The Blonde of the Joke by Bennett Madison

Author:Bennett Madison
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2009-03-26T16:00:00+00:00

I had been wandering aimlessly, and then I was at my destination. I’d known I would find it if I didn’t stress too much, and then there it was, on the corner of a side street, right above a small convenience store. I’m not sure how I recognized it, but as soon as I saw it, it all came back to me. This was it, for sure.

Jesse had left home for good the day after high school had ended. He had graduated by the skin of his teeth, and his efforts at the whole college thing had been lackadaisical at best. He’d landed this apartment, taken some classes here and there, waiting tables at night, before finally switching to bartending at some point, and dispensing with the classes altogether. A couple of years ago, he’d sublet the place, and picked up to move to New York. We hadn’t heard a lot from him after that, until now. Now he was back.

From the outside, Jesse’s building was pretty shitty and falling apart, but it still had a certain ramshackle dignity. You could tell that it had once been nice—fancy, even. Looking up at it—at the cracked stone moldings around the windows and the filthy, elaborate cornices—I imagined Jesse and Liz playing MASH, back in high school, and wondered if this had been predicted for him.

I rang the buzzer. When there was no answer, I rang it again and then again, until I finally heard Jesse’s crackling voice, hoarse and scratchy, through the intercom: “Who is it?”

“It’s Val,” I said. “Your sister.”

The door vibrated, startling me, and I pushed it open and ran up the narrow, fouled staircase to the third floor, where Jesse stood in the doorway, in sweatpants and an old T-shirt, eyes puffy and hair matted. “This is a surprise,” he said. He seemed a little insane, like everything he said should have been punctuated with an exclamation point. But it was early in the morning.

“Hey,” I said. “Sorry to, like, wake you up or whatever.”

“No worries,” Jesse said. “No worries. I’ve been awake, actually. But the place is kind of, like, a total dump. You know how it is.”

We stepped inside. He was right. It was a complete dump. Honestly, I wouldn’t have expected anything else from Jesse, who had always been an utter slob. The place was tiny and littered with empty cigarette boxes and coffee containers, clothes strewn on every possible surface, and it stank with a gross stench that I couldn’t identify. “Let me get some air in here,” Jesse said. He flung open a window and cleared a spot for me on an ancient futon by scooping the clothes onto the floor, then plopped himself onto a wooden stool. “So what’s up?”

I didn’t know how to answer the question. Jesse was fidgeting, running his hands through his hair and drumming his fingers on an end table. He didn’t look great. His face was pulled and lined, and his lips were chapped and cracking. It looked like he had been picking at his face.

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