And then I gave up.
If someone puts himself in a video, then shows you that video, he must want to hear—perhaps above all else—what you thought of his part in that video. It seemed so to me at the time, at least. And given that Triple-J’d appeared in the “Flick&Look” clip, he might, I reasoned, appear in another clip (or even more than one other clip), and because I had no time to find out (it was 10:48, I had to leave in two minutes), let alone any time to watch any more clips, I wouldn’t be able, if pressed on the matter, to speak about his part(s) with any confidence; I would not be convincing. And he very well might, I thought, press me on the matter. It’s true I hardly knew him, but I knew he wasn’t shy.
A decision, then, if not quite made, had been reached—backed into, I guess: I’d admit that I hadn’t finished watching the video, and offer Triple-J a rain check on the crit.
I also decided not to take Blank to brunch, so I stopped in my room on my way out and nested it. Before sitting down to let me close the lid, it broke out a classic: that throat-clearing move Woody Allen often makes—always with his chin tucked and eyebrows raised, sometimes with an index finger timidly extended—to signal he’s about to deliver a joke. Kablankey performed the more basic variation—no finger involvement—but I wasn’t disappointed. Not by a long shot. I hadn’t seen Blank Allen-throat-clear in years (it had mastered the throat-clear while relatively young, during a Woody home video marathon ca. Bullets Over Broadway’s theatrical release, and had abandoned it by Hollywood Ending’s, at latest), and I wouldn’t have thought the move was still in its repertoire. Plus it was adorable. It really cheered me up. Granted me perspective. Suddenly, I was aware of an upside—a possible upside—to my having to admit I hadn’t finished A Fistful: might not Triple-J, to hear my rain-checked critique, invite me for brunch at the compound a second time? It seemed like he might.
I was laughing my face off. Blank Allen-throat-cleared again and again. Six or seven repetitions. They were so spot-on, I probably would have kept laughing for another six or seven, but I had to get going.
I waved and said, “Bye.”
Instead of waving back, Blank, mid-throat-clear, pratfell sideways, clutching its chest, then sat up and brow-wiped and, just as I was closing the lid of the nest, throat-cleared again, at greater volume, as if to say, “Wait, I haven’t gotten to the joke yet!”
How I loved that guy.
I pocketed a fresh pack of Quills and left.
* According to Hillary Clinton’s introduction to the fifth-anniversary reprint edition of FABRYTAYF (Random House, 2003), said movers and shakers had been suffering massive revenue loss in the wake of prostitution’s full legalization in 2002, and “The industry,” claims Clinton, “would have hardly been able to stay in the black were it not for the success of the ‘nonviolent crying porn’ (aka ‘crybaby porn’) genre, the development of which is widely acknowledged to have been inspired by the ‘Violent Pornography’ chapter of the very book you are holding in your hands.”
HANGSTRONG, ULYSSES
WHEN THE PELLMORE-JASONS MOVED into the compound, back in the summer of 1987, it was only just another unremarkable pair of suburban cul-de-sacs set mouth-to-mouth: two kissing omegas of sidewalk cement ringed by raised ranches, split-entries, and trilevels. What little bit of fortification it possessed seemed ornamental, flimsy even: along its border on Armstrong Road—east of which lay the Ridgewood development, where my and a hundred-some other families lived—ran a squat iron fence with a never-manned, ever-retracted sliding gate that permitted passage at Pellmore Place (at that time still called Osage Lane). The other barriers were natural, or relatively natural. Acres of corn- and soybean fields stretched out to the compound’s north and west, and to its south was a stand of high weeping willows abutting a shallow, man-made pond thats banks were sown with velvety cattails the children of the neighborhood would reap to joust with.
Over the following summer, however, Jon-Jon Jason had the fencing removed and the compound surrounded with concrete ramparts that rose up as high as fifty feet in some spots. Rumors of Jonboat’s seductions atop them eventually came to prevail so broadly that the sexual euphemisms heard in the hallways of early-nineties Wheelatine High embraced citadel imagery as often as not (“We were pressing the parapets.” “You get her to climb the bulwarks, or what?” “I gave her some spidge, and she was draped on them balustrades.”), but Jon-Jon hadn’t, I wouldn’t imagine, raised the walls just to get his son laid. Wheelatine was demographically booming. Over eighteen months the population had doubled, and with it came all kinds of commerce and traffic. By 1991 most of the fields to the compound’s north had been transformed into Wyndstone Homes, phases I and II, and an unnamed strip mall dually anchored by a TGI Friday’s and a twelve-screen Cineplex Odeon Theater. The fields to the west were entirely paved, giving way to Lake County’s largest Jewel-Osco, a full-service Amoco, the Plaza Beige strip mall where Pang’s(?) White Hen was, and Sawyer Rock phases I through V. The stand of weeping willows was felled overnight to make room for a grade school, and, later that year, in the wake of a near-fatal bullying incident, the pond was filled to expand the school’s playground.
Few complained. Property values went up across the board, and it was nice to be able to walk to the movies, to send your kid out on his bike to buy milk. An editorial or two in the Daily Herald got some citizens grumbling about the ramparts themselves (the “vistas” they obstructed, the shadows they cast, the elitist Pellmore-Jason worldview to which they couldn’t help but seem to attest), but Jon-Jon, no slouch at managing public perception (or hiring others to do so for him), responded by funding field house construction in each new phase of Wyndstone and Sawyer, spread word that the ramparts’ primary function was to mute the kinds of street sounds that triggered his wife’s debilitating migraines, and quietly purchased a stake in the Herald.
The grumbling ceased.
That the compound had always been called a compound, i.e. even prior to the ramparts’ construction, was something I used to find intriguing. I thought that whoever first used the word compound—rather than manor, say, or estate—must have been someone with a lot of foresight. Either that, or Jon-Jon was so intent on living up to the community’s expectations that he decided to have the ramparts constructed only after he’d heard his twenty-six-house tract repeatedly (and perhaps jokingly) referred to as the compound. Looking back on it now, though, it seems I failed to imagine the simplest, and therefore (by some measures) most likely possible explanation: that Jon-Jon, planning all along to fortify, had himself been first to call his dwellings a compound, and, as the rest of the world so often seemed to, the rest of Wheelatine went along with him.
* * *
—
The first time I’d ever visited the compound—to discuss the design of the JONBOAT SAY shirts—was in the spring of 1988, and although the ramparts hadn’t yet been installed, its at-purchase Wheelatine-conventional aesthetic had been altered enough since the family’d moved in that a sense of having entered a foreign enclave began to overtake me the moment I pedaled through the Osage Lane gateway. Whereas outside the compound an elm sapling barely as tall as my father grew from each driveway-sandwiched grass trapezoid, here the grass trapezoids were shaded by evergreens three stories high. Instead of ersatz gaslight lampposts, there were granite obelisks with luminescent crowns. There weren’t any house numbers stenciled on the curbs, nor any mailboxes planted behind them. Chrome-plated manholes and sewer grates shone. The surface of the street itself was exotic: poured, slate-gray concrete, freeway-smooth, rather than ashen, particulate asphalt.