Epilogue #2
I ring up books and I dust shelves. I let my mind wander like a toddler on a lawn. No dad on a mower to worry about. I remember when I diagnosed myself with cancer of the heart. It makes me laugh now. The drama of it all. I was a bit over the top, but that was me then.
I have a new lease on life. You wouldn’t recognize my dick if you saw it in a Polaroid, and see how hard it is?
There I go again, thinking about you. Time to go home, time to move on, but four fucking years and still I don’t look at the girls the way I used to before you, before love.
It’s the upside of surgery. I can’t look at women.
There’s an invisible rubber band tied around my dick.
A temporary castration to protect me from all the women rendered loveless by all the cold, hard dicks.
I cannot, must not be a spoon. Not yet. And it’s comforting when the physical matches the emotional, when the carpets match the drapes.
At home, I pick up The Lovely Bones and touch the page you dog-eared. Little criminal. No attention span. Who dog-ears the third page of a fucking book?! Why do I love you?
I stomp down the stairs and set the book on the stoop. Within minutes, a woman in tight jeans bends.
“Are you giving this away?”
“Yep.”
“Well, hello, universe, and thank you!”
Something shifts, Vail. My Portnoy twitches.
It hurts, but it’s not quite as bad. Did you see that?
Did you feel it? The Lovely Bones was sitting on my nightstand for four fucking years and now The Lovely Bones is gone.
It’s like it was never here and holy shit, Vail.
Lift things up and put them down. Dick of all people to the rescue, once again, and I think that’s it for us.
I think we’re done.
And it’s okay. It’s been a while since I gave away a book, and I forgot about the high of letting go.
Some books are yours for life. Some books are meant to go in one ear and out the other.
Sometimes you reach the last page and toss it on the stoop for someone else and you never think about it again.
I loved The Lovely Bones. But I don’t need to own it.
A couple of days later, and I really do miss you a little less. I don’t write to you anymore. You tried to love me, but you failed, same way some books fall apart in the last few chapters, and that was you, wasn’t it?
Pizza for lunch. At the counter by the computer.
No AOL Instant Fucking Messenger and no more writing to a dead girl who can’t write back.
I get it now. The computer is a strip club that never closes, always tempting, but I am a lucky guy, Vail, a broken record, I know, but I need to focus on the positive, right?
At least I am not, never will be on fucking MySpace.
My shift ends and I walk outside and there’s a neon-pink flyer on the dirty sidewalk.
A band called Martyr is playing tonight, and the lead singer is blowing a kiss to the whole city.
I panic. It’s not time. The pain, it still comes and goes.
Truth is, I think I trusted the wrong doctor and I don’t really believe I’m ever going to heal.
I fear that every woman who sends Pop Rocks through my system is going to kill me, but life is a surprise, a thing with feathers and…
Whaddya know? It’s another first. Blood flows inside of me, and at last, no more pain.
I fight a smile and walk down stairs to catch a train.
Life is fast at times. A sucker punch in the dark of a warehouse.
Now that I am healed, I see things as they are, as they were.
And honestly…I feel a little guilty about the past few years.
I’ve been haunting you, clinging. Things are different now, and it’s out of my control.
I don’t need you anymore and I know that I’m gonna talk to you a little less every day.
It’s a little sad, a little unbearably sweet.
But it’s the nature of all beasts, things with feathers, and I feel it in my bones.
The truth surfaces; the subway shimmies.
The dog tags in my back pocket are pressing. It is time.
You were my first love, but it doesn’t count, not really.
I was your child. You and Dick weren’t perfect.
You lied to me and abused me at times. But like all parents, you did the best you could.
First love is notoriously dangerous, and yes, you fell for the wrong man, a louse who refused to fall with you, for you.
It happens, Vail. People come together and they can’t make it work, so they have a child.
That was you and Dick. And that was me. Your na?ve first and only son.
I can either spend the rest of my life turning red with shame or I can let go. Move on. Put it all behind me.
The train is slowing down and the doors are about to open. It’s good timing.
I’m in no rush. I need a minute to prepare, to stop and smell the hot dogs.
I don’t fight the joy. If you think about it, this is a happy ending for any first love, for any family.
All parents want to go first, all good ones anyway.
You hoped that you’d be lucky enough to see me fly away from the nest and soar into the unknown.
But that’s life, that’s love. The risk all expectant, misguided mothers take on when they indulge the wrong man, a roving-eyed dick who stands there smoking a cigar and sizing up a nurse while his woman is in labor, screaming.
I know. I can’t fixate on you and be good to any woman all at the same time.
Life is too short, too crowded. You died for me, and I killed for you.
It’s my duty as your son to outlast you, to find someone to love and do it right.
You don’t have to worry. I won’t repeat the mistakes of my messy, human parents.
I learned a lot from you and I’m not gonna overdose or run into a bus at the young, old age of twenty-five.
I know you want better for me, and I promise to do the one thing you could never pull off.
I will close the white box on you and never look back.
I made it, Vail. I’m on the edge of the East River. I reach into my pocket for the dog tags. I wait for myself to feel something, but that’s how I know I’ve changed. Grown.
I don’t cry. I don’t shake. I toss the fake-ass dog tags into the fucking river. And that’s it.
I made a deal and I’ll honor the contract.
I won’t talk to you when I’m lonesome and I won’t think about you when I’m lonely.
It won’t be easy, not at first, but every step toward Brooklyn is a move in the right direction.
I’m not the man I was; I don’t even have the same Portnoy.
And talking about you to myself, to the next girl I meet, would be a bad thing.
After all, that is how you killed us. You…No. No more you.
The bus hit me hard, but it didn’t kill me.
I’m young, strong. Still open for business.
And my “parents” really didn’t die in vain.
When I get back out there, I’ll be smart.
I’ll make X-ray vision goggles so I can see the things I need to see, the things a young girl coming into her own doesn’t want me to see.
The important things. Her secret life…her little chats.
But then a crack in the sidewalk. What if I never love again? What if you…No. I don’t say your name, not anymore.
They say you never forget your first. But they also say, “Never say never.” I am choosing to erase you from the hard drive in my head. I am choosing to stop talking to myself about you, about us. Better to make room for good things.
It’s like my old Aunt Misty. I only met her once when my mom took me to the nursing home where she lived. She was chomping on a Popsicle. Red juice everywhere, red tongue, white nightgown. She licked her fingers and tossed the dead stick on the floor. She never had kids. She was like a kid.
“I want a Popsicle.”
“You just had one, Aunt Misty.”
She didn’t get mad. She just laughed. I don’t think I ever saw anyone happier than Aunt Fucking Misty when my mother peeled the paper off a Popsicle and handed it over.
Forgetting things comes naturally when you get old, when your time is short, as if your brain is trying to make it easier to let every Popsicle taste as sweet as the first.
We never went back to the nursing home. My mom hawked Aunt Misty’s ring to pay the gas bill. “It’s not like she’ll miss it,” she said. “Same way she won’t miss us.”
Aunt Misty is a good role model. The wind picks up as I buy a lighter at a newsstand.
Night starts to fall. (Touching skillfully, mysteriously) her first rose.
The smile on my face comes from within, for no reason, like an excuse you make for someone you love.
I’ve never been in love, not yet—I’m pretty sure the other person has to be in there with you—but the thing with feathers is alive inside of me.
Unflappable. A little scary, the idea of a bird in your gut that won’t stop bashing the walls of your insides and maybe Mooney is right.
Maybe smart, sensitive guys like me are supposed to abstain from hope altogether.
I turn a little red. Who am I kidding? There are no “guys like me.” I’m not a dick.
And I know the way you know about a…I’m special.
I can’t lose hope, because I am hope. And it would be selfish of me to run home to my typewriters when there’s a girl out there yearning for a man to love her down to the last, frostbitten drop.
I can love a woman at her lowest when she feels like she’s not enough, like she’s disappearing.
When I was a kid, I licked the Popsicle stick until it gave me a splinter on my tongue, and then I pulled out the stupid splinter and licked the stick some more.
I toss my new lighter to a homeless guy.
I don’t need props. I have a good feeling about tonight as I line up with all the other people looking to get lost in the fog of love, in the noise of music, the pursuit of the kind of happiness you can only find in something outside yourself.
A Popsicle, a girl. I’m gonna be okay. Fate is on my side, because for the first time in my life, I am too.