AOL
ANOTHER COUPLE WEEKS, A hundred-some more pages, and I’d all but forgotten A Fistful of Fists, or in any case I no longer feared I’d hurt Blank. I’d let it sit on my shoulder or lie in its sleeve all day while I worked, and after dinner we’d take a walk, and after the walk, we’d hang out more actively. If Clyde were out, we might watch the Groucho compilation and/or a movie I’d rented. If Clyde were home, I’d read in my bedroom with Blank out-of-sleeve, or we’d look through old photos, or work on gags, or I’d browse through my journals, and every couple-three nights, I’d bring a short glass of Scotch—I’d bought a bottle of MacGuffin 12 for myself to celebrate having finished the transcript—to the playground next door and sip it and smoke while Blank sat on my knee or the surface beside me sipping at a thimble of juice or milk.
In sum, we slipped back, with relative ease and comfort, into nearly all our pre-transcript routines. The only change that had stuck was that Blank’s enthusiasm for many of our games (all of them, really, but for Make This Face), seemed permanently diminished. It would act excited as ever to play one at the start, but then, after just a couple of minutes, it would crawl its way back inside its sleeve or sit where it had stood or perform a series of Allen-throat-clears followed by brow-wipes and/or pratfalls. Initially, this depressed me a little—was I boring my cure?—but soon it became less depressing than interesting. Perhaps, I thought, Kablankey had reached, or was reaching, a new phase in its life. A new kind of maturity. It was, after all, twenty-five years old. Maybe cures around their twenty-sixth year became “adults.” Who could say otherwise? Who else would know? Maybe, I thought, they acquired new capacities, new sensitivities or kinds of imperviousness, which led them to put aside childish things. Maybe, much like men at that age, who become more robust—developing what Clyde, when it had happened to me, referred to as man muscles—cures underwent physiological changes that produced broad, however subtle, psychological effects, some or one of which might have accounted for Blank’s having grown weary of the games. Although I didn’t see any new muscles on it, maybe they were only starting to develop, or maybe its ostensibly dawning robustness had little or nothing to do with muscles; maybe it had more to do with invisible processes like hormone regulation, neurotransmission…
Whatever’d caused Blank to lose its love for our games, the worry that I’d had a couple months earlier—the worry that the problem was me; that I’d been so altered by my work on the transcript that Blank had sensed it and gotten afraid of me—disappeared. After all, in the rest of the activities we undertook together, Blank continued, throughout those first post-transcript weeks, to show the usual enthusiasm, and though I’m not sure I would, strictly speaking, be correct if I said that the timing of its eyebrow-flexing improved, it had certainly begun to eyebrow-flex less often, and I liked to think this was a kind of progress: the result of its having started to figure out some of the contexts in which it would not be very funny to eyebrow-flex, which may have been, however inefficiently, a path toward deducing the contexts in which it would be very funny to eyebrow-flex.
Not that I puzzled over eyebrow-flex progress all that much. I was mostly just happy to be back on solid ground with Kablankey; happy not to be a threat to the guy. On top of that, I was far too busy thinking about this memoir to really puzzle over anything else, let alone the progress of anything else. Which made me happy too.
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And then one morning—the morning of November 5, 2013—I realized I had over 350 clean pages (all of “The Hope of Rusting Swingsets,” three large chunks of “Invitation,” and the opening of “Compound”), which is to say I had more pages of this memoir written than I had pages already published (No Please Don’t had been 341 in manuscript; 288 in book form), and this fact seemed almost to make me too happy, and, in any case, to demand celebration. A drink. Preferably one not drunk alone. A drink and human company. But which human company?
Of course I’d have loved to celebrate with Fon, I’d have preferred to drink with her over anyone else, and I was in a good enough mood to briefly consider walking over to the compound to see if she was home, but even if she were there and wanted to hang out with me, which I had no real reason to think she would (she hadn’t called since my visit), I was certain that Jonboat wouldn’t like it, that he’d want to make sure it wouldn’t happen again, and I didn’t want to end up braced by the Archons, Chad-Kyle-style, so I banished the thought.
I didn’t have Denise’s number, but considered calling 411 to get it, decided I shouldn’t, that it wouldn’t be nice of me, then did it anyway, and she wasn’t listed.
411 for Lotta Hogg? She was, after all, with Valentine now, so maybe friendship—no; I thought about that toe in her cleavage, couldn’t shake it.
My father was at work (it was 10 a.m.).
Burroughs didn’t drink, and even if he were willing to watch me drink, calling him would still seem somehow inappropriate, and in any case he’d probably ask about the transcript, and then I’d have to lie, then worry he saw through it.
There was Herb, but I didn’t want him to think I was badgering him about finding Lisette, plus I wasn’t particularly in the mood for Herb; I liked him a lot, but he could be too much.
The last time I’d spoken to Eli Khong, my old editor at Darger, he’d mentioned he was in a twelve-step program, so that was a bust.
Which left me with…no one.
For the first time ever, I seriously considered going to Arcades and finding someone I could pay to celebrate with me, but rejected the idea—I wasn’t ready for that, or ready to learn I was ready for that (which is maybe redundant, it’s hard to say)—and at the same time I realized that one of the reasons (not the only one, but certainly one) that I could say that this was the first time I seriously considered Arcades was that, up until just a few weeks earlier, I wouldn’t have been able to afford a good prostitute (not without giving up days’ worth of Quills), and it occurred to me that being able, now, to afford a good prostitute also meant I could afford any number of other luxuries, one of which was a special bottle of Scotch, a bottle even more special than the $58 bottle of MacGuffin 12; one maybe as special as—maybe even more special than—the Glenfibbly 21 I’d bought for Herb, which had cost me $300.
How much could I spend on a bottle of Scotch, though? Rather, how much should I spend? I had tens of thousands. Tens of thousands plus incoming biweekly SSDI checks. And then there was this memoir: I was confident I would be able to sell it. For how much would I sell it? I had no idea. And having tens of thousands plus biweekly SSDI was already more than I was able to fully get my head around…
Basically, I wanted to pay too much for a bottle of Scotch, but just too much. I wanted to buy a bottle of Scotch that I could not afford to get in the habit of drinking, but I didn’t want to buy a bottle of Scotch that I, newbie to drinking Scotch that I was, would fail to fully appreciate and thus later regret not having built up my palateal IQ for before having tasted. (Since having started drinking the MacGuffin 12, I’d thought, on numerous occasions, about how much better the Glenfibbly 21 tasted, and how much better than that it would taste, were I to drink it again, now that I somewhat “understood how” to drink Scotch.) This line of thinking didn’t help me to answer my question, though; it didn’t help me determine how much I should spend, and soon my desire to celebrate, which was too rare a desire to just leave alone, began to wane a little, and in order to keep it from waning any further, I picked the least arbitrary number I could think of: 350. I’d buy, I decided, a $350 bottle of Scotch. I’d spend a dollar for every clean page of memoir I’d written.