“I’m OK.”
He put on his coat and told her he was leaving, and she told him she had tickets for the Joan Jett concert that night if he was feeling like he needed to do something, and he said he didn’t want to get crammed in with a bunch of sweaty, horny old-people bodies where he might accidentally get fucked and then she smiled.
“I’ll text you,” he said.
“You better.”
Later, he texted her “what’s the plan” and she said the Joan Jett concert was at Barclay’s and that she’d be waiting outside. He stole some change from his roommate’s bedroom and then put on his coat and walked to the Eighth Street-NYU station and used the change to buy two rat dogs with everything and a Mountain Dew and then got on the Q. The train was full and he put in one earbud and listened to Fleet Foxes on his iPhone and he leaned against the pole and took a deep breath as the train came to a stop. He could make out his reflection, hair getting too long on top, sunglasses still on. He heard a child several seats behind him retching, then a splatter against the floor, and the odor hit him and he bit hard into his cheek to fight the nausea and that depressed him so completely that he just closed his eyes.
In Brooklyn, he got off the Q and walked along streets lined with dirty snow that looked like ash and he filled his lungs with clean, moist night air and his stomach settled. He met Laura and they went to the Joan Jett concert and got crammed in with a bunch of sweaty, horny old baby boomers, and Joan Jett was wearing a red leather jacket and looked like a bad clone of herself. Laura pulled a bottle of Jack Daniel’s from her purse and offered it to him as she unscrewed the top, and he took a deep swig and said thank you and then handed the bottle back and she took a swig and he started feeling really good, and at some point Joan Jett got to “I Love Rock ‘n’ Roll” and Laura kept looking at him with those freakishly perfect brown eyes that were so wild and he couldn’t help it and he was staring back, and after they finished the bottle he leaned over and kissed her and they went to her apartment.
THEY TOOK SOME OF HER Klonopin and he poured two glasses of wine. His iPhone notified him that a serial killer had strangled a runner in Central Park, so they talked about serial killers and looked some info up on their phones—Charles Manson, how he was from West Virginia (or had lived there); Ian Brady and his weird face; Dennis Nilsen, how he sort of looked like Mads Mikkelsen—and then she grabbed her iPad and they watched several episodes of Forensic Files on Netflix. She put her head on his chest and he thought it’d be nice to sleep with her, but that it would’ve fucked them both up and possibly their working relationship as well.
“I feel like my life’s a failure,” Laura said. “I feel incredibly scared about that.”
“Why?” he said. “You should be president.”
“It’s just that I’m so scared sometimes and I think maybe—I mean maybe I’m next, maybe I’ll just be running through the park and that guy, or some other guy, or an out-of-control taxi, will come up behind me, and what will my life have been for? I don’t have a family, or children—I’m nearing thirty. It’s easy to make a joke out of what happened to that runner because it didn’t happen to us, but—”
“It’s OK,” he said. “I understand.”
He hated when people got dramatic, so he started scrolling through her Instagram on his iPhone and saw pictures of empty rooms and animal heads.
“So,” he said, “where’re you from?”
She laughed. “Adelaide—south Australia. I really miss it. I’ve thought about going back. You’re from Virginia, you said? Like Charlie Manson?”
“Yeah. Well, not exactly. West Virginia, same as Manson, so…”
“Scary. Do you get back much?”
“Couple times.”
“Since?”
He shrugged this time. The last time he went home was for a long weekend to celebrate his twenty-first birthday. The scene came back to him: eating steaks at a sports bar with his father, the empty pitchers on the table, the particular way they had of addressing each other. Jamie said, “How’re things down here,” and his father said, “Place ain’t changed since last time,” and Jamie said, “And Mom?” And his father said, “Usual.” He said, “What’re you writin’ now?” and Jamie told him, “Nothing really, not at the moment.” And his father said, “You write some of the prettiest things,” and Jamie couldn’t really remember what else he’d said, but it was obvious he wanted to say a lot of things—the most important one being something about home—and his father sighed and said, “You’re gettin’ the feeling you want to move, right? You’re realizing that you need to come home but now you’re wonderin’ if you can, right?”
Quicksand in one of them old Tarzan movies.
“You don’t think you should go see how your family is?” Laura said.
“I was like completely taken aback by it, y’know? And I haven’t been there in so long.”
“Well, then, you just have to decide if it’s worth going back to.”
She didn’t say anything for a long time and he heard the sounds of the endless traffic outside, and he realized there were too many things he didn’t understand the meaning of anymore and he felt worlds away from all that shit. He smoked some of a cigarette.
“Say you could live in any time and be anything, what would you be?”
“What would you be?”
“Someone normal.”
She asked him what was the worst thing he’d ever done.
And so he told the story of the dog.
GROWING UP, Jamie’s best friend was Kenny Bennett. Kenny was a redneck and he talked about how he wanted to be one of the two toughest rednecks in school (“next to Adam Young”), even though he was kind of a pussy, even though they were all rednecks, and Jamie had a suspicion that Kenny wouldn’t let the aspiration go until he did something drastic.
It came at the end of seventh grade. Jamie was in a sleeping bag in Kenny’s backyard, drunk for the first time in his life, listening to Lynyrd Skynyrd, and he was feeling pretty sick and he tried to pretend that Kenny didn’t say anything, but then Kenny said it again: “Look at how big my dick is, everbody, quick, look.” He was in his sleeping bag and wearing a Mountain Dew T-shirt, Taco Bell sauce in the corners of his mouth, and his knee was pointed upward like a giant erection, and he pretended to masturbate, looking jumpy and excited, rubbing his knee boner, his eyes wide, a Dale Earnhardt hat stuck to the top of his skull.
“Y’all niggers have sapling dicks compared to me!” he cackled.
Tom Melvin, a “known faggot” among the boys because his hair was long and blond and his parents were college educated, was standing near the fire pit and he told Kenny to stop shouting “nigger” because it was the third time and a black person was going to hear him, and Kenny called Tom a dumb idiot because
