Remembrance of Things I Forgot: A Novel Read online

  Junior had watched Taylor’s outburst without comment. I felt like telling him that something else he had to look forward to was Taylor’s temper, but I knew that would just come off as sounding mean.

  Within a half hour we were on our way, and Jen’s good deed seemed to have lifted all our spirits.

  Suddenly it was a gorgeous day: the corn was green, the sky was blue, and our hearts were rosebuds. At the Illinois border the welcome sign made us feel that Governor James R. Thompson had personally invited us to the Land of Lincoln, and if we needed guest accommodations for the night, we could stay at his mansion in Springfield. Junior opened the extra-large bag of peanut M&Ms he’d bought at our last stop and offered us handfuls. For the next half hour, we drove in a comfortable silence (interrupted by the occasional crackle of candy-coated peanuts), happily subdued by the hypnotic blissfulness of a car ride, which offers misleading visible reassurance that you’re following a path that others have traveled, conveying the comforting illusion that, for once in your life, you have truly left your past behind and know where you’re headed.

  A billboard announcing a Father’s Day sale at a lawn mower dealer appeared to prompt Junior to speak. “Do you honestly think you helped Dad?”

  “I have no idea. He never reveals how he feels about anything.”

  “He seemed pretty shaken up,” Taylor said.

  “I think it was more about Carol,” Junior said. “He’s close to her.”

  “He’s always dropped everything to help her,” I said. “Maybe he’ll put down the Scotch to help keep her alive.”

  It seemed a slim hope, but I didn’t argue against it. I was trying not to believe most hopes are imaginary friends. I admitted that ever since we passed through Pennsylvania, I’d been trying to think of an effective plan of how to prevent George W. Bush from becoming president. The problem I came up against was the same one I’d had in trying to prevent my father from becoming an alcoholic: I didn’t know what made either of them tick.

  “The problem with straight men,” Junior proclaimed, “is that when you try to figure what motivates their lives, the one or two things they do reveal seem so trivial or insubstantial that you assume they either have to be stupid or nuts.”

  I remembered when I used to naively believe that my gayness conveyed some special artistic sensitivity that was lacking in heterosexual men. My youthful conviction was that my boner pointed to truth and beauty, while their dicks only pointed toward vaginas. This was before I met gay men who seriously collected Barbie dolls or supported a political party that despised them.

  Junior looked my way. “Gay men tend to be more forthcoming about what motivates their lives.”

  I tried not to vomit. He sounded like every morning he stood up and put his hand over his heart before reciting the pledge of allegiance to the Rainbow flag.

  “You’re in no position to sneer at straight men when you sell comic books for a living.”

  Junior smiled. “I never really thought of that.”

  “All men get a bum deal,” Taylor mused from the backseat. He and Junior had changed places the last time we stopped to let Ravi pee. “Men are always accused of repressing their emotions, but since they’re only permitted to reveal the presentable feelings, they shut them all down rather than play favorites.”

  “Dad shows his emotions at Sabres’ games,” Junior said. “He’s always shouting at the refs or players.”

  “Sports allow men to have an emotional life without having to take any responsibility for it,” I said. “If your team fails, it’s never your fault: you were always there for them.”

  “Can’t you say the same thing about art?” Junior asked. “If a book, painting, or play stinks, it’s never your fault: you can always blame the artist.”

  “I think we’ve just explained the emotional lives of 99 percent of the men in America,” Taylor commented.

  “President Bush is into baseball,” I said. “He was part owner of the Texas Rangers before he became president. We should keep that in mind.”

  “In what way?” Junior helped himself to another handful of M&Ms.

  “I don’t know,” I said. “This is your idea. If we’re going to do this, I’m going to need some help planning.”

  Junior passed the bag to Taylor. “That could help when we’re talking to him. Straight men believe all the world is a baseball field, while gay men think all the world is a stage. Use lots of baseball metaphors to win his trust.”

  Junior made an interesting point, but he was wrong. “Taylor and I recently attended a six-month Ingmar Bergman film retrospective,” I said. “We saw a new-to-me film every Sunday morning at eleven. Bergman’s indisputably straight and he used theater as a metaphor for life just as much as Shakespeare did.”

  “So I’m wrong about that too.”

  I felt embarrassed but had been compelled to correct him. It’s easy to point out your flaws and mistakes when you don’t have to take any responsibility for remedying them.

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “Everything you say I take personally.”

  “Well, it isn’t personal,” he said. “Get over yourself.” Junior smiled before he lowered the volume on the tape player. “What else do we know about Bush?”

  I explained that he undoubtedly had some complicated father issues. In one of his first interviews, when he was asked if he asked his father for advice, he replied that he only sought guidance from our heavenly father. “Which I thought was insulting to both dads.”

  It occurred to me that George W’s life was a parody of his father’s.

  “His father was a war hero pilot during World War II, while W. became a draft-dodging pilot in the Texas National Guard during Vietnam. In the ’50s, his father went to Midland and became a millionaire in the oil business, while in the ’70s, W. moved to Midland and failed in the oil business.”

  “Does the father fuck around?” Taylor asked. I knew from his question that Taylor was thinking about sex; he always found a way to bring up the subject whenever he was horny.

  “There’ve been stories. I read or heard something about him having an affair with this long-time employee.” I felt my lack of exact information was a huge detriment to our planning and was frustrated that we couldn’t get information quickly in 1986. “Fuck, I wish we could stop and just Google ‘infidelity’ and ‘George H. W. Bush.’”

  A brief digression ensued, as I explained Internet search engines to them.

  “The son’s probably as horny as his dad,” Taylor said. “The apple doesn’t fall too far from the tree and the seed doesn’t shoot too far from the cock.”

  “Why don’t you needlepoint that one on a sampler?” I suggested. When Taylor moved on to dirty talk, it meant he would definitely have an orgasm sometime today.

  Junior turned toward me. “What kind of women does the young Bush like?”

  “His wife Laura’s a librarian and the one woman in his cabinet—his current Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice—is a spinster of some sort.” They made a few derisive comments about her unusual first name, until I explained she was African American, and then they stopped because they didn’t want to sound racist.

  “She and Bush are extremely close. I’m not saying he’d like to fuck her, but he seems to enjoy giving the impression she’d like to fuck him. I’m sure that’s a sexist interpretation of their relationship, but I’m not imagining it. The even stranger thing is there’s a good chance she could be a lesbian, and you would still think that.”

  “You didn’t really answer my question,” Junior said.

  “Yeah, because I don’t want to think about what gives him a hard-on. I’d say he likes women who are smarter than him, which gives us a wide net.”

  “A brainy hooker,” Taylor said. “In Midland Texas. Finding her won’t be easy.”

  “One weird thing,” I added. “Bush’s wife, Laura, was in a car accident when she was seventeen and killed a seventeen-year-old jock who was a friend and might have been her hig
h school sweetheart.”

  Taylor took an audibly large breath. “So when we meet Bush, we shouldn’t say, ‘Hey, when you’re president why don’t you just give your wife the keys to the presidential limo and let her go after our nation’s enemies?’”

  Junior snickered, but I didn’t. I wasn’t twenty-six. Her accident wasn’t funny after you’ve experienced your own horrible personal tragedies. Even though I thought she was her husband’s political accomplice, I felt sympathy for her. Laura Bush was our nation’s First Lady Macbeth. I seriously wondered if late at night she wandered the halls of the White House, unable to sleep because the ghosts of thousands of young soldiers haunted her, soldiers slaughtered by her husband in his personal Iraq War, young men and women who were the same age as the boy she killed.

  “There’s sibling rivalry between him and his brother Jeb,” I said. “Jeb’s younger and is supposedly considered to be the smart one in the family based apparently on his ability to speak Spanish. His mother thinks he’s a genius because he can tell the maid, ‘Consuelo, the platos in the sink are very sucios and need to be lavados right away!’ There are some fucked-up mother issues in that family. I actually met a woman in New York who used to dress Barbara Bush during the ’80s, and she remembers Barbara used to make fun of her ne’er-do-well son George. If his mother was making fun of him to strangers, you can bet she mocked him to his face. Oh, and young Bush is also an alcoholic, and he once reportedly liked to do coke.”

  “When did he quit drinking?”

  “I’m not sure. Sometime in the ’80s.”

  I couldn’t recall exactly. I’d never expected to need to know this much about his life.

  Junior had a suggestion. “If he’s still a boozer, let’s buy him drinks and he’ll be our friend for life.”

  It takes a drunk to know one, I thought to myself.

  “Is he a horndog?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “He doesn’t cheat on his wife?”

  “No, he found Jesus. I remember reading he was a member of a men’s Bible study group in Midland.”

  “Are you kidding?” Taylor said. “The reason straight men join Bible groups is because they need Jesus to stop thinking about pussy.”

  “Or to stop secretly thinking about cock,” Junior suggested. “Is he a closet case?”

  “No. I’m sure of that. It would make our life a lot easier if he was. His policies are completely homophobic, but he comes off as one of those straight guys who has no problem with the gays because he’s so confident of his own heterosexuality.” Bush’s leering smile came to mind. “He’s kind of a smirker. I’m willing to bet he’s the kind of guy who loves to talk dirty but doesn’t have the balls to do anything about it.”

  Another thought immediately challenged my assertion.

  “He’s also extremely cocky. He loves to win and continues to believe he won even when he clearly didn’t. He lost the popular vote in 2000 by half a million votes and still took it as a mandate. Then he claimed victory in the Iraq War in 2003 with a ridiculous ‘Mission Accomplished’ speech, even though we’re still fighting there in 2006.” Our task seemed impossible. “Logic doesn’t seem to work with him. He really is a mental case.”

  “So we’ve got to find a brainy, spinster whore in Midland, Texas,” Junior said. “How big is that city?”

  “I don’t know.” I wasn’t sure if it was a big town or a midsized city like Buffalo. If Midland were a big city we’d have to find him, find out where he hung out, and connect with him, all in one day and night. That was all the time I was willing to spare. Saving Carol was more important to me than trying to save my life with Taylor.

  “We’re fucked,” I said. “There’s no way this will work. All I know for sure about Bush right now is that he lives in Midland, his oil company is Spectrum 7, and he’s a member of a men’s Bible study group. That’s nothing.”

  Junior and Taylor encouraged me to be optimistic, but this time they did it gently and without animosity. I regarded my deep reservations as being realistic.

  “He’s never going to sleep with a local whore in the city where his family lives.”

  I imagined the next highway exit would be for the town of Drudgery and after that would be a sign telling us we were ten miles away from Nothingtodo.

  “We’ve got to think of a plan.”

  There wasn’t any response from either of them, leading me to believe they were pondering different scenarios. We drove a few miles further, passing an antiques mall. I was surprised when Junior didn’t ask to stop, suggesting we could be passing boxes of comic books that had been stored in a farmhouse attic since World War II. Junior leaned backward to address Taylor.

  “How long have you been working out?”

  Oh, Jesus. I couldn’t believe Junior was using that ancient show of interest. In fact, “Oh, Zeus” would have been more appropriate because that line was already old when Socrates used it on a wrestler named Apollodoros in 410 BC.

  “Since high school.”

  “Do you work your forearms?”

  “Not really. They’ve always been like this.”

  Taylor raised his right arm, twisted it, to give Junior a little show of his corded bowling pin.

  “You’re lucky; they’re really thick. I wish I had those veins.”

  “You have better biceps.”

  I felt like telling them to get a room as they continued to compliment each other’s physiques. Junior had clearly been thinking about Taylor’s forearms since we stopped in Indianapolis. I’d watched his eyes bulge as Taylor pulled back the aluminum tab on his can of pop.

  “Look, this was your idea to stop Bush, and now you two are putting all your energy into verbally groping each other. We don’t know where he lives or works. We don’t even know what church he belongs to. We have no plan. I’m not going to be able to do this myself.”

  “All right!” Junior shouted. “We have tonight and tomorrow to think of something, and we will. Quit being . . .”

  Junior stopped himself from saying I was negative, which I appreciated.

  “We can find out his Bible study group,” Taylor said. “He’s not Roman Catholic, I’m guessing.”

  “No,” I replied. “And I’m pretty sure he’s not Baptist. The Bushes are real WASPs. He’s either Episcopal, Presbyterian, or Methodist.”

  “That can’t be hard to narrow down.”

  “In Texas?” I said. “There’s probably two people to every church.”

  “Look,” Junior said. “You just call every church and say George. W. Bush suggested I join their men’s Bible study group. His father’s a name in Texas. People will know him. It’ll take time but it can be done.”

  That actually seemed to make sense and to be feasible. We still didn’t have a plan, but somehow knowing we could track him down without Google was calming.

  Taylor asked Junior for another handful of M&Ms.

  “That’s something else you can look forward to,” I said. “In twenty years, they’ll have chocolate-covered, candy-coated almond M&Ms. Very adult, almost sophisticated.” Taylor exclaimed, “No! That’s impossible! I can’t believe we’ll live to see that! I thought maybe interstellar warp-drive but not almond M&Ms!” Junior and I laughed. “The future sounds fantastic! Almonds covered in chocolate with a candy coating!”

  We stopped for the night near St. Louis. I’d wanted to show them Cahokia Mounds State Park in Illinois, the sparsely visited site of the largest Pre-Columbian city in North America. It definitely was a place that Junior and Taylor would enjoy, but it was dark when we crossed into Missouri, and we wouldn’t have time to visit the next morning. Instead, I drove them by Louis Sullivan’s Wainwright Building in downtown St. Louis, which I happily pointed out wasn’t nearly as beautiful as his Guaranty Building in Buffalo.

  We were going to sneak Ravi into our motel again and kept him in the car as we checked in at an Econo Lodge outside of St. Charles, Missouri. The desk clerks at cheap motels always depr
essed me; the pudgy young men and drab middle-aged women always gave the impression they knew it was a lousy job, but they couldn’t afford to quit. It kept them supplied with free matchbook-sized bars of soap. It had to be frustrating continually checking in people who were going to have sex when you weren’t getting any.

  “How many rooms would you like?” asked a dour, plump woman.

  Before I could respond, Junior blurted out, “Two.”

  He and Taylor looked slightly embarrassed, and they bowed their heads as the desk clerk gave us our room keys. I wasn’t surprised that they hooked up. Years of watching nature documentaries had made me think of my penis as a shark; it required periods of rest but never really slept; when provoked, it always lunged forward. Taylor was provocation.

  I was at a loss for words. “Um, okay.” It took a moment to register how I felt; sometimes my nervous system’s outdated wiring can’t handle the voltage required for newfangled emotions. As we climbed the red-carpeted stairs to the second floor, I knew if I suggested a threesome they’d go for it, but all I really wanted to do was just go to bed. Then it occurred to me why I was cold and bothered: I was envious that after driving for fourteen hours, they still had the will and energy to have sex at two a.m.—even when we would have to get up by seven if we were going to reach Midland by tomorrow night.

  I was jealous that Junior and Taylor were twenty-six.

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