Perv by Jerry Stahl

Author:Jerry Stahl
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins

I didn’t know what to grab before I split, so I went for the drugs. I kept some pot in a Sucrets box stuffed in the pocket of a rolled-up work shirt, and a knuckle of hash in tinfoil shoved inside a pair of my father’s old brogans. (Mom saved all his clothes, in case he came back from the dead and dressed for dinner.) That stuff I stashed in my boots. The other items—two hits of orange acid Tennie swore was Sunshine, but I suspected was baby aspirin, and a fistful of pilfered Reds—I slipped into the lining of my windbreaker.

“Going somewhere, doll-puss?”

“Huh?”

I was banking on Mom napping after her lunch and Lucy-perm. But she was on the prowl. Worse, she was brewing coffee. A bad break! Instead of her usual MO: heading into Baby Talk and Smooches, then collapsing altogether, now she’d perk up and launch into the C and C. The College-and-Cancer Report. I knew this from long experience. Whenever she met with her friends, at some point afterward I’d have to hear about their kids, who were all doing fabulous—“Kevin’s Pre-law, Kathy’s engaged to an orthodontist!”—and then their husbands, who either had prostates “the size of beach balls” or had just sprouted some kind of “thing.” As in “Poor Tessie, the doctor’s just found a ‘thing’ under Harv’s arm…He’s going in Tuesday.”

Much as I hated to cop to it, on some level I could not get enough of this. Especially the Tumor News. Something happened when my father died. I’ve tried to explain this, but I don’t know…. Suddenly, I had a license to fuck up. When Dad was alive, knowing how bad he’d had it growing up, I felt obligated to at least try to appreciate all I’d been blessed with: warm house, food on the table, my own clothes. Dad never talked much about the orphanage, but I know from my mother that it was like something out of Oliver Twist, without the cute hats and Cockney they stuck in the movie version. Much as I loved my dad, I felt sorry for him, too. I didn’t want to make the miserable life he’d endured any worse by being a problem, myself. But all that changed when he died. More than my sanctioned failure (what else was the son of a suicide supposed to do, if not fuck himself up?), I had a new attitude. A new way of thinking—call it Negative Serenity—that sprang from the certain knowledge that everything ran to shit in the end. Mr. Schmidlap knew all about this. Meeting him was like meeting Moses. He brought the bad news down from the mountaintop, and he stayed drunk for the whole fucking trip.

My credo boiled down to a slogan I’d inked on the arm of the mayonnaise-colored vinyl chair in my room at Hale. It was just two words: Death Anyway. These came to me one Sunday, when I was curled under a blanket doing mescaline in my closet. My eyes were closed, and the words flashed like neon against a black sky.

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