Good for Nothing

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  Good for Nothing

  Brandon Graham

  F+W Media

  Copyright © 2014 by Brandon Graham.

  Originally published in the United Kingdom. First U.S. printing, 2017, Tyrus Books.

  All rights reserved.

  This book, or parts thereof, may not be reproduced in any form without permission from the publisher; exceptions are made for brief excerpts used in published reviews.

  Published by

  TYRUS BOOKS

  an imprint of Simon & Schuster, Inc.

  57 Littlefield Street

  Avon, MA 02322

  www.tyrusbooks.com

  Hardcover ISBN 10: 1-5072-0162-1

  Hardcover ISBN 13: 978-1-5072-0162-6

  Paperback ISBN 10: 1-5072-0161-3

  Paperback ISBN 13: 978-1-5072-0161-9

  eISBN 10: 1-5072-0163-X

  eISBN 13: 978-1-5072-0163-3

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, corporations, institutions, organizations, events, or locales in this novel are either the product of the author’s imagination or, if real, used fictitiously. The resemblance of any character to actual persons (living or dead) is entirely coincidental.

  Cover design by Jonathan Graham.

  Cover illustration by Joseph Lappie.

  Interior design by MaryNeal Meador.

  Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Dedication

  A Rash Series of Decisions

  A Supposed Source of Helpful Advice

  Forced Exodus

  Accused of Perversion

  Petty Crime Committed

  A Home Away from Home

  Poked Viciously by Crazy Person

  Heavy Breathing

  Initiates Clandestine Purchase

  Evil Twin

  An Increasingly Crowded Orgy

  Breakfast and Shoplifting

  Unwanted Confession

  Regrettable Attempt at Second Breakfast

  The Least Flattering Reflection

  Bullshit for Breakfast

  Hateful People Are Hateful

  The World’s Deadliest Crumb Catcher

  A Personal Reckoning

  Red-Handed

  The Harshest of Hangover Cures

  No Place Like Home

  All Pent-Up

  Everything Works Out

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Dedicated to the memory of my friends

  Leslie Hamilton, Brian C. Gwaltney, and John Lynch

  A Rash Series of Decisions

  For the hundredth time in ten minutes, Flip cinches the terry cloth belt of his forest green bathrobe. This frustrates him, so he cranks it down tight. He’s convinced his belt is mocking him.

  He’d considered changing into his grubby clothes before starting this chore, but he knew none of his clothes would come close to fitting. He and his body are not on speaking terms. He has gained two or three pounds a week for at least the past eight months. He’d always been prone, since he was a little boy, to seeking comfort in food, especially during stressful times. For him, comfort food was aptly named. Food was the only thing he’d found comfort in for some time, even before he was fired. It’d gotten so bad that he only felt comfortable wearing his Tabasco-bottle boxer shorts and threadbare bathrobe, both of which were Christmas gifts from his wife, Lynn. He’s aware things can’t continue like this. Given another year like the last one, a group of firemen with chainsaws and block and tackle will be needed to hoist him from his bedroom. Assuming his entire family isn’t living on the street by then.

  Flip takes a wide stance and leans awkwardly over the paint can he’s placed on the old sheet he’s using as a drop cloth. He breathes heavily at the mild exertion. His gut forces the belt loose again and his robe hangs open at his sides, like impotent wings, revealing his corpulent, furry midsection. Ignore it. He leans his weight on the paint can for balance and gazes down his torso.

  What the hell happened? His chest is loose and covered with coarse silver hair, like he’s been dipped in honey and rolled in steel wool. His gut is enormous. In this position, it sways a little. He sucks in his abdomen with no visible effect. His skin is sallow and blotched. He thinks it’s irritated by his own perspiration and imagines it would be tender to the touch. He lets a hand brush along his clammy skin, and his index finger plumbs the depths of his bellybutton, finds crusty dead skin around the edges. I should moisturize.

  He stretches to pick up a putty knife and wiggles the tip around the gummy perimeter of the paint lid. Slowly the lid begins to pry loose. He levers it harder. The putty knife slips and the sharp point painfully gouges a sliver of flesh from the heel of his left hand.

  “That fuckin’ figures!” His voice rises to a squeal. He flaps his hand, sucks at the wound, dances clumsily in place, and flaps his hand a little more. He looks at the flesh divot hanging by a thread of skin and his blood welling up thick and red. He pumps his fingers and watches the blood gather in a widening pool in the palm of his hand, obscuring the crescent shape of his lifeline and making his fate line unclear. He tips his hand and lets the blood run over his wrist and drip to the floor. He looks down to see red soaking into the carpet, just beyond the edge of the drop cloth he’d been aiming for.

  “Shit,” he says. He wraps his hand in a rag Lynn left out for him, ties it off, using his teeth to tighten the knot. He rushes a second rag into the hall bathroom and wets it in the sink.

  Earlier that morning, Flip had been happy to hear his wife calling his name.

  “Flip,” she said, “Flip. You need to wake up.” In his dreamy stupor, her voice moved to him in a husky, warm whisper laced with the promise of gentle caresses and moist, meaningful kisses. He often dreamed of her, and of them together, of the places they’d traveled, of times they’d made love.

  When she called to him, he was with her in the south of France, a little coastal village on the Mediterranean. All day they casually walked from one wine tasting to another, stopping at lunch to sip café au lait and then again at dinner to dine on fresh Provençal seafood stew, followed by more local wine.

  They lingered in town long after midnight, unwilling to return to the hotel. In the early morning hours they walked barefoot on the beach, their toes working into the sand as the foamy surf rose and fell. In a secluded spot they spread a blanket they purchased from a tourist stall and let their warm, tan bodies glide together. Her sandy foot ran along the sides of his calves, pulling the hair. It hurt. But they were intoxicated, drunk on one another, on life. A part of his mind knew that Sara was conceived that night, conceived out of a mix of love, wine, and lustful abandon.

  “Flip,” she called again. “Get up.”

  As he half-woke from his reverie, he wanted to hold Lynn and tell her how much he loved her, breathe her in and hold her essence deep in his lungs. He reached for her and his hand came down on the empty pizza box he’d been sleeping beside.

  “Flip!”

  His eyes creaked open and it became clear Lynn was not interested in losing herself in his embrace.

  “Will you wake the hell up? It’s nearly ten o’clock. Dylan got me up at five thirty because he needed me to wipe his butt. I’ve been up ever since
. Sara has a stomach bug, again, and is in one of her moods. Again. Or should I say, still. I am this close to throttling her.” She stood in the doorway of what used to be their bedroom. She didn’t come in and didn’t bother to uncross her arms to gesture when she said the words this close. Months earlier she’d started sleeping in the guest room in the addition and had slowly been moving all her belongings to that end of the house.

  “Okay. Sorry. Hey, baby. I guess I was up late again,” he said. Flip had slept slumped awkwardly across the duvet, his neck torqued at a painful angle and his head propped on the crunched pillows he’d stuffed behind him as he watched the Tarzan Theater Movie Marathon the night before. He’d slept in his robe again. “Yesterday was a stressful day,” he added.

  The truth was, the previous day Flip had only ventured out of the bedroom long enough to take delivery of his Pizza Pizza, then he’d returned to the serious business of flipping channels. It was the only thing he felt good about doing, other than eating.

  He couldn’t stand to be out during the day, was afraid he would catch a glimpse of his likeness in a mirror or a window. Or worse yet, in the eyes of strangers who would look at him with disgust or pity or avoid looking at him at all. He preferred low light and cool, dark places. His life had become a pathetic parable of alienation, a self-imposed banishment. Being alone made him feel simultaneously liberated and isolated. He missed his old life, but this was all he felt capable of handling.

  “Do you remember three weeks ago when I asked you to please paint the office?” She didn’t wait for a reply. “Do you remember that you said, ‘Sure honey. No prob,’ and then you proceeded to do nothing?”

  “Um, yeah,” he said. He tried to sit up. His body ached and his head throbbed painfully. He reached behind his neck and rubbed at a tender protrusion at the top of his spine, under his shaggy hairline. He wondered if he had herniated a disk.

  “Well, two weeks ago, in an effort to encourage you, and not to nag or be impatient—God forbid I sound unsupportive—I paid Sara and her boyfriend to help me move the furniture away from the walls, to make it easy for you to get to everything. Do you remember that?” He remembered. He shifted around some more on the bed and pulled the TV remote out from the small of his back.

  “Did you really need to pay Sara and her boyfriend?” he asked, trying to degrade the momentum of her rant.

  “Well, yes.”

  “Did they ask you to pay them, or did you volunteer to pay them?” He rubbed a hand across his throat; it was like sandpaper, with damp strips where his flesh had folded while he slept.

  “What does it matter? I volunteered to pay them. I needed the help.”

  “Yeah, but Sara lives here, rent-free. I’d think that she could help without you needing to pay her . . . she is a member of this family. Family. That’s the definition of family. You do things for each other because they need doing. And the boy, What’s-His-Face, should have refused to take your money. If he wants to be welcome in this house, he should act like family. I would have refused the money if I were in that situation. It’s not right. Doesn’t he have any pride?” Flip’s bladder felt as if it might let go without permission. He tried to find a position that would ease the pressure.

  Lynn said nothing. Instead she refolded her arms under her large, tired-looking bosom and made her lips tight. She tilted her head as if to say, All good points. But I find them somewhat ironic, given your current situation. He knew she was right. He had known how she would respond as he spoke. They had been married a long time. That was another of his problems: he lacked the capacity to self-edit. Sometimes it was as if his mouth was subjected to more gravity than the rest of his body. He couldn’t stop himself. Words fell out.

  “My situation is completely different,” he said weakly.

  “So the room has been ready for weeks.” She ignored him and got back to her original point. “But apparently the task of gathering the painting supplies was too taxing for you, because all you’ve been doing is dicking around the house. The kids are back in school. I’ve picked up more hours at work. So I know it wasn’t fear of interruption.” She paused to give him a chance to argue. He had nothing to say.

  “So last weekend, in a final effort to make it as easy for you as I can, short of moving your body through the motions needed to paint a room, I bought a new roller pad and paint tray. I bought masking tape and a new angle brush. I dug out old sheets and rags, and I even found the leftover paint from remodeling, and I placed them all in the office.”

  “I told you thank you,” he said. He jerked his open robe closed over his lap and adjusted the belt yet again.

  “Yes. I know you told me ‘thank you.’ It was the most you’d said to me in weeks, so I remember that you said ‘thank you.’” Her voice was getting progressively higher. He knew this as a bad sign.

  “I’ve been having a tough time,” he explained.

  “Really? Have you? I hadn’t noticed. Oh wait—is that the reason you’ve been completely useless for the past, what is it now, six months? More than that—over half a year. Because you had a touch of the blues? Flip—grow a pair, will you? Your family needs you to snap out of it.” She hissed the last few words at him, an attempt to yell quietly. She didn’t like the kids to hear them disagree. As if the kids hadn’t already noticed their marriage was circling the toilet. If he honestly assessed the state of their relationship, he would have to say Lynn only stayed with him out of a kind of sentiment, the same sort of sentiment she felt for the wretchedly misshapen and dangerously sharp, gaudy, and globular coil pot Sara had made in first grade art class—a Mother’s Day gift. I am just a cracked pot she keeps because it would break some emotional contract to get rid of me. But he tried not to think about things like that.

  “What do you want me to do? No one is hiring right now. I’ve networked and put in my application and paid for resume services and called in old favors. I contacted three headhunters. I don’t know what else to do. The market is bad. No one is hiring right now. My hands are tied. We are upside down on our mortgage, so we can’t afford to sell. We have no equity, which means no down payment on a new home. My old buddies over at McCorkle-Smithe have stopped returning my calls. I think I’ve been blackballed. It’s not my fault.” He rocked his body a few times before managing to swing his legs over the side of the bed. He didn’t look at her as he spoke. He noticed he was wearing only one black sock. “I looked through the want ads yesterday,” he lied. “And there was nothing new. I’ve applied for everything.”

  “Do you understand that we are putting the house up for sale next week? We have an open house in nine days. If we can’t sell the house on our own, we will likely go into foreclosure, file for bankruptcy, piss off our friends and neighbors by bringing property values down, be the subject of whispers and gossip and ridicule. That room has to be painted so we can move the furniture back. It’s not been fun trying to pay bills with the office torn apart, by the way. But I didn’t nag you about it, did I? No. I did not. I worked with the situation. I did not blame the inconvenience on you. I ignored it. Because, let’s face it, complaining about it would do no good.” In spite of her best intentions, the volume of her monologue was escalating. She took a deep breath. Flip looked at the bathroom door. God, he needed to piss. He glanced at the gnarled stub of pizza crust in the box beside him and wanted to eat it, but he let it alone. That faint flicker of self-control felt like a small victory, as if he’d accomplished something for the day. Now he could take it easy.

  Then Lynn regrouped and made another verbal pass. “Your legs still work,” she quietly hissed at him, gesturing toward his massive pale thighs. “The downturn in the economy hasn’t crippled you, has it? You can still do some dishes or laundry, can’t you? You could help the kids with homework or pick Dylan up from school. You could get outside and mow the yard so we don’t have to hire that pothead from next door.” Flip was certain the yard work comment was her way of calling him fat, telling him he needed the exercise. The
fact was she was so sickened by him she had moved out of their room. She said it was his snoring, but he knew it was disgust. Or she was withholding sex as a way of teaching him a lesson: sex is for men with income, for closers. As if they were characters in a Mamet play.

  “That ‘pothead’ is named Kev, and he is not a pothead. He’s a drummer. I shook his hand and said he could have our business. I can’t go back on a deal.” His heart wasn’t in the rebuttal, and even as he spoke he was aware Lynn knew he hadn’t actually paid Kev in a month.

  She gave up on hissing, threw her hands up and started screaming. “Fuck it! Look, I’ve made arrangements for Mom and me to take the kids to the amusement park for the day, so you can crawl out of your cave and do this one fucking thing for your family. Do it. Don’t do it. Let your conscience be your guide. But if you don’t get it done, you need to find somewhere else to be.” She turned and scrambled down the steps and yelled for the kids.

  “I understand,” he said to no one. He sat on the edge of the bed, gnawing on pizza crust and feeling defeated. He listened to his family tramp across the kitchen floor and head out of the back door. He heard the garage door lift and the sliding door on the minivan slam shut. He heard his family drive away. And still he sat, until finally he wiggled his foot out of the unmated sock and moved his aching body into the bathroom to take a much-needed leak.

  “Dab don’t rub. Dab don’t rub,” he tells himself as he leans over the bloody carpet stain. Lynn takes housework seriously. And with the house going on the market, the room needs to look impeccable when he’s done. He’s determined not to cock this up. Lynn is right. I’ve been worthless.

  He sees this project as one little baby step that could be the first move toward some kind of personal redemption.

  When it comes to painting, Flip has a system. First he uses a four-inch angle brush to cut in along the ceiling and down the corners as far as he can reach; then, cut in along the baseboards and up the corners as far as he can reach. Finally, he slowly rolls the spaces between. He doesn’t use masking tape. He considers it a waste of time, and he regrets that, with their finances so tight, Lynn wasted money on unnecessary supplies. One only needs to go slowly and move steadily.