“My lips are sealed,” I said.
“That’s not to say you should snow him on this critique of his video. He’s a little unworldly yet, as sheltered as you’d probably imagine, but he knows it, and he really wants to change it. He’ll be a great man one day, believe me. He asked for a critique: that means he wants an honest one.”
“Got it,” I said.
“Alright then.”
“Alright,” I said. “Beer?”
“Excuse me?”
“ ‘Excuse me,’ he says. Like I’m the one sitting in his goddamn kitchen.”
“You’re funny,” said Burroughs. “But I want you to know that I don’t think you’re like him.”
“We’re both of us astronaut billionaires, though. We both have famous wives who the press—”
“Your father’s who I meant, not Mr. Pellmore-Jason. You aren’t like your father.”
“What the hell kind of thing is that to say?”
“There’s a certain kind of small-penised man,” Burroughs said, “who makes a lot of jokes about how small his penis is. He does that because he thinks it’ll suggest to those around him that he’s comfortable with the size of his penis, which he thinks will in turn suggest that his penis must not be that small. No one cares, though. Not before he makes the joke. He wouldn’t make the joke about how small his penis is in front of anyone who’s interested in the size of his penis to begin with, but once he makes the joke, people get interested. And some of them do think the way he hopes they would—they think, ‘This joker must have a good penis.’ The others know what I know.”
“Did my father say something about his penis before I arrived?”
“I’m not talking about him. I’m talking about you. You’re making his wisecracks. Quoting him verbatim. These are jokes you’re making about not being like him. How it looks to me is that you make the jokes because you think it’ll suggest that you’re so comfortable not being like him that you must, after all, be a lot like him. But it doesn’t suggest that. Not to me. It does suggest that you believe I think you should be like him, though. And I don’t. I have no opinion one way or the other. I don’t know either of you.”
“Well I know where you’re weak,” I said.
“Good one,” said Burroughs. He clapped me on the back.
Again I couldn’t tell whether we’d been riffing or not.
Triple-J returned, waving the no-longer-blinking/beeping pendant. “That was bitch-ass,” he said. “Of me. My behavior was bitch-ass. I don’t want bitch-ass to be the note I leave on. Even mentioning it, though—that’s bitch-ass itself.”
“Say something kind, from the heart,” Burroughs told him.
“But he’ll think I’m saying it to look less bitch-ass.”
“That is one of the reasons you’ll say it, Trip, but it won’t interfere. He’ll believe what you tell him. You’ll speak from the heart, and that’ll make him believe you.”
“I don’t see how he could.”
“You won’t see until you’ve tried.”
“So I’ll try,” said Triple-J, and then, endearingly, attempted to clear his already-clear throat. “Ehem,” he said, “Belt, I meant to say this earlier, before I went off script, and I mean it now, just as much, no matter how it looks: without No Please Don’t, I’d be dumber, blinder, and my life would be worse. In my favorite scene, when Gil bites the gold ring, remembers the water glass, and realizes mothers can never be trusted…the first time I read that part was the first time I ever believed that my heaviest thoughts about the universe were worth holding on to. It was the first time I recognized those thoughts as insights. It changed my life. You understood me, and you didn’t even know me.”
I thanked him for the praise. I said his words meant a lot to me.
He said, “I believe you.”
* * *
And I did find Triple-J’s words to be moving. He’d described how it was for him to read No Please Don’t the way I would describe—a way I had, at least in my journals, described—how it was for me, when I was a boy, to read the books I cherished the most. Furthermore, the scene he’d said was his favorite (the same one from which he’d quoted in the kitchen) also happened to be my favorite. I’d struggled to get that scene right for months, and learning any reader other than myself possessed an outsize affection for it couldn’t help but validate the work I’d put into it. Not even if that reader, like Triple-J, failed to understand it the way I’d intended.
Nor, I thought, did one need a PhD in Psychology (or, for that matter, Literature) to see how Triple-J’s misunderstanding of the scene probably stemmed from an overidentification with Gil; from his having, as the phrase goes, “made the book his own.” Whether Darla Pellmore-Jason, née Field, had always been an alcoholic mess, or had been, on the contrary, a fragile romantic who, shattered and humiliated, turned to the bottle only after Jonboat had left her for Fondajane Henry, what’s never been disputed, not even by the tabloids, is that she died in a single-car collision with a BAC of .19 when Triple-J was barely a toddler, and so it isn’t, I don’t think, so hard to imagine how, after having lost his mother at so young an age (regardless of the kind of person she’d been), Triple-J could find solace in believing that Gil MacCabby—and so also, ostensibly, the author, Belt Magnet—didn’t think very highly of mothers, and so would (i.e. Triple-J would), if the opportunity presented itself, seek out evidence to support that belief. In other words, if his favorite protagonist (or that protagonist’s creator) didn’t believe that mothers could be trusted, then maybe it was better to grow up without one, or at least okay to; maybe growing up without one didn’t necessarily mean that you were broken.
* * *
—
Despite my sleepiness (which owed at least as much to the day’s uncommonly high level of intense social interaction—an uncommonly high level, for me, of any kind of social interaction, intense or otherwise—as it did to my overly caloric lunch, not to mention the pain in my back), and despite my curiosity about the contents of Triple-J’s portfolio, I found myself wanting, more than a nap, and more even than to view A Fistful of Fists or read “On Private Viewing” or “Living Isn’t Functioning” (Triple-J’s video and papers, respectively), to have a look at our favorite scene. I hadn’t read a sentence of No Please Don’t since its publication, seven years earlier. For reasons too dull in their authorliness to describe at length (e.g. anxiety of self-influence, fear of disappointment, fear of self-satisfaction), I’d resolved not to read it, in whole or in part, for twenty years, or until I’d finished a second novel worth publishing, whichever came first. But I’d wanted to reread it, all along I had—particularly that scene—and here had arisen the perfect excuse to revise my decision: to better relate to a fan of the book; to discover, if possible, which line or lines had allowed that fan to think (or had inadvertently confused him into thinking) that what I was trying to say was “mothers can never be trusted.”