Venus Drive Read Online Free PDF Page A

I was pretty certain I was suffering from that deficit thing. That disorder. Everything flickered a lot, and I never knew which story I was working with.
    Take the story of Gary’s thumb. Many years ago, on the eve of manhood, Gary sawed it off with his father’s Black & Decker table saw. Gave it to his mother on an olive dish, or maybe it was a cookie plate.
    â€œYou should have seen the look on my mother’s face,” said Gary, back from emergency.
    The truth was, you could still see it on her a few days later, there in the bar mitzvah ballroom. That kind of look, it doesn’t disappear, even with all that disco-nagila going, and Gary bouncing high in the chair. Gary’s uncles, men with great bony mouths, slid Gary from his throne into my arms. I held him there, the bandaged hand between us, and under the din of Hebrew synths, I asked him why he did the sawing.
    â€œThey wouldn’t let me watch TV,” he said. “The late movie. Now I watch all hours. Anything I want.”
    That’s the story how Gary left his thumb and his youth behind, though they did sew the dead thumb back on.
    We had years as strangers before I saw him again, but somehow I’ve always been following Gary. What he did to his thumb made him, I believe, a wisdom-giver.
    Me, I was never bar mitzvah’d. According to the tenets of my faith, I’m nothing close to a man, though I have a hairy neck and look older.
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    Walking around now I thought of all the times I used to walk around and see Gary on the streets of this city. It’s funny to see someone down here from your town. You think everyone will stay behind and do everything you did all over again, forever. You picture old geezers in jean jackets doing whip-its behind the plaza.
    But I got out and Gary got out. Everybody gets out. Getting out is not the problem.
    You can picture what the problem is.
    For instance, Gary tried to be a rock star, even trained his bad thumb to squeeze on a guitar pick, but rock was dead.
    â€œSomebody should have mentioned something,” he said.
    Next thing, I see him loitering near trust-fund bistros, looking smug and hunted.
    â€œI’m in goods and services,” he said. “It’s the only uncompromised medium left.”
    That was when I decided to buy his services, his goods. I was in a steady phase, but Molly was tired of my clarity. It’s hard to fuck your girlfriend when she’s fucked up and you’re not. It’s harder than the Skee-Ball they used to have at the Plaza arcade, all that agony over a fuzzy prize.
    Now the sun was clearing the rooftops, the water towers. I thought of the man with the periscope. I looked for Gary in all of the Gary places, but I was too early. These places were all haunted by the future of Gary.
    I wanted to score for the straw people, maybe make Gary proud.
    I wanted to have friends from all over the world in the way of a man who has no friends. Maybe some of them were still heaped on the coats.
    I went home when I knew Molly would be at work and started to pull her music off the shelves. This was what I called a mercy burgle, all those bands overmuch with faux hope for the world and untricky beats. I unloaded a stack of them on a British guy with a store down the block. He got by selling crap at a mark-up to club kids—used-up ideas, pants unpopular in their own time.
    â€œI just staple a tag on and they buy it,” he told me. “It helps that I’m a Limey.”
    The Brit’s eyes had this pucker of awful witness. He’d been everywhere just as everything got ugly: art, philosophy, rugby, love. Maybe what he’d seen had made his teeth fall out, too.
    I asked him if he knew where I could get what the straw people needed.
    â€œI don’t travel that road anymore,” he said. “It’s clogged with idiots like you. Now sod off.”
    He held a mug of tea and I noticed a sliver of cellophane floating on top. Was that