Happyland by J. Robert Lennon

Author:J. Robert Lennon
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Happyland
ISBN: 9781936873883
Publisher: Dzanc Books
Published: 2013-08-31T04:00:00+00:00

* * *

Dave Dryer, meanwhile, was driving down to the hospital, north of Nestor. You could see it from Equinox—it was right there, on the other side of the lake—but it took an hour to drive to. The truck’s suspension was shot—it had the approximate jolt-absorbing power of a tricycle—and every bump in the road, every stray bit of gravel, was transferred directly to his mouth and magnified there a thousand times.

He seemed to be, for the first time in several years, experiencing some kind of medical crisis. His face had swollen during the night, and he had begun to spit blood. His eyes, when he gazed at them in the mirror, looked like they belonged to a squirrel or raccoon, and his tongue had the weight and gray smoothness of a rock dredged from a river.

To make matters worse, Janet Ping had visited the night before, to try to reconcile their differences. It seemed that her friends had dissed her when they found out she was working for Happy Masters. She figured that Dave would be more forgiving.

Well, duh. He let her in and gave her a drink, and she spilled her guts—confessed that she loved Happy, her friends were trying to make her choose between Happy and them, yada yada yada. Dave nodded, made comforting noises, and lusted after her: her face was almost perfectly round, a freckled moon; her shoulders were narrow and seemed to shiver at random intervals as she talked, despite his having the heat turned up to like 70. He drank along with her, firmly off the wagon now, and as he watched and listened and drank, the pain in his jaw dulled, and his anger (at Happy, at his father, at his customers, at Janet) seemed to melt and mingle with his woozy affection.

She told him about Sally Streit, the lesbian sex celebrity who was coming to campus. She said she found the whole thing disgusting.

“What,” he said, kind of sliding down a little on the sofa, so that his knee pressed against hers, “is so disgusting about it?”

“It’s a—there’s a lucture,” she slurred. “Ha! That’s good, a lucture.”

“A lickture,” Dave offered.

“A fuckture.” She snorted with laughter and poured more wine—the last of it—into her coffee mug. “It’s a lecture, and a demonstration. She supposely—supposededly—supposedly does stuff with the audience.”

“Like what?”

“Like makes them put on a dildo or something.”

They looked at each other and laughed. Dave slapped his knee. She slapped his knee, and then he slapped her knee.

So they started talking about dildos, had he ever seen one, had she ever used one, it was all completely hilarious, and they kept laughing, and kept slapping each other’s knees. And then she ruined everything. She said, “Oh, I’m just sick of it all.”

“Sick of what all?” he said.

And she said, “The whole lesbian shhthing. The whole girls unite, woman power thing.” She wiped her tired face with a rubbery hand. “I just want to have…normal friends. I want regular love.”

Which he took to mean she was going hetero.

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