Choke

Chapter 26

THE HALF-MOON LOOKS UP AT US, reflected in a silver pie tin of beer.

Denny and me kneel in somebody's backyard, and Denny kicks away the snails and slugs with little kicks of his index finger. Denny lifts the pie tin, full to the brim, bringing his reflection and his real face closer and closer until his fake lips meet his own lips.

Denny drinks about half the beer and says, "This is how they drink beer in Europe, dude."

Out of slug traps?

"No, dude," Denny says. He hands me the pie tin and says, "Flat and warm."

I kiss my own reflection and drink, the moon watching over my shoulder.

On the sidewalk waiting for us is a baby stroller with its wheels splayed out wider at the bottom than the top. The bottom of the stroller drags against the ground, and wrapped in the pink baby blanket is a boulder of sandstone too big for Denny or me to lift. A pink rubber baby head is balanced inside the top edge of the blanket.

"About having sex in a church," Denny says, "tell me you didn't."

It's not so much that I didn't. I couldn't.

Couldn't bone, shaft, drill, core, screw. All those euphemisms that aren't.

Denny and me, we're just two regular guys taking the baby out for a stroll at midnight. Just a couple of nice young guys in this fine neighborhood of big houses, each set back on its lawn. All these houses with their self-contained, climate-controlled, smug illusion of security.

Denny and me, we're about as innocent as a tumor.

Harmless as a psilocybin toadstool.

This is such a fine neighborhood, even the beer they leave out for the animals is imported from Germany or Mexico. We hop the fence into the next backyard and snoop under the plants for our next round.

Ducking to look under leaves and bushes, I say, "Dude." I say, "You don't think I'm a good-hearted person, do you?"

And Denny says, "Hell no, dude."

After a few blocks, all those backyards of beer, I know Denny's being honest. I say, "You don't think I'm really a secretly sensitive and Christlike manifestation of perfect love?"

"No way, dude," Denny says. "You're an asshole."

And I say, "Thanks. Just checking."

And Denny stands up using just his legs in slow motion, and in a pie tin between his hands is another reflection of the night sky, and Denny says, "Bingo, dude."

About me in the church I tell him, I'm more disappointed in God than in myself. He should've hammered me with a lightning bolt. I mean, God's god. I'm just an asshole. I didn't even take off Paige Marshall's clothes. Still with her stethoscope around her neck, dangling between her breasts, I pushed her back on the altar. I didn't even take off her lab coat.

The stethoscope against her own chest, she said, "Go fast." She said, "I want you to stay in synch with my heart."

It's not fair how a woman never has to think of shit to keep from coming.

And me, I just couldn't. Already, that Jesus idea was just killing my hard-on.

Denny hands me the beer, and 1 drink. Denny spits out a dead slug and says, "Better drink through your teeth, dude."

Even in a church, even laid up on an altar, without her clothes, Paige Marshall, Dr. Paige Marshall, I didn't want her to become just another piece of ass.

Because nothing is as perfect as you can imagine it.

Because nothing is as exciting as your fantasy.

Breathe in. And then, out.

"Dude," Denny says. "This is got to be my nightcap. Let's get the rock and head home."

And I say, just one more block, okay? Just one more round of backyards. I'm not near drunk enough to forget my day.

This is such a fine neighborhood. I jump the fence to the next backyard and land on my head in somebody's rose bush. Somewhere a dog's barking.

The whole time we were up at the altar, me trying to get my dog hard, the cross, polished and blond wood, was looking down on us. No tortured man. No crown of thorns. No flies circling and sweat. No stink. No blood and suffering, not in this church. No rain of blood. No plague of locusts.

Paige, the whole time with the stethoscope in her ears, just listened to her own heart.

The angels on the ceiling were painted over. The light through the stained-glass window was thick and gold and swimming with dust. The light fell in a thick solid shaft, a warm heavy shaft that spilled on us.

Attention please, would Dr. Freud please pick up the white courtesy telephone.

A world of symbols, not the real world.

Denny looks at me stuck and bleeding from the rose thorns, my clothes ripped, lying in a bush, and says, "Okay, I mean it." He says, "This is, for sure, last call."

The smell of roses, the smell of incontinence at St. Anthony's.

A dog's barking and scratching to get out the back door of the house. A light comes on in the kitchen to show somebody in the window. Then the back-porch light comes on, and it's amazing how fast I tear my ass out of that bush and run to the street.

Coming the other way on the sidewalk are a couple, leaned together and walking with an arm around each other. The woman rubs her cheek on the man's lapel, and the man kisses the crown of her head.

Denny's already pushing the stroller, so fast the front wheels catch in a sidewalk crack, and the baby's rubber head pitches out. Glass eyes staring wide open, the pink head bounces past the happy couple and rolls into the gutter.

To me, Denny says, "Dude, you want to fetch that for me?"

My clothes shredded and gummy with blood, thorns stuck in my face, I trot past the couple and nab the head out of the leaves and trash.

The man yelps and pulls back.

And the woman says, "Victor? Victor Mancini. Oh, my God."

She must've saved my life, because I don't know who the hell she is.

In the chapel, after I gave up, after we were buttoning our clothes shut, I said to Paige, "Forget fetal tissue. Forget resenting strong women." I say, "You want to know the real reason why I won't fuck you?"

Doing up the buttons of my britches, I told her, "Maybe the truth is I really want to like you instead."

And with both hands above her head, making her black hair brain tight again, Paige said, "Maybe sex and affection aren't mutually exclusive."

And I laughed. My hands tying my cravat, I told her, yes. Yes, they are.

Denny and me, we get to the seven hundred block of, the street sign says Birch Street. To Denny pushing the stroller, I say, "Wrong way, dude." I point behind us and say, "My mom's house is back there."

Denny keeps pushing, the bottom of the stroller making a growling sound against the sidewalk. The happy couple are drop-jawed, still watching us from two blocks back.

I trot along next to him, tossing the pink doll head from hand to hand. "Dude," I say. "Turn back around."

Denny says, "We have to see the eight hundred block first."

What's there?

"It's supposed to be nothing," Denny says. "My Uncle Don used to own it."

The houses end, and the eight hundred block is just land with more houses on the block after that. The land is just tall grass planted around the edges with old apple trees, their bark all wrinkled and twisting up into the darkness. Inside a bunch of brush, blackberry whips, and scrub, more thorns on every twig, the middle of the land is clear.

On the corner is a billboard sign, plywood painted white with a picture across the top of red-brick houses built against each other and people waving from windows with flower boxes. Under the houses, black words say: Coming Soon Menningtown Country Townhouses. Under the billboard, the ground's snowed with peeling paint chips. Up close, the billboard is curling, the brick townhouses cracked and faded pink.

Denny tips the boulder out of the stroller, and it lands in the tall grass beside the sidewalk. He shakes out the pink blanket and hands me two corners. Between us, we fold it, and Denny says, "If you can have the opposite of a role model, he'd be my Uncle Don."

Then Denny flops the folded blanket into the stroller and starts to push the stroller toward home.

And I call after him, "Dude. You don't want this rock?"

And Denny says, "Those mothers against drunk driving, for sure, they threw a party when they found out old Don Menning was dead."

Wind lifts and crushes the tall grass. Nobody but plants lives here now, and across the dark center of the block you can see the porch lights of houses on the other side. The black zigzags of old apple trees are outlines in between.

"So," I go, "is this a park??

And Denny says, "Not really." Still walking away, he says, "It's mine."

I pitch the doll head at him and say, "For real?"

"Since my folks called a couple days ago," he says, and he catches the head and drops it into the stroller. Under the streetlights, past everybody's dark house, we walk.

My buckle shoes flashing, my hands stuffed in my pockets, I say, "Dude?" I say, "You don't really think I'm anything like Jesus Christ, do you?"

I say, "Please say no."

We walk.

And pushing his empty stroller, Denny says, "Face it, dude. You nearly did sex on God's table. You're already shame spiraling big-time."

We walk, and the beer's wearing off, and it's a surprise how the night air's so cold.

And I say, "Please, dude. Tell me the truth."

I'm not good and kind and caring or any of that happy horse-shit.

I'm nothing but a thoughtless, brain-dead, loser dude. That I can live with. This is who I am. Just a puss-pounding, seam-reaming, dog-driving, fucking helpless sex addict asshole, and I can't ever, ever let myself forget that.

I say, "Tell me again I'm an insensitive asshole."