It Won't Always Be This Great Read online

  Copyright © 2014 Peter Mehlman

  All Rights Reserved

  No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by electronic means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the publisher, except by a reviewer, who may quote passages in a review.

  All characters in this book are ficticious. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

  Bancroft Press

  P.O. Box 65360

  Baltimore, MD 21209-9945

  (phone) 410 . 358 . 0658

  (fax) 410 . 764 . 1967

  bancroftpress.com

  ISBN

  978-1-61088-135-7 (cloth)

  978-1-61088-138-8 (mobi)

  978-1-61088-137-1 (epub)

  978-1-61088-139-5 (audio)

  Cover Design: Siori Kitajima, SF AppWorks LLC

  Interior Design: J. L. Herchenroeder

  FRIDAY, THEN AND NOW

  I.

  When did being me become a full-time job?

  I know, it sounds unseemly to imply that you never considered yourself self-absorbed but, before the events I’m about to describe, I’d never given it any thought. So there you go, right? Maybe not.

  Either way, everything changed last December, and it’s important for you to know right off—I haven’t told this story to anyone, not even God.

  The fact is, until the flight down here, I planned to take it to the grave. I was never someone to jump into people’s laps and spill my guts, and I’m even less so nowadays when everyone blabs everything, a trend that kind of makes me sick. I don’t know, maybe there’s not enough attention to go around anymore, with twelve billion people or whatever the wall-to-wall population of the world is. New people keep cropping up with their own little lives. It’s like, I go to a crowded restaurant a mile away and don’t know anyone. And these are people living the exact same life as mine. Ten miles away and the total strangers don’t even look familiar.

  You know, as long as I’m in confessional mode, sometimes when there’s a news report of some natural disaster killing ten thousand people, part of me is thinking: Good. Gravity needs a break.

  Well, not good, really. I’m not saying mass tragedies are good. Mass, personal, small group—all terrible. But for the sake of squeezing more years out of the planet, maybe these things need to happen. Some economist even said as much. Veblen, I think. Or Malthus? Like I know. I dropped Econ 205 after the midterm. Anyway, I’m just saying, I can’t believe there’s enough grain to cover St. Patrick’s Day, let alone Asia.

  It’s weird, but I think about the end of the world a lot lately. I’m no big environmentalist, but there are what? Ten animals in the world not on the endangered species list? The Nature Channel shows these ferocious polar bears doing their baffled doggy paddles to the next studio apartment-sized iceberg and it’s like: Damn! When’s our turn on the list?

  Funny, those nature shows go on and on about an endangered species and then show footage of fifty of them at a time. You don’t know what to believe.

  Anyway, like I said, I was okay not telling anyone this story, and I’m sorry if telling you in particular seems indulgent. Other people might see it that way, but other people aren’t here, so tough luck.

  It all started on a wickedly cold Friday. It’s funny; I remember feeling like I just wasn’t in the mood for myself that whole day. My typical ruminating, reviewing, and regretting, leading to conclusions that are all wrong . . . I just wanted to dodge myself from the moment I woke up. That’s why I wound up staying late at work. The best way of getting out of my own head was to hang out with Arnie, the chiropractor who shares office space with me. Podiatry and chiropractic actually mesh nicely as far as mutual referrals go, but it’s even better because Arnie is such a great guy. You’d love him. I mean, he’s nothing like you, but still, the guy is a total riot. At around four, after our last patients, we had the funniest conversation in the history of the world. But it ran past sundown, so I was forced to walk the two-and-a-half miles home.

  Now, don’t for a second think I observe Shabbos. So why would I have to walk home if I work past sundown on a Friday? Here’s why: My little Long Island town has become flooded with Orthodox Jews. Some were brought up Orthodox. Others reached a certain age, took stock of their lives, came up empty, and hit up God. I can only guess at the reasons, but I swear, it took hold like a virus. The streets, the schools and, most significantly, the retail establishments on Stratification Boulevard were full of people casually walking around in yarmulkes as if they looked totally normal. Stratification is a seriously high-end shopping area, but it’s silent on Friday nights and Saturdays. Some idiotic rules get chiseled into a tablet for some guy and his poor blind brother to fetch at the top of some mountain in the Mideast and 5,000 years later, it costs Americans a ton of income. Fucking nuts!

  Anyway, at the western end of Stratification is a four-story glass professional building, headquarters of yours truly, DPM. Now, the Orthodox don’t overtly give you shit if you’re not one of them. But (BUT!) they do throw their economic weight around. If your store is open on Shabbos, regardless of your religion, you will be frozen out of Orthodox dollars. Right now, maybe forty-five percent of my patients are Orthodox. I don’t wear a yarmulke or have a mezuzah on the door, but they’re okay with that. It’s like: My feet hurt, so what you do in the privacy of your own office is your business/shame. But if they saw me driving home on a Friday night, then I’m just shoving it in their faces and they’d take their feet elsewhere.

  Look, Commie, as clichéd as it sounds, I have a family to support.

  That morning, Alyse had specifically reminded me to leave work before sundown, so I had to call her from Arnie’s office to tell her I blew the deadline. “Alyse, Jesus, I’m sorry. I got to talking to Arnie and lost track of time.”

  “That’s fine, hon, as long as you don’t mind walking home. Take your time.”

  Alyse was in a lenient state of mind due to a fairly major parenting lapse she’d made that day. Not that she usually has me on a short leash. Or any leash. Alyse is great.

  “I’ll leave in a few minutes.”

  “Whenever. Say hi to Arnie. I love you.”

  I paused.

  Alyse said, “You can give me the not-alone version of ‘I love you.’”

  I laughed and said, “And you’re a really good person.”

  That’s a thing Alyse and I have done since college, when ending all phone calls with “I love you” seemed like a great idea. Now the kids say it at the end of every call too. With cell phones, it’s like eighty-five ‘I love you’s a day. It’s nice, I guess.

  I hung up and Arnie smiled. “‘You’re a really good person?’”

  I explained the code and Arnie said, “My ex-wife ended most calls by slamming down the phone. Then again, she was the kind of woman who could hang up on you in person.”

  I laughed and vetoed the idea of asking about his current wife’s phone habits, but Arnie did it for me. “Fumi doesn’t even use the phone.” he said, shaking his head. “She’s scared of germs even though they’d all be her germs. What a nut. You know, I used to think the dumbest thing you could do was marry an ugly shiksa. But marrying an emotionally volatile Asian girl? What the fuck is the point of that?”

  After getting my breath back from laughing my ass off, I said good night to Arnie, threw on my coat and gloves, and started walking home.

  The town’s hoity-toity stores line the south side of Stratification Boulevard. The sidewalk is generously wide, maybe twenty-five fe
et until you hit the curb, where there’s diagonal parking, a two-lane eastbound road, then a grassy island before you hit the westbound road. North of that is a park with benches and swings and trees. It’s pretty nice, actually. Spacious.

  So I’m walking east along the stores, mindlessly looking at the windows. The Commerce Committee hypes the diverse joy of the season so, along with menorahs and dreidels, the stores all had white Christmas lights framing their windows. A faintly ecumenical Winter Wonderland.

  With the wind chill, it was Minnesota out there, so hardly anyone was on the street. One demented jogger. A bag lady in an alcove whom I heard say, “I can’t find anything in this house.” Two non-local women wondering why the shops were closed. A forty-ish guy glaring at his Bernese as it sniffed other dogs’ urine on a hydrant. Anyone you know, Rover? The guy yanked the leash and disappeared down a side street. Otherwise, it was just me, chugging home.

  I won’t go into it, but a few weird/annoying/troubling things that day kept trying to seep back into my head. Instead, I chose to think about my talk with Arnie. Some of what he said before the stuff about Fumi was so funny, I laughed aloud right there on the street. I felt good.

  I. Felt. Good.

  So, knowing me, Commie, you can guess that my high spirits had a narrow sell-by date.

  Marching sprightly along, I reached Nu? Girl Fashions, a store for tweens that’s a retail gold mine for the owner, Nat Uziel, one of the town’s more prominent Orthodox Jews, whatever that means. Maybe he sits courtside for the High Holidays, I don’t know. But more relevant, he was one of my long-time patients. Even more relevant, so was his daughter, Audra, a freshman at Columbia whom I’d seen that morning. She was one of my favorite patients, but I’d said something kind of stupid to her—the kind of little thing I torture myself over forever. I won’t go into it, but suffice to say, as soon as I saw Nu? Girl Fashions, I thought of my idiotic comment and muttered under my breath, “Oh, come on! Let me forget my crap for one minute!”

  With a real sense of defiance, I turned my back to the store and bolted ninety degrees to cross the street and continued my walk on the grassy island dividing Stratification Boulevard. Get me away from everything that reminds me—

  On my second or third step on the grass, my left foot landed on something lying on the ground. My ankle jackknifed, the joint lurching to such a grotesque degree that my ankle bone touched the ground while my sole was still on the object I’d stepped on. I fell to the ground, grabbed my foot with both hands, and waited for the wave of nausea I knew was coming from the fifty times I’d rolled my ankle playing basketball. There was a delay before the pain set in. My next thought was: That’s it. I’ll never play hoops again.

  It took a good two minutes before the pain eased enough to let me swallow and stand up. With all my weight on my right leg, I looked around, hoping someone would pass by and give me a lift home. But the area was still deserted and spooky.

  Knowing me, you can imagine how my mind started spinning, recounting all my dumb mistakes and lousy luck leading to that moment. If only I’d have gone straight home instead of talking with Arnie, which forced me to walk home along stores that, anywhere else, would be open and full of people who don’t give a shit if you drive on Friday night . . .

  I treated myself to maybe thirty seconds of wheel spinning before finally looking down to see what protruding tree root or wayward rock I’d stepped on. It was so dark, I had to bend way down to see. It wasn’t a root. And it wasn’t a rock.

  It was MOSSAD KOSHER HORSERADISH.

  A wave of pure, livid adrenaline shot through me. I picked up the bottle, wheeled around, and committed the first real crime of my life.

  I threw a bottle of horseradish on a beeline through the upper pane of glass above the sign for Nu? Girl Fashions.

  I shattered the storefront of Nat Uziel’s pride and joy along with the way-too peaceful monotony that had become my life.

  II.

  I later learned the shattered pane was fourteen feet high and twenty-eight feet wide. Chunks of screaming glass rained down on the street like crystals off a gaudy chandelier.

  Then it was quiet again.

  Instinctively, my left hand reached into my pocket for my phone. My right hand moved, my fingers all ready to dial 911 and own up to my crime like the dyed-in-the-wool mensch I am.

  But wonder of wonders, Commie, my head swiveled around: still no one on the street. I looked back at the store: two old, low resolution security cameras—they looked like the boxes you’d use to watch an eclipse—were aimed down at the front door, blind to my position. I looked at my gloves, which covered my fingerprints. Then it was like my head said “no” to my hands.

  Instead, I let go of the phone, turned, and walked away.

  Vetoing my hands as they were about to confess, scanning for witnesses, casing out security cameras, excluding fingerprint evidence, fleeing—all of that happened in a flash. Amazing how adrenaline cranks down time and lets you notice a million details. On the other hand, it totally blinds you to the shit storm dead ahead.

  I limped pretty fast, but not too fast. I went maybe three-quarters of a block when I noticed that the security alarm from the store was blaring. Weird. I hadn’t heard it, even though, I later learned, it activated the second the window shattered. Suddenly, the pain in my ankle spiked. The swelling bulged out my sock. I walked another block and realized I’d never make it home that way, so I started to call Alyse to pick me up. But just before I hit HOME on my speed dial, I hung up.

  Commie? You won’t believe this. I didn’t call home because, if I became a suspect, the cops could dump my phone records, triangulate and pinpoint where I made the call, and boom: strong circumstantial evidence. Did I mention that I watch a lot of Law & Order?

  So I told myself, Keep limping homeward. That put the song Homeward Bound in my head. Trembling and scared, I started singing Homeward Bound to myself. Then I got an idea for a new version: Homeward Bound and Gagged. I actually laughed thinking I should call Paul Simon. I mean, boy, who can explain the brain?

  After another few minutes, I was silhouetted by headlights coming from behind. I turned and saw a car with a taxi sign on the top. I decided I was far enough away from the scene of the crime and hopped on my right leg, waving my arms. The cab stopped.

  The driver, a boxy Greek guy in his late fifties, had his head under a beanie and some knock-off version of an iPod.

  As I hobbled into the backseat, he asked, “Are you okay, man?”

  “I sprained my ankle really badly.”

  “What?”

  He took the pods out of his ears. “Sorry. You okay?”

  “I sprained my ankle really badly.” Then, seeing an opportunity to bolster my alibi, I added, “I tripped over a tree root about twenty yards back. Maybe thirty seconds ago. Thanks so much for stopping.”

  “Hey, I’m a cab driver.”

  “But I doubt you expected to pick up a fare around here.”

  “No. Truth is, I just dropped off a fare from JFK and got lost trying to find the parkway or I would’ve never passed by.”

  “Well, your wrong turn is my good fortune. I live nearby. I’ll be happy to give you directions back to wherever you want to go.”

  “Deal.”

  Halfway through the drive, two police cars, sirens wailing, sped in the opposite direction. The driver looked back at them in the rearview mirror and said, “What could be happening to make them cause such a racket on a cold night like this?”

  When he said that, it hit me that he hadn’t heard the alarm when he passed Nu? Girl Fashions. Drowned out by the knock-off iPod. Beautiful.

  I checked my pockets for a slip of paper to write directions for the cabbie. Nothing. I pulled out my wallet and—oh, get this—before I even opened it, I thought: I really need a new wallet. In the immediate wake of my first felony, that was my thought
.

  It’s so easy to retrieve your mundane, event-free life. Scary.

  While I was scavenging through my wallet, the driver said, “What’s this maniac doing?”

  I looked up, didn’t see anything, and didn’t ask. I’d had enough intrigue for one night. But keep this “maniac” in the back of your mind, Commie.

  The cabbie stopped in front of my house. I gave him ten bucks on a six-dollar fare and, finding nothing in my wallet, wrote directions to the highway on a torn-out page from a Sports Illustrated I had in my attaché case. Then I hobbled—

  Not that I like Sports Illustrated anymore. The way they conduct those snarky anonymous polls of athletes turns me off. “What NBA player would you least like as a teammate?” “Who’s the most overrated player on the PGA Tour?” As I see it, it’s all just malicious gossip under the guise of a survey.

  But I’m not going to get into that now.

  Arnie subscribes to it in the office.

  I hobbled out of the cab.

  “You should get some ice on that ankle, sir.”

  “Believe me, I will. Have a great night.”

  Turns out, his night was more than he bargained for.

  Oh Jesus, Commie. Alyse is calling me. I swear, the phone is like having one of those house-arrest things around your ankle. I’ll be right back . . .

  III.

  Hey. Sorry about that. Alyse is in Tribeca looking at apartments and wanted to ask me something about flooring. As if I know anything. We came into some money—which is actually part of the story I’m telling you—and we’re pretty set on moving back to the city. Charlie is at hockey practice, but Alyse took Esme with her so of course I had to talk to both of them. This girl Harley Binder, a friend Esme had a falling out with—also part of the story—suddenly friended her on Facebook. “Daddy, do you think I should let bygones go and accept?”

  I just told her to trust her own instincts. I swear, the Internet’s made the world so fat with etiquette, it just wears me out. Last summer, I had a thought: I have over three hundred Facebook friends but have only spoken to maybe two hundred people in my whole life. So I pretty much stopped looking at it except to keep track of this cop I’ll tell you about later.