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Am I a good person or a bad person? I'm not a great person—I know that. I've been a certain way my whole life: Mr. Showcase, Mr. Jokey, Mr. Handshake. After a while, even I can't stand it. I look down on people. I've got a short fuse. I piss on my friends. I always thought the benefit of being this type of guy was that you forget the things you do to people, and you go on living in a happy pink bubble. You're not such a winner, but you're allowed to forget.
I had gone over to Kiffany's with the idea of persuading her. I took the gun. I have a confession to make: As a kid I was fascinated by Nazis. I hated them, like everybody else; I would think up tortures to pay them back—gouge out their eyes with a rusty fork, rip off their balls with pliers and shove them down their throats—but I also thought they were terrible and dangerous and, so, worth thinking about. I drew swastikas on my notebook. I ordered a catalogue of war paraphernalia from the back of a comic book, and in it were wool uniforms and spiked German helmets, Third Reich binoculars, leather holsters, and guns—cigarette lighters made to look like guns—and, after all these years, I still had the gun I got then. It was a lighter that looked like a .45, the American gun. It was fun to use. A big flame came out of the barrel. At my place, Kiffany lit her smokes with it seven times a night. It was big and heavy. It looked real.
I had on a T-shirt and gym shorts, the elastic waistband of the shorts bulging and stretched out. I had one hot, red ear from an hour on the phone with Kiffany, who lived two blocks away, more toward downtown New Haven, and I'm running over there in my flip-flops with this gun tucked into my shorts. Don't ask me to explain the state I had reached by the time I headed over there. Sometimes love is not what it's cracked up to be. I had this idea of using the gun as a prop, actually to lighten the mood of our quarrel, like, "Why don't I just kill us both? Why don't you just shoot me, or I'll shoot you?"
An old guy in a station wagon had his turn signal on and was pulling toward me—I realized then that I was walking across his driveway—and I hurried up a step so he could turn. The gun fell down my shorts. It hit the ground and broke. They said it was identical to the real thing except for the lighter mechanism. Obviously not. The old man looked at it and looked at me. I grabbed the three biggest pieces and ran up to Kiffany's house and went in.
We started in on the same fight we'd been having on the phone. Kiffany said, Hold me; Kiffany said, Let me go. I let go of her, all right. I was frustrated, and we were both so tired of fighting—I let her go kind of through a doorway, like, Get away from me, so she could maybe go sit in the other room, where it was cooler. Except the door was closed—a swinging-type door with no knob. I forgot to look, and she found that out with her nose. Well, more her forehead. Afterward, we both cried and she put ice on it and I left and went home and she didn't press charges on me. That's when I knew it was time to take a break.
My brother called then. It had been a while. Dave's my older brother, and I could tell him my problems. He listened. Then he said he had a reason for calling. He had something to tell me—good news. I said I didn't think there was any good news left. He said, "Hey, Vince, Denise is pregnant."
"Wow—shit," I said.
"What do you think?"
"That's major event," I said.
"We're pretty happy," he said. I asked him how long before it would pop. He said seven months.
"You got enough money for it?"
"Yeah."
Dave had been really busy. Getting married and a new house on the Jersey shore and a new job. We weren't as close as we had been. Everybody was so wrapped up with work that we hardly ever called each other. We waited too long and then had nothing to say.
I hadn't been to their house since Christmas, and that was the first time I'd seen it. Dave had met Denise two years earlier, taking golf lessons. Then, in the span of eight months, they got engaged, set a date, joined a church and a health club, got married, bought a house, and now she was pregnant. We hung up, and when I thought about that call I could picture Dave touching her belly.
They live near the water. Some things are automatically picture-perfect. It dawned on me that the weather down there is always mild, and with Labor Day coming it might be a nice idea to visit them. "Uncle Vince"—it clanged like an old, familiar bell. I called him back. I reminded him of the troubles I'd been having with Kiffany, and said that since there was a holiday weekend, I was thinking of getting out of the city.
"You're saying you want to come down?"
"Maybe. I don't know—sure."
"Let me ask Denise," he said. "I'll call you back."
"Thanks," I said. "Fantastic."
"I'll call you back."
"Hey, how far are you guys from the water?" I couldn't quite remember.
"Not far," he said.
"Is there going to be a picnic or anything?"
"A picnic?"
"Like a Labor Day picnic."
"I don't know of any picnic."
"I'll bet there's something in your area—a street fair or a sack race. I haven't been to a picnic in ten years."
"Let me call you later."
It would be an opportunity to get away from this scene for a while. To be there at the start of their adorable family—my timing was exquisite. Later, Dave called and said it was O.K. So I put some stuff in the trunk Friday morning. After lunch I got out on the road and turned south.
* * *
Kiffany was the last in a long line of failures. Looking back over the years, I could see a pattern. Pictures came into my head on the road to my brother's house. Old faces drifted across the road in front of me, things I had done. I looked for a good station on the radio. The drive was about four and a half hours long.
Kiffany was the best-looking, the smartest, the best dressed. She had gone to Harvard. A lot of people go to Harvard. I didn't. They hired Kiff in marketing at the radio station where I worked, the second-biggest station in the city. She got the job through a connection. I'd been there for four years, and I was the chief engineer. It takes about ten seconds to tell whether you like a person, and when I saw her that first day, in that dress, I thought I could learn to love a woman like that. She was tall and skinny, she wore cool clothes, her chestnut-brown hair was cut short and fresh. Look at that face. Her cheeks were smooth, and the tiniest white hairs stood out against her tan skin. She had big, pink gums that were evident when she smiled. And tits that were full and moved as though they were either very firm Ð or sheathed in leather. Go ahead, I thought, Why not? We could become friends. She had just moved here from somewhere else, and I'd show her the town.
I found, upon reflection, that she fit my idea of the supreme woman. Why? Who gives a shit. I felt love.
To read the rest of the story, buy the book...
Copyright© 2000 by Matthew Klam
Read more excerpts from Sam the Cat and Other Stories
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