Back in October of 2020, Brian Alan Ellis sent me Body High, Jon Lindsey’s first novel. Brian was excited for his press (House of Vlad) to publish it, and I was excited to read it. The cover is gross, and I like gross things. But the pandemic had made a mess of my work life, and I wasn’t sure I’d ever get to it. I did get to it a few months later, and by the time I finished it, I was almost sad that I hadn’t read it earlier. It’s a book unlike any other. It’s got wrestling, an ass infection, incest, druggy wild-goose-chases through L.A., a dog named Flaubert, plot twists and surprises, and at the heart of it all, a dead mother and a grieving son. It’s dead serious and difficult, and it’s also funny as hell.

Over the next few months, Jon and I  emailed back and forth about the book, why we write, sexual abuse and incest (some of which was edited out for privacy), suffering—you know, the easy stuff. But, like the book, Jon is funny, and not afraid to make fun of himself. “One time,” he told me, “I tried to shoot a bottle rocket out of my butt crack and got a burn scar shaped like a heart on my ass. That scar was the most beautiful thing I ever made, until Body High.” At the end of our conversation, he calls himself a “born quitter,” but I don’t buy it. When you read Body High, you won’t buy it either.

Get your copy of Body High right here.

Lindsay Lerman: I want to start here: Let’s talk about mothers. Or maybe “the figure of the mother” if you’d like to keep it abstract. I found it really, really moving how the mother is kind of the heart (at least a big part of the heart) of the book. Some of the most heartbreaking and difficult scenes in the book are the ones in which Leland is confronting the ghost(s) of his mother, and his past with her. In this respect, there’s *so much* presence through absence in the book. For you, what’s going on with all this?

Jon Lindsey: I started writing Body High after my mom’s first attempt at suicide.

Looking back, I think that writing the book was an attempt to prepare for her death. Or duck it.

I was too poor for therapy. I was incredibly emotionally inarticulate but considered myself a writer and wanted to write a book. I was also terrified to write about my mother, because her attempt at suicide was in retribution for something I said. So when she survived, the situation we found ourselves in was … awkward. Her: not really wanting to live, threatening to kill herself all the time. Me: wrecked with guilt.

For years, while I did everything I could to keep my mom alive, I sputtered writing scenes that I considered fun: robbing sperm banks, drug deals, pro-wrestling. But I was writing around “the heart of the book”—the mother.

There’s a reason the book opens at the funeral of the mother. I figured if the mother was dead then I could avoid her. I could stash the mother’s character, as well as my own complicated feelings about my mom—who was constantly breaking my heart—in the margins of the story, a grave.

Predictably, the book was trash. I would give drafts to writers I respected, and afterward they would avoid me at parties.

Only when I began to write into the pain, of memory, of my mom and myself, could the book emerge from my body. Only then could readers take seriously the questions I wanted the book to ask: How is trauma transmitted? How does the sexual abuse suffered by a mother affect her son? Is incest inherited?

“When can I read your book?” My mom would ask me constantly.

“When it’s published,” I’d say, to put her off, sometimes feeling like it never would be published.

But shortly after I finished writing the final draft, my mom killed herself.

And now the book is publishing. And she’s not here to read it. But in a way, she is it.

Damaged from childhood, she was alienated from her body. Her emotions were ugly. There wasn’t ever any space for her in the world of the normal. She was someone who grossed out normal people. I hope Body High does the same.

A hot woman followed me on Twitter, but it seemed suspect. I clicked her profile. She was a barista in LA who wrote screenplays. Attractive. Funny. Definitely not real. 

My friend Jenn texted me to ask why I didn’t follow her bot back. Said she made it with some Mad Libs style template that would shuffle all the words and phrases she uploaded and the bot would fire off a nonsense movie idea every hour.

Does it respond if someone comments?

Yeah, like, she calls me master when I reply, but she calls everyone else babe.

Oh shit––I should make one to resurrect Jeremy.

Oh god, that’s so sad and creepy––Yeah, and I’ll make one for my mother that tweets the lyrics to ‘Hallelujah’ in a never ending loop and says she’s proud of me when I post about my b-hole. 

For a few days I laughed at the concept, played it off, then found myself digging through the ammo box jammed full of letters Jeremy sent from prison. I called Bekah.

“Yo, if I gave you all those letters, would you do me a favor?”

“From him?”

“Yeah.”

“Whatcha thinkin?”

“I just want to make, like, a digital file.”

“All of em? Dude, there’s gotta be like two hundred letters.”

“Can you do it?”

“Why can’t you? No offense.”

“Can you help or not?”

I dropped off the ammo box full of letters from different addresses within the Florida State Corrections system. I told her how to fill the templates with all his -isms. Bekah was the only one capable. She knew the way he spoke and wouldn’t clean up any of the poor grammar or correct words like set to sit. 

Weeks went by and I wanted to call and see if she’d made any progress, but I didn’t. It was a lot to wade through. We spoke a few times––their daughter had been enrolled in preschool and started saying goodnight to her daddy’s picture before bed––but I didn’t bring up the ammo box.

The week of Father’s Day, she texted me:

You still got those recordings?

I want to kiss my neighbor. He is a bald, lanky old man who lives directly next door to me. He lives very alone, except for his tiny dog named Princess. Sometimes I hear screaming outside my window, and then run to the window because I am a sucker for semi-suburban drama and am secretly hoping to see an argument about missorted recycling get out of hand, but it’s usually just him, alone, telling Princess to stop eating her own feces. 

He only speaks at one volume and it’s a very high volume. Even when he’s just asking, “How’s it going?” as I carry my groceries to my front door, it could be mistaken for aggressive screaming. It’s possible he is hearing impaired, but the more I observe him, the more I don’t think that’s the case. I suspect he screams for the same reason most people do: fear. I think he’s afraid people will ignore him, and the dependable thing about screaming is that it’s very difficult to ignore. 

This screaming could probably be traced back to some childhood trauma of his—maybe his father beat him and whenever he mentioned the beatings to his mother, it fell on deaf ears—but I doubt he’s ever made that connection. I don’t think he actually knows he’s screaming. Who would tell him? Whenever he’s screaming at me, I certainly don’t tell him he’s screaming. In fact, I end up raising my voice too, kind of like how I always end up talking in the local accent when I travel. This is an embarrassing habit, though someone once told me it’s a sign of empathy. 

My desire to kiss my neighbor began the day I moved in. I brought him a box of cookies from the local bakery—it’s important to get off on the right foot—and he refused them. As he screamed about not liking sweets and knowing a guy who once died of diabetes, I entered a familiar softcore fugue state I have only ever experienced when staring at a woman I am dating and realizing, for the first time, that I’m “in love” with her. In these blissfully disorienting moments, I tend to hold onto reality by focusing on the woman’s lips. I do this because I know that the only way to break the spell is to kiss those lips hard, with tongue, passion, urgency, etc. 

So, I watched his lips as he screamed something about Governor Cuomo being a secret Nazi. I probably nodded my head a lot and even said something like, “You never know with Nazis,” but really I was imagining what his mouth would taste and feel like. As I imagined it, I grew confident in the accuracy of my imagination. His saliva would taste metallic and salty, like a sweaty battery. His lips would be firm, with no give at all, as if God took a utilitarian approach to this particular creation, knowing he was designing a man who would spend decades using his mouth to eat, drink, breathe, scream, but never kiss. 

A few weeks ago, it was Michael Bible’s birthday. His girlfriend Kelsey got him a landline: red and corded, like the one from Dr. Strangelove. We conducted this interview over that secret line, sharing drinks on either end. 

All his books have been novellas. All his books have been immaculate. The most recent, The Ancient Hours, is a stunning lyrical look at guilt, love, and the small triumphs that are still available to us despite the indignities that time and other people ruthlessly dole out. It centers on Iggy, who burns down a small town church and is sentenced to death and dies, and the lives he’s affected. Imagine Meursault in the American South and you’ll have some idea of Bible’s achievement.

Trey and I were walking to the liquor store to buy potatoes, three for a dollar, and a guy at the body shop yelled ‘Looking sexy, girl’ out of his greasy car window and Trey told him to fuck off and smiled real big at me. The sky looked real good and I told Trey I had been thinking about the sky a lot lately. Not in a scientific way or anything, just how grateful I am for it and how universal it is. How it’s always free and always different. Trey said that sounded like some hippie shit and smiled real big at me. On the corner, outside the liquor store, there was a man selling heroin and I cringed when he hollered his advertisement. He said he had sawbucks. Very Chicago. The phrasing never failed to make me think of a David Mamet play I’d read. We saw an old man walking slow and dizzy and Trey said he was doing ‘the crack rock shuffle.’ Trey knew about a lot of things I didn’t know about. We walked back from the liquor store with Marlboro Reds and three potatoes and energy drinks and some of those candy coated peanuts that are for some reason called Boston Baked Beans. I had a small crush on Trey but blamed it mostly on my caretaking spirit, maybe it’s because I’m a Cancer rising, I don’t know if I believe in that stuff anymore or anything. I just liked helping him.

That morning Trey had sent me a selfie where he had wet hair and looked real bad, out of the blue, with no text or context. I asked if he was okay. Ben and I had broken up two days before in a McDonald’s during breakfast and it felt like all I did was cry and take baths for those two days. Trey asked if I could call him an Uber to my place, this was way before Uber was deemed to be fascist or whatever they are considered now, this was more than a year ago, in late July. I called him an Uber and sent him a screenshot and told him to get outside. He did and I watched the car get closer on the app and I wondered why he looked so emaciated and I knew he’d been up for days taking big risks. I buzzed him in and saw him looking all scrawny and tired but still good. I took him to my room and we lay down and I think we both cried. He listened to me talk about Ben and Trey always did a good job of not doing that thing where you talk about yourself too much. Like when you tell someone you’re heartbroken and they talk about their own heartbreak, he never did that too much. He said he had no money, that he wanted to fly a sign in Wicker Park and that he didn’t think he had an apartment anymore and that he’d smashed up his guitar and that he was freaked. I said let’s go get some potatoes and I’ll fry ‘em up for us. I said ‘nice and starchy for our tum tums’ and he smiled and said he couldn’t eat probably but he needed to. I had put all my pills in a Nike drawstring bag and hidden them under some clothes in a laundry basket but not because I didn’t trust him just because I didn’t want him to be tempted. It was the second to last day in July and my lease ended on August first and no one had ever lay down in that bed with me except for Ben and I was okay that it was Trey doing it because I cared about him and his spirit, felt protective of him. 

A Voyeur

Mr. Adams was our seventh-grade woodshop teacher. He lived on the hill with his wife and two kids. He had a false eye and once showed us a video of himself riding a homemade hovercraft on the high school soccer field. He had a soft spot for girls and would always ask if they could help him clean up the classroom. Many did and asked for extra credit, and he gave it.

A guidance counsellor walked into our class after Christmas break and didn’t say anything about what happened to Mr. Adams. It’s not like he had to. Facebook was new, and everyone had already seen and shared the post. It happened the week before Christmas. At least that’s what people said. None of us were there. Most of us only saw his mugshot on the county bookings website and made up our own versions of what happened. Apparently, Mr. Adams had been looking into people’s windows and videotaping them naked. Or having sex. Or maybe it was little girls in their bathrooms. The only foundation validating the rumors was one word: voyeurism. I didn’t know the definition. My parents said a voyeur was a Peeping Tom. I imagined Mr. Adams climbing into a tree like George McFly and spying on someone with binoculars. Why would anyone do that?

When I came home, I got on Facebook, combed through the posts about Mr. Adams, and read all the comments. My crush commented on one of them. She said he was a pervert sicko and looked at her bare back when she bent to pick up trash in class. I clicked on her profile. We were friends, but we’d never talked and never would. I looked at all her pictures, framed in tiles on my screen. I could see everything.

I first met Kristen Millares Young at the venerable Hugo House, a central hub of literary life in Seattle, WA where she was Prose Writer-in-Residence from 2018-2020. I’d driven up from Portland to read a story at the Hugo Literary Series that featured a new mother whose brain, body, and sexuality made choices the narrator didn’t feel in control of. After the reading, Millares Young approached me and said, essentially, Thank you for that. I knew exactly what she meant. She also had two young children at home, was midway through mentoring a hundred or so writers as part of her writer-in-residence post, and her first book Subduction was due out the following year. Within the first few minutes of our conversation, she felt like kin. 

When speaking, Millares Young exudes a fearless intelligence and a laser focus of concentration, with just the right amount of cursing (to my taste) peppered in. I suspect all three traits are useful and/or born from her background in investigative journalism. Her work appears in the Washington Post, the Guardian, and the New York Times, where she was the researcher for the team that won a Pulitzer Prize for “Snow Fall,” as well as many other newspapers, literary reviews, magazines and anthologies, including Latina Outsiders: Remaking Latina Identity (Routledge). She has degrees from Harvard and the University of Washington, and she was co-founder of InvestigateWest, a nonprofit news studio in the Pacific Northwest.

Her debut novel Subduction launched on April 14th, the same time COVID-19 began to pummel New York after shutting down most of the West Coast, and many of her book launch events had to be postponed or moved online, including a bunch of readings coming up this fall. By the time we got together for this interview on June 1st, we were more than two months into lockdown while homeschooling our kids, and it had been exactly one week since George Floyd was murdered by the Minneapolis Police. 

The escalating roar of national anger and demand for rights and protection is a macrocosm of the issues explored in her novel. As a Latinx woman, Millares Young is well acquainted with both the weight of America’s historical oppression and its racist counterpoint of representation.

Precisely as in real life, Subduction and its characters navigate complicated truths that often don’t settle easily into alignment with everyday reality. The story unfurls between dual narrators, Claudia and Peter. A Latina anthropologist, Claudia has just fled her falling-apart marriage to throw herself into fieldwork studying the ritual songs of a Makah whaling village. She collides with Peter, back home in Neah Bay to get answers from his failing mother about his father’s murder. Both of them, in their own ways, are desperate to make meaning of their lives. 

As are we all.

Subduction is a finalist in two categories (Best First Book and Best Novel, both in English) of the International Latino Book Awards.

Mark Gluth <[email protected]>
Jul 4, 2020, 1:10 PM
to Thomas

Hey Man, I thought I’d kick off our conversation if you are ok with that.

When I think about Alone I think it is a very self aware book. I mean the mind beneath the surface of the book comes off as having a clear idea of what it is. It seems to know what it doesn’t know as well. In this way I see it as a book that impacts what it interacts with as opposed to being impacted by it. Conversely, with Come Down To Us, I always pictured the book being like a home movie being projected on a sheet hanging at the dark end of a barn. Drafts make the sheet move and distort the image and light makes it through the roof and blots out portions of the film.

Thomas Moore
Jul 4, 2020, 3:06 PM
to me

I think that you’re right. Definitely that the book is there and very much ready to collaborate with whoever picks it up, with their imagination or thoughts or whatever. I love how you describe Come Down To Us. It’s an apt scene that you imagine because I always think of your writing as being very visual – I see your books so vividly when I read them. You have a skill of being able to really help or entice the mind into building these super rich scenes – you can feel the damp moss on trees, the weather is always so palpable. Do you have these really strong images appearing to you before you write them – are the ideas born like that? I ask, because I’m very much not a visual writer. For the most part, when I write, it’s the language that occurs to me. I rarely see things and then write about them – the words are just there to be lined up and rearranged.

Mark Gluth
Jul 4, 2020, 10:16 PM
That’s interesting about how the words are there for you, I think that gets at what I was saying about how I don’t see Alone being impacted by outside forces. Your writing often has this vibe, a confidence perhaps, where it seems like it considers anything outside of itself as besides the point. That’s something I admire about it for sure. For me, the mood is always the most important thing. Everything beneath it is a hodge podge that serves the goal of conveying that mood. I rewrite everything so much, and I know the drafts are moving in the right direction that when I read them back they cause a vague little film to play in my head.

Thomas Moore
Jul 5, 2020, 12:27 AM
to me

I mean that the ideas come in words rather than visuals. The first sentence of Alone came first and hovered round in my brain for a while before I started the book – it doesn’t always start like that. But this one sentence appeared out of nowhere without any other context; there was no scene in my head or any notion of anything else. Rather than confidence, I always think that a lot of my writing is about confusion. Maybe because by the time they are finished I’ve messed around with the texts so much and edited so much out, perhaps they are just zipped shut and hermetic or something – maybe that comes across as the confidence you can feel? I dunno. Similar to what you say – I always think in terms of mood – that kind of trumps anything else when I’m writing.

Oh – I mentioned my first sentence, which reminded me that I wanted to ask about yours – that first sentence in Come Down To Us is really something! It’s like this spiralling sensation – straight away it pulls you around and forces you inside the text – it kind of calls for this extra level of attention that I think is really important with your writing in that there always seems to be a lot happening with the sentences. It can be disorientating, which I really enjoy as a reader. Can you talk a little bit about how you started the book like that – is that where it started?

Mary South’s You Will Never Be Forgotten is an excellent collection of high concept short stories, usually having something to do with the intersection of technology and being human—energetic literary fiction that sometimes collides with sci-fi, or something even more interesting that I can’t put my finger on; I just think of them as Mary South stories. A clone named Keith, being harvested for his internal organs, is also an object of love; a person who works as an online content scrubber lashes back at a venture capitalist who sexually assaulted them; a devastated mother resurrects a deceased daughter with new tech. I loved this book. I read it on an airplane right before Covid-19 quarantine happened and was in awe after every story, “Oh this one will be a movie someday.” “Oh this one could, too.” “Oh they should make six movies out of this one.” Mary South has big ideas but cares just as much about her sentences and her characters. There’s a big heartbeat, a big pulse of life running though the veins of her writing. She’s an idiosyncratic, singular voice out there, telling radical stories about normal people thrust into a strange changing world. What else can I say? When I finished You Will Never Be Forgotten and got off the airplane, things were beginning to shut down for the coronavirus. I wanted to know more about Mary South and how she creates her unique stories. Instead of meeting up in person in the city, like I’m sure we would have done, and recording the conversation over a few beers, the questioning turned to telephone calls and emails and google docs and on and on, at least we didn’t have to do any Zooms. All right. Well, I’m always interested in where artists come from, so I guess we’ll begin there. The first thing I learned about Mary South is that she grew up in a small town called Rosemount. There were a lot of woods, she says. It was quiet.

Mary South: My mother is from Northern Minnesota, another small town called Starbuck. She has the strong accent and everything. She comes from a long line of farmers. She’s told me both some pretty harrowing and funny stories about farm work.

Bud Smith: What happened on the farm?

MS: When she was a child, my mother became attached to this calf, which she named Velvet because its coat was so soft. She still brings up sometimes how she showed up after school one day on the farm to see it, but Velvet had been shipped off to the slaughterhouse for veal. This anecdote will often segue into how my great-great-grandmother walked heavily pregnant behind a covered wagon for weeks until they reached northern Minnesota and started farming back in the 1800s.

My mother’s uncle Claude managed the farm for decades until he died and it was finally sold. He could toss a bale of hay with one arm into his tractor even when he was very old. Those bales are heavy, a hundred pounds or more. We would visit him on occasion when I was a kid; on one such trip, he whispered to me that he believed aliens were living underneath the surface of the earth. I told my mother about it later, and she said, “Oh, Claude was just messing with you.” I think he had a bit of a diabolical sense of humor.

He asked me if I made it home okay in such a caring, fatherly tone I got turned on. We met in a writing workshop. He critiqued one of my stories by saying, “You’re very good at individuating based on the desires of other people.” The night before, we got drunk together at a bar near a reading with a thrown together group of acquaintances, and now he was closing in on me in the corner kitchen of another reading inside someone’s Bushwick apartment. I told him, “Yeah, I got home fine” and not “I spent two hours walking around Brooklyn near-blackout last night alone, took blurry pictures of buildings on my phone, and then masturbated about you until I fell asleep at 6AM.” I noticed him staring at me as I walked back to my seat to watch the rest of the reading. When I left he texted me, Where did you go? I couldn’t believe it. 

I read Paradise by Donald Barthelme as an excuse to text him. Then I bought the Harold Brodkey book of short stories he recommended right after. The first edition hardcover with a ripped jacket was $7 at The Strand.

I’m a sucker for ‘Innocence.’ I read it as a kind of metaphor for the reader/writer relationship, he texted me.

I read the story immediately. It is explicit sex for 30 pages. It is hot. I overlooked the narrator’s misogyny and the laughably written female dialogue because I loved the weirdness of the prose. There are times the oral sex pushes past the point of consent. He wants to give his girlfriend her first orgasm and she’s afraid to have it. Right before she comes he says she’s Good. 

We met at the Family Forever Noodle House in Riverhead in 1983. Does the name ring a bell? Despite the suburban setting, in those days it was not actually a place for families, nor was it family-owned or owned by someone who had a family. A series of divorces and emancipations convinced the original owners to sell, and all communal feelings went with them. By our time it was the good-for-nothing sort of eatery, a shrug of a building, kept up without a semblance of pride, with walls once white turned gray-green from monthly fumigation. More ambitious and expanding establishments shouldered us from either side, and sometimes so aggressively I thought I could hear a voice behind the walls ordering others to push. I might have preferred to work in one of those places, with their handshakes and napkins and general rule of respect, but then who knows what that would have meant for me. 

I worked behind the counter, U-shaped, if you remember, with a cold metallic surface in which one could find their reflection, at least where it was clean and not dented from customers reminding us of their absent meals. There were twelve stools around the counter, and most were put together so poorly by Mr. Davies—the cross-eyed owner who knew nothing about noodles, knew nothing about any cuisine, as far as I could tell, and who never had a family and bought the place so he could ruin it for everybody that did—that they consistently tipped one way or another when someone sat down. One was drilled into the floor a foot and a half from the counter, and whoever sat there had to count on themselves to balance their meals. It also happened to be in the direct path of the restroom. Of course, this was all to Mr. Davies’ liking, and not only did he refuse the simple work of unscrewing the stool from the floor and bringing it in, he even laughed at those who sat there and threatened not to serve them. But enough about Mr. Davies, the cross-eyed owner who never had a family and still has none. 

“Can you describe a time when someone betrayed you?” This question is posed to me by Jan during a round of The Ungame, which I play over lunch with a group of colleagues in our architecture firm on the 92nd floor. The Ungame looks deceptively like Candy Land but is described, in its product materials, as a game without winners. Or losers. What is the narrative of this game? “To know one another,” apparently. “To create a story together of who we are, alone and apart.” I’m reminded of long adolescent evenings, with Stacey and Joe and Shane and Steph, slowly beginning to feel the idiosyncrasies of our tiny lives, how we gifted each detail to one another without knowing their value, and for the first time in years, I miss them. I think about the question. About who has betrayed me. But cannot think of anyone. Other than myself, of course. Ha. Am I lucky? I giggle and believe for a moment that I must be winning the game. The Ungame.

I open my mouth to share this revelation with my colleagues, but Jan interrupts, waving me aside and directing our attention out the floor-to-ceiling window, freshly cleaned and gleaming. “What is that,” she asks, pointing into the clear blue sky. We all turn to look, some swiveling in office chairs, others shifting to peer around shoulders. “I don’t see anything,” Eric squints, leaning forward. But it’s there. Unmistakably it is there. 

An airplane. Large. Suspended, sort of hovering, or just barely moving, some distance off from our building, waiting in the air, paused far above the Hudson. “It’s not moving,” someone states or asks.

Utterances of disbelief and questions of whether or not this is possible—a jumbo jet floating motionless in the sky—give way to alternate explanations. “It’s not an airplane, it’s a helicopter. See the rotors on top?” But it is an airplane, undeniably. We can make out the wings, just barely see the turbines, the long row of windows. “It’s an illusion, an advertisement,” someone offers. But it’s there, in 3D—patient, and not selling us a thing. “A blimp, a hoax, a conceptual art prank,” someone offers, or pleads really. This is the angle that gets the most traction, if only briefly: a joke, a gag. But even that explanation falls away when the news reports start rolling in, confirming our suspicions: a large passenger plane—a real one, with an origin and destination and ferrying actual passengers—floats immobile in the sky above the river, impossibly still, somewhere between New Jersey and Manhattan.

Below is an excerpt from Mark Gluth’s new book, Come Down To Us, available now from Kiddiepunk. Order your copy here.

I.

The night sky hung above the sea with arrant darkness that the water’s surface reflected so that the sky may well have just  been some other sea, with a packed in pitch enveloping the both of them like what inkiness would be found in a closed off cave sunk under a forest that was buried beneath an avalanche  and hidden within some other night, one whose sky was  so thick with unlitness  that it just came off as loaded with the stuff which  it pressed on the planet that splayed beneath it so that  the landscape was some long thing which ran featureless and so fucking black that it seemed to be  some still sea upon which this night sky that’d been emptied of its moon and stars swaged it’s absent form.

everybody always thinks i’m lying about this dream but i’m not: the dream is me standing next to a long pole that looks like those things on the boardwalk with the bell on top and the weight on the bottom and you have to bring the hammer down on the bottom part and depending on where you get the weight to go, you’ll know how strong you are. that’s what it looked like but instead of the words very weak, weak, strong, or very strong appearing up the pole, there were the words comedy, romance, adventure, drama. i knew i could choose which genre of dream i’d have and i’d get whatever i wanted. i couldn’t choose and i woke up. anyway. i’m not always lying. it’s just that…you know that phrase “he lies like he breathes”? it’s what people say about someone who lies a lot. you could maybe say i lie like i sneeze; there are just certain situations i’m allergic to. mom is one of those situations. out of the goodness of her heart she overwhelmed me. as a boy i was her buddy for every unnervingly tedious thing—i remember sitting with her at the dmv with a grocery bag in my lap while she haggled with our health insurance on her cell phone—these “activities” were the shape the love between us took, as vases, dog bowls, and beakers are to water. to this day the most romantic thing i can imagine is helping a woman move, taking apart her bed frame, waiting together for some maintenance guy to show up and do something. these things are related—in some way it doesn’t make any sense to say out loud. what i mostly remember isn’t anger that i was stuck with her or boredom at the objectively boring things we did. i remember being jealous. glowering at the valet when we went to the hospital for my physical therapy, the ache to strangle him when mom handed off her keys and fingered his palm; hating the fact we were “regulars” at the town diner, the smiley way the waiters already knew what to bring her (onion rings and russian dressing); and of course the boys at school. being aware of how people saw her was an entirely slimy thing. so i talked. to distract mom (and to distinguish myself) from the persistent idiots who wanted to take my place. and if you only talk to get what you want, sooner or later you’ll end up lying. you can only say so much as a kid before you see an adult escape into the sweet daydream of shooting themselves. even if the adult denies it (they will), it’s true. so, lying. for me it started small—feigned interest in her job, which turned out to be maddening, jealousy-wise, because she taught special ed and a lot of times she’d tell me as if it were a funny story that so-and-so “accidentally called me mom today” and i’d imitate some sort of kind son’s smile that i’d probably seen on tv while crushing a complementary cracker over my cup of diner soup. that agonized smile is the other bigger kind of lie. i don’t have to describe it because you’re probably doing it right now to someone you love, or someone you love is doing it to you. unlike the small lies which basically say i’m interested in the real you, the bigger ones do something darker which is say what a coincidence it just so happens that the real me is exactly who you want me to be. in those ways and for those reasons i lied to mom a lot. but to actually understand what happened with me and jasmine, it’s only important to tell you about the worst lie.

Tie a Tie

Russell cannot tie his tie and cannot accept that he cannot learn it, that this part of his brain is just gone. In the bathroom mirror, I watch his fingers fumble with the tie as the upturned scar on his forehead purples with tamped down rage. 

“Drape, wrap, repeat, push, pull through the loop,” he says. 

I respect Russell’s perseverance, that despite his traumatic brain injury Russell does not acquiesce into helplessness and rely on the assistance available to him, like some other residents tend to. 

But after so many Sundays, I must admit, I am not optimistic. After so many Sundays, I know that this episode only ends one way: with him asking for my help. 

“Russell,” I say, hoping to move things along. His half-sister hates when we’re late. “There’s plenty of stuff I can’t do, either. I can’t do calculus or knit sweaters. I can’t eat dairy products or peanuts or watch Christmas movies without crying. I can’t roller skate.” 

Russell ignores me. “Drape, wrap, repeat, push, pull through the loop.” 

 “I can’t think about the deep ocean without existential dread,” I say. “Or sleep without draping a heating pad over a pillow and pretending it is another human body. I can’t volunteer at the humane society.” 

 “Drape, wrap, repeat, push, pull through the loop.” 

And as Russell’s fingers fumble, I continue listing my shortcomings. I list them and the list grows long and painful. But I do not stop. I keep listing because I want Russell to understand that we are all deficient in some fashion.