Choke Read online

  As it was, his favorite website was pretty much not sexy, at least not to him. You could just go there, and there would be about a dozen photographs of this one dumpy guy dressed as Tarzan with a goofy orangutan trained to poke what looked like roasted chestnuts up the guy’s ass.

  The guy’s leopard-print loincloth is tossed to one side, the elastic waistband sunk into his tubby waist.

  The monkey’s crouched there, ready with the next chestnut.

  There’s nothing sexy about it. Still, the counter showed more than a half million people had been to see it.

  “Pilgrimage” isn’t the right word, but it’s the first word that comes to mind.

  The monkey and the chestnuts wasn’t anything the kid could understand, but he sort of admired the guy. The kid was stupid, but he knew this was something way beyond him. The truth was, most people wouldn’t even want a monkey to see them naked. They’d be terrified about how their asshole might look, if it might look too red or baggy. There’s no way most people would ever have the nerve to bend over in front of a monkey, much less a monkey and a camera and lights, and even then they’d have to do about a zillion sit-ups first and go to a tanning booth and get their hair cut. After that, they’d spend hours bent over in front of a mirror, trying to determine their best profile.

  And then, even with just chestnuts, you’d have to stay somewhat relaxed.

  Just the thought of auditioning monkeys was terrifying, the possibility of being rejected by monkey after monkey. Sure, you can pay a person enough money and they’ll stick stuff into you or they’ll take pictures. But a monkey. A monkey’s going to be honest.

  Your only hope would be to book this same orangutan, since it obviously didn’t look too picky. Either that or it was exceptionally well trained.

  The point was, there’d be nothing to this if you were beautiful and sexy.

  The point was, in a world where everybody had to look so pretty all the time, this guy wasn’t. The monkey wasn’t. What they were doing wasn’t.

  The point was, it’s not the sex part of pornography that hooked the stupid little boy. It was the confidence. The courage. The complete lack of shame. The comfort and genuine honesty. The up-front-ness of being able to just stand there and tell the world: Yeah, this is how I chose to spend a free afternoon. Posing here with a monkey putting chestnuts up my ass.

  And I really don’t care how I look. Or what you think.

  So deal with it.

  He was assaulting the world by assaulting himself.

  And even if the guy wasn’t loving every moment, the ability to smile, to fake your way through this, that would be even more admirable.

  The same way every porno movie implies a score of people standing just off camera, knitting, eating sandwiches, looking at their wristwatches, while other people do naked sex only a few feet away…

  To the stupid little boy, that was enlightenment. To be that comfortable and confident in the world, that would be Nirvana.

  “Freedom” isn’t the right word, but it’s the first word that comes to mind.

  That’s the kind of pride and self-assurance the little boy wanted to have. Someday.

  If it was him in those pictures with the monkey, he could look at them every day and think: If I could do this, I could do anything. No matter what else you came up against, if you could smile and laugh while a monkey did you with chestnuts in a dank concrete basement and somebody took pictures, well, any other situation would be a piece of cake.

  Even hell.

  More and more, for the stupid little kid, that was the idea …

  That if enough people looked at you, you’d never need anybody’s attention ever again.

  That if someday you were caught, exposed, and revealed enough, then you’d never be able to hide again. There’d be no difference between your public and your private lives.

  That if you could acquire enough, accomplish enough, you’d never want to own or do another thing.

  That if you could eat or sleep enough, you’d never need more.

  That if enough people loved you, you’d stop needing love.

  That you could ever be smart enough.

  That you could someday get enough sex.

  These all became the little boy’s new goals. The illusions he’d have for the rest of his life. These were all the promises he saw in the fat man’s smile.

  So after that, every time he was scared or sad or alone, every night he woke up panicked in a new foster home, his heart racing, his bed wet, every day he started school in a different neighborhood, every time the Mommy came back to claim him, in every damp motel room, in every rented car, the kid would think of those same twelve photos of the fat man bent over. The monkey and the chestnuts. And it calmed the stupid little shit right down. It showed him how brave and strong and happy a person could become.

  How torture is torture and humiliation is humiliation only when you choose to suffer.

  “Savior” isn’t the right word, but it’s the first word that comes to mind.

  And it’s funny how when somebody saves you, the first thing you want to do is save other people. All other people. Everybody.

  The kid never knew the man’s name. But he never forgot that smile.

  “Hero” isn’t the right word, but it’s the first word that comes to mind.

  Chapter 6

  The next time I go visit my mom I’m still Fred Hastings, her old public defender, and she keeps me yakking all afternoon. Until I tell her I’m still not married, and she says that’s a shame. Then she turns on the television, some soap opera, you know, real people pretending to be fake people with made-up problems being watched by real people to forget their real problems.

  The next visit, I’m still Fred but married and with three children. That’s better, but three children … Three is too many. People should stop at two, she says.

  The next visit, I have two.

  Every visit there’s less and less of her under the blanket.

  In another way, there’s less and less of Victor Mancini sitting in the chair next to her bed.

  The next day, I’m myself again, and it’s only a few minutes before my mom rings for the nurse to escort me back to the lobby. We sit not talking until I pick up my coat, then she says, “Victor?”

  She says, “I need to tell you something.”

  She’s rolling a ball of lint between her fingers, rolling it smaller and tighter, and when she finally looks up at me, she says, “Fred Hastings was here. You remember Fred, don’t you?”

  Yeah, I remember.

  These days, he has a wife and two perfect children. It was such a pleasure, my mom says, to see life work out for such a good person.

  “I told him to buy land,” my mom says, “they’re not making it anymore.”

  I ask her who she means by “they,” and she presses the nurse button again.

  On my way out, I find Dr. Marshall waiting in the hallway. She’s standing just outside my mom’s door, leafing through notes on her clipboard, and she looks up at me, her eyes beady behind her thick glasses. Her one hand is clicking and unclicking a ballpoint pen, fast.

  “Mr. Mancini?” she says. She folds her glasses and puts them in the chest pocket of her lab coat and says, “It’s important that we discuss your mother’s case.”

  The stomach tube.

  “You asked about other options,” she says.

  From the nurse’s station down the hallway, three staffers watch us, their heads tilted together. One named Dina calls, “Do we need to chaperon the two of you?”

  And Dr. Marshall says, “Mind your own business, please.”

  To me, she whispers, “These small operations, the staff acts as if they’re still in high school.”

  Dina, I’ve had.

  See also: Clare, RN.

  See also: Pearl, CNA.

  The magic of sex is it’s acquisition without the burden of possessions. No matter how many women you take home, there’s never a storage problem.
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  To Dr. Marshall, her ears and nervous hands, I say, “I don’t want her force-fed.”

  The nurses still watching, Dr. Marshall cups a hand behind my arm and walks me farther away from them, saying, “I’ve been talking to your mother. She’s quite a woman. Her political actions. All her demonstrations. You must love her very much.”

  And I say, “Well, I wouldn’t go as far as that.”

  We stop, and Dr. Marshall whispers something so I have to step closer to hear. Too close. The nurses still watching. And breathing against my chest, she says, “What if we could completely restore your mother’s mind?” Clicking and unclicking her pen, she says, “What if we could make her the intelligent, strong, vibrant woman she used to be?”

  My mother, the way she used to be.

  “It may be possible,” says Dr. Marshall.

  And not thinking how it sounds, I say, “God forbid.”

  Then real fast, I say that’s probably not such a great idea.

  And down the hall, the nurses are laughing, their hands cupped over their mouths. And from even that far away, you can hear Dina say, “It would serve him right.”

  On my next visit, I’m still Fred Hastings and my kids both get straight A’s in school. That week, Mrs. Hastings is painting our dining room green.

  “Blue is better,” my mom says, “for a room you’re going to put any sort of food in.”

  After that, the dining room is blue. We live on East Pine Street. We’re Catholics. We save our money at City First Federal. We drive a Chrysler.

  All at my mom’s suggestion.

  The next week, I start writing things down, the details, so I won’t forget who I’m supposed to be from one week to the next. The Hastings always drive to Robson Lake for our vacation, I write. We fish for steelhead. We want the Packers to win. We never eat oysters. We were buying land. Each Saturday, I first sit in the dayroom and study my notes while the nurse goes to see if my mom is awake.

  Whenever I step into her room and introduce myself as Fred Hastings, she points the remote control to turn the television off.

  Boxwoods around a house are fine, she tells me, but privets would be better.

  And I write it down.

  The best kind of people drink scotch, she says. Clean your gutters in October, then again in November, she says. Wrap your car’s air filter in toilet paper for longer service life. Prune evergreens only after the first frost. And ash makes the best firewood.

  I write it all down. I inventory what’s left of her, the spots and wrinkles and her swollen or empty skin and flakes and rashes, and I write reminders to myself.

  Every day: Wear sunblock.

  Cover your gray.

  Don’t go insane.

  Eat less fats and sugars.

  Do more sit-ups.

  Don’t start forgetting stuff.

  Trim the hair in your ears.

  Take calcium.

  Moisturize. Every day.

  Freeze time to stay in one place forever.

  Do not get frigging old.

  She says, “Do you hear anything from my son, Victor? Do you remember him?”

  I stop. I feel my heart ache, but I’ve forgotten what that feeling means.

  Victor, my mom says, never comes to visit, and if he does, he never listens. Victor’s busy and distracted and doesn’t care. He’s dropped out of medical school and is making a big mess out of his life.

  She picks at the lint on her blanket. “He’s got some minimum-wage kind of job as a tour guide or something,” she says. She sighs, and her terrible yellow hands find the remote control.

  I ask, wasn’t Victor looking after her? Didn’t he have a right to live his own life? I say, maybe Victor is so busy because he’s out every night, literally killing himself to pay her bills for constant care. That’s three grand each month just to break even. Maybe that’s why Victor left school. I say, just for the sake of argument, that maybe Victor’s doing his frigging best.

  I say, it could be that Victor does more than anybody gives him credit for.

  And my mom smiles and says, “Oh Fred, you’re still the defender of the hopelessly guilty.”

  My mom turns on the television, and a beautiful woman in a glittering evening dress hits another beautiful young woman over the head with a bottle. The bottle doesn’t even mess her hair, but it gives her amnesia.

  Maybe Victor’s struggling with problems of his own, I say.

  The one beautiful woman reprograms the amnesia woman into thinking she’s a killer robot that must do the beautiful woman’s bidding. The killer robot accepts her new identity so easy you have to wonder if she’s just faking the amnesia and was always looking for a good reason to go on a killing spree.

  Me talking to my mom, my anger and resentment just sort of piddles out as we sit and watch.

  My mother used to serve eggs scrambled with dark flakes of the nonstick coating from the frying pan. She cooked with aluminum pots, and we drank lemonade out of spun aluminum cups while we chewed on their soft cold lips. We used underarm deodorants made with aluminum salts. For sure, there’s about a million ways we could’ve got to this point.

  During a commercial, my mom asks for just one good thing about Victor’s personal life. What did he do for fun? Where did he see himself in another year? Another month? Another week?

  By now, I have no idea.

  “And just what the hell do you mean,” she says, “about Victor killing himself every night?”

  Chapter 7

  After the waiter’s gone, I fork up half my sirloin steak and go to cram it all in my mouth, and Denny says, “Dude.” He says, “Don’t do it, here.”

  The people all around us, eating in their dressy clothes. With the candles and the crystal. With all the extra specialty forks. Nobody suspects a thing.

  My lips crack, trying to get around the chunk of steak, the meat salty and juicy with fat and crushed pepper. My tongue pulls back to make more room, and the drool in my mouth wells up. Hot juice and drool slop out on my chin.

  People who say red meat will kill you, they don’t know the half of it.

  Denny looks around quick, and says, through his teeth says, “You’re getting greedy, my friend.” He shakes his head and says, “Dude, you can’t fool people into loving you.”

  Next to us, a married couple with wedding rings, gray hair, they eat without looking up, each of them head down, reading a program from the same play or concert. When the woman’s wine is gone, she reaches for the bottle to fill her own glass. She doesn’t fill his. The husband’s wearing a thick gold wristwatch.

  Denny sees me watching the old couple and says, “I’ll warn them. I swear.”

  He watches for waiters who might know about us. He’s glaring at me with his bottom teeth stuck out.

  The bite of steak is so big my jaws can’t come together. My cheeks bulge. My lips pucker tight to close, and I have to breathe through my nose while I try to chew.

  The waiters in black jackets, each with a nice towel folded over one arm. The violin music. The silver and china. This isn’t the normal kind of place we’d do this, but we’re running out of restaurants. There are only so many places to eat in any town, and this is for sure the kind of stunt you never repeat in the same place.

  I drink a little wine.

  At another table near us, a young couple hold hands while they eat.

  Maybe it will be them, tonight.

  At another table, a man in a suit eats staring off into space.

  Maybe he’ll be tonight’s hero.

  I drink some wine and try to swallow, but the steak’s too much. It sits in the back of my throat. I don’t breathe.

  In the next instant, my legs snap straight so fast my chair flies over behind me. My hands go to gripping around my throat. I’m on my feet and gaping at the painted ceiling, my eyes rolled back. My chin stretches out away from my face.

  With his fork, Denny reaches over the table to steal my broccoli and goes, “Dude, you are way overa
cting.”

  Maybe it will be the eighteen-year-old busboy or the corduroy guy in the turtleneck sweater, but one of these people will treasure me for the rest of their life.

  Already people are half out of their seats.

  Maybe the woman with the wrist corsage.

  Maybe the man with the long neck and wire-framed glasses.

  This month, I got three birthday cards, and it’s not even the fifteenth. Last month, I got four. The month before, I got six birthday cards. Most of these people I can’t remember. God bless them, but they’ll never forget me.

  From not breathing, the veins in my neck swell. My face gets red, gets hot. Sweat springs up on my forehead. Sweat blots through the back of my shirt. With my hands, I hold tight around my neck, the universal sign language for someone choking to death. Even now, I get birthday cards from people who don’t speak English.

  The first few seconds, everybody is looking for someone else to step in and be the hero.

  Denny reaches over to steal the other half of my steak.

  With my hands still tight around my throat, I stagger over and kick him in the leg.

  With my hands, I yank at my tie.

  I rip open my collar button.

  And Denny says, “Hey, dude, that hurt.”

  The busboy hangs back. No heroics for him.

  The violinist and the wine steward are neck and neck, headed my way.

  From another direction, a woman in a short black dress is pushing through the crowd. Coming to my rescue.

  From another direction, a man strips off his dinner jacket and charges forward. Somewhere else, a woman screams.

  This never takes very long. The whole adventure lasts one, two minutes, tops. That’s good, since that’s about how long I can hold my breath with a mouthful of food.

  My first choice would be the older man with the thick gold wristwatch, somebody who will save the day and pick up our check for dinner. My personal choice is the little black dress for the reason she has nice tits.

  Even if we have to pay for our own meal, I figure you have to spend money to make money.