOVER // THE END OF FRIENDSHIPS // CRED // IMPORTANT MEN

  MIXED MESSAGES

  The message the natives, with hand signs, conveyed was: LEAVE OUR CROPS BE, AND WE WILL GIVE YOU OUR DAUGHTERS.

  We hadn’t any interest in their crops or their daughters: not their daughters till we realized they were so undervalued, not their crops till we saw that by torching their crops we might teach them to value their daughters more highly.

  That our actions could be taken by the natives to mean EVEN TO THE LIKES OF US SEAFARING MEN, THOSE DAUGHTERS OF YOURS ARE OF SO LITTLE VALUE THAT THE PLEASURE WE DERIVE FROM DESTROYING YOUR HARVEST IS PREFERABLE TO THAT WE’D DERIVE FROM THEIR POSSESSION, or perhaps WE WILL TORCH YOUR CROPS AND THEN HAVE YOUR DAUGHTERS did not occur to us—these sorts of possibilities simply refuse, in the heat of the moment, to occur with the facility they occur to you later, in your well-appointed quarters, sipping from a magnum of pupu-tree liquor, reviewing the day’s events in your log—but such misunderstanding on the part of the natives might in fact provide the correct explanation for why they elected, in the glow of the fires we had put to their crops, to pulp all their daughters’ skulls with clubs.

  At the time we assumed they were offering us a sacrifice.

  TWO CONVERSATIONS

  A FALSE START. It meant something to the man it didn’t mean to the woman, something it didn’t mean to normal people. But that, in itself, was not the problem. It wasn’t what drove her mad, so to speak. What drove her mad—“Drove her mad,” so to speak! the woman thought; “‘Drove her mad,’ so to speak,” the woman thought! she thought—came three days later, in their next conversation, when she’d called to clarify the first conversation, a brief conversation, the one in which he had said A FALSE START, which brief conversation she had since realized to have been too easy for him (she had, she’d realized, been too easy on him), too easy in the sense that she had not shed tears till she got off the telephone, had exhausted all her powers via holding back tears and controlling her voice and the sound of her breathing, telling herself—while still on the phone—that weeping, hers, was what he was after, and therefore weeping would mean her defeat, when that hadn’t been, she now reflected, the case at all, but quite the opposite, for failing to weep, the woman saw now, had signaled to the man her ready acceptance of all that he’d said about A FALSE START, which nullified in him any sense of obligation, any sense of his duty to offer her comfort, to clean up the mess that he’d made because mess? where mess? mess what? what mess? No one had wept. No one had argued. No one had done anything except to accept and stammer about A FALSE START once or twice, and when she called him up, weeping, three days later, what drove her mad was the way he made it sound as though she was betraying—in calling him, weeping, three days later—an agreement they’d made, the way A FALSE START had become THE FALSE START, as in “But we already discussed THE FALSE START.”

  BILLY

  I had this mutt once. Medium-to-large. A gift from my father, a schmuck. I forget the mutt’s name. It had a few before it died and I can’t remember what we finally settled on. When we dropped its corpse into the ditch we’d dug, my schmuck father said a prayer to his schmuck higher power in which the mutt’s name was mentioned, and I remember feeling confused for a second because the name wasn’t the name I was expecting to hear. Whether my father’d used the mutt’s most recent name and I’d been expecting to hear an earlier name or it was the other way around I couldn’t say, but it sounded all wrong. It sounded wrong to my brother, too, now that I think about it, so that probably means Dad used an earlier name because my brother was not sentimental—he was a mental cripple—and he corrected my father’s prayer, and my father gave him a kind of schmuck-type look, though he let the correction stand, and Billy piped down.

  Billy was also one of the names of the mutt, not just my brother, who was, understandably, confused by this fact, though it was my brother himself who named the mutt Billy. Billy, now that I recall it, was the mutt’s original name, and that, in fact, is part of how the mutt came to have so many different names.

  I said the mutt was my mutt, but the mutt started out Billy’s mutt, who Dad brought the mutt home for and then told to name it. When Billy named it Billy, I said it was a bad idea and my dad said it wasn’t up to me. What he actually said was, “Not your dog,” which is how a schmuck talks, but what he meant was what I just said he said—wasn’t up to me—and then he left the room and ate some cold chicken.

  A few days into having a mutt with the same name as him, which made Billy-my-brother more confused and scared than usual, Billy said he wanted to change the mutt’s name, and my dad said he could not change the mutt’s name. Said he had to stick with his choice, honor his commitments, the schmuck, though what he actually said to my brother when my brother, mentally crippled, said he’d like to change the mutt’s name was, “Can’t. Made your bed.” I made, in response, a kind of fuck-you face, and my father told me, “Not your dog,” so I offered my brother a dollar for the mutt and Billy sold me the mutt and ran off to buy candy and I gave the mutt its second name, which I don’t remember, and my schmuck father gave me a kind of schmuck-type defeated look, so I gave the mutt a third name, right then and there, and received another schmuck look, and I gave the mutt a fourth name, and so on, until the schmuck stopped looking at me, which didn’t take that long.

  The thing about it was, though, I didn’t much want the mutt and had bought it only to help out Billy and get at the schmuck, and had, in fact, later offered to sell the mutt back to Billy, newly named, for just a penny, but Billy didn’t much want the mutt either, poor mutt. Poor schmuck. Poor Billy. Poor me.

  A couple days later, the mutt got sick with something I can’t remember, something painful we couldn’t afford to treat, and the schmuck, who said it was my responsibility, would neither let me handle his gun nor would he shoot the mutt himself. I’d had enough of this schmuck ruling over me and Billy, and I did what I had to. I raised up a shovel and ended the mutt and raised up that shovel and turned to the schmuck and told him some things had to change around here and I told him he would help us bury the mutt.

  A PROFESSOR AND A LOVER

  No. A SENSE OF ENTITLEMENT—a phrase better suited to describe the quality possessed by freshmen who park their Jeeps in the handicapped spaces of faculty lots and contest B-minuses with intendedly rhetorical questions like “How do you expect me to be accepted into a top-tier law school if you won’t give me an A?”—would not describe the DRIVING FORCE that had led Professor Jon Maxwell Schinkl, medievalist, to drag three fingertips along the curve of moon-faced sophomore Hallie Benton’s jawline and speak INAPPROPRIATELY about her mouth. Nor, for that matter, did PERVERSITY describe the DRIVING FORCE. But then no one on the committee had posited PERVERSITY. To accuse Schinkl of PERVERSITY would endanger their whole PROJECT, for PERVERSITY was a HEGEMENOUS concept responsible for SOCIAL BIAS against the likes of furries and N.A.M.B.L.A. constituents, no less so coprophiliacs and gerbilers. (Though to be fair, just last semester THE RIGHT OF GERBILERS TO GERBIL was hotly contested by a special panel comprising six members of the very disciplinary committee before whom Schinkl was presently speechifying, and while it’s true that during that panel-discussion—over the two-hour course of which the words NATURAL and UNNATURAL remained impressively unspoken—three of the committee members had defended the gerbiler assertion that GERBILS SEEMED TO ENJOY GERBILING, it is also true that the other three members, while they readily defended THE LEGITIMACY OF THE DESIRE TO GERBIL, and even the possibility that gerbils themselves enjoyed THEIR ROLE IN THE PROCESS, were also MADE UNCOMFORTABLE BY THE IDEA OF SPEAKING FOR ANY POPULATION BEREFT OF A VOICE WITH WHICH TO PROTEST ITS OWN OPPRESSION and therefore opined that THE WILL TO MAKE SUCH PROTESTS, HOWEVER FRUSTRATED BY SYSTEMIC LIMITATIONS, IS MORE SAFELY ASSUMED MANIFEST IN GERBILS THAN NOT and that furthermore WHETHER THEIR ROLE IN THE PROCESS IS EXPLOITATIVE OR TRULY CONSENSUAL, GERBILS, AS OFTE
N AS NOT, DIE INSIDE THOSE WHO GERBIL THEM. Thereafter ensued a firestorm of fresh debate about the meaning of CHOICE and THE RIGHT TO DIE. The firestorm had raged beyond the bounds of the panel, for the most part via listserv, until just last Monday, at which point Hallie Benton’s formal complaint, to the relief of everyone in the college but Schinkl, decisively snuffed it.) No, it was not PERVERSITY the committee had accused him of. Had they accused him of PERVERSITY, they would have been vulnerable to the counter-accusation of HYPOCRISY, an accusation with which they had—each and every one of them—made their careers by uttering skillfully, liberally, without hesitation. Like a master long-swordsman and a long sword, the committee members had wielded HYPOCRISY so many times, had landed so many fatal blows with it, that they almost couldn’t have helped but to forge and don the superlative armor they’d forged and continued to don against the accusation. Even if their armor’s impregnability was an illusion—even if the armor was, as it were, a little bit pregnable—the members’ reputations as masters over HYPOCRISY served to prevent all but their most reckless enemies (doomed from the outset by their recklessness anyway) from testing that armor with the one weapon it was specifically designed to frustrate. No, to stab at their helmets with HYPOCRISY would only serve to humiliate Schinkl further. In pursuing the death of master long-swordsmen, one’s only hope is to mount a cliff and take aim with a crossbow, if not a carbine. Yet THE PATRIARCHAL RHETORIC OF ROMANTIC LOVE was all that Schinkl had come to the hearing strapped with, and even if that old cannon had retained some firepower, he was far too scared of heights to climb any cliff, and so instead he said a number of lofty-sounding things that smelled of self-pity and resigned.

  THE END OF FRIENDSHIPS

  That to hide amid the strip mall’s dumpster-array and unbox, uncap, and—tipping her head back, squinting against the high summer sun, nozzle whole inches above her lips—empty the tube of frosting she’d stolen from Pattycake’s Partystore into herself had provided Danielle Platz, who was lately getting stocky, AN EROTIC CHARGE was not the kind of information her father, Richard, had meant to solicit when he queried their neighbor, Dr. Linus Manx, about whether Danielle had behaved that afternoon on her trip into town with the Manxes. It seemed to Richard Platz the kind of information that a decent human being, psychotherapist or not, shouldn’t ever share with another human being about his child—the second human being’s. Either one’s, actually, come to think of it. And Richard Platz, coming to think of it, had no doubt at all that Dr. Linus Manx would have proffered the same untoward information about Johan Manx, who had after all hidden amid the dumpsters right next to Danielle, sucking down his own tube of stolen frosting, were Johan, rather than budding his way into sequined, lisping, limp-wristed queerdom—Platz had seen him mincing in overtight T-shirts around the sprinkler, dancing serpentinely in their unfinished basement, making pouty faces when he swung on their swing set—also getting stocky. Which is just what Richard Platz, in so many words, said to Linus Manx on the trapezoid of grass that split their two driveways.