Mr Wheeler steps out onto the front porch in shorts and sandals with black socks pulled up to the calves of his white, hairless legs. He squints, shielding his eyes from the sun’s glare, and tells me that Bixby is still asleep. I glance at my wrist.
“Two o’clock,” he says, noticing I don’t have a watch.
“Is he... alone?” I say.
Mr Wheeler shrugs. “To tell you the truth, Vim, I really don’t know what he is. But you can go on in and find out.”
I walk through the living room and down the narrow hallway. On Wheeler’s door are an ad for the Jesus Lizard “Wheel-chair Epidemic” seven-inch and the picture of him in a dress from the Gazette and little stickers of the old Mr T cartoon. Mr T and his squad of crime-fighting gymnasts. I drum my fingers on the door and wait. A stirring, a groan, a mattress squeak. I knock again and Wheeler, barely audible, goes: “Yeah?”
In my best Mr Wheeler impression, superflat and nasally, I say, “Bixby, wake up. It’s Christmas morning. Come and see what Santa brought you.”
“Gimme a break, dad.”
“Wheeler, I’m kidding. It’s me.”
“Vim?”
“Yeah.”
“Go away, man. I’m sleeping.”
“Not anymore, you’re not.”
“I’m tired. I was up till five.”
“You know, you can’t make up sleep. You either get it or you don’t.”
“That’s the point, man. I’m getting it.”
“Let me in.”
At last he opens the door. The air in the room is heavy and close and reeks of the musty essence of a thousand Wheelers. The hazy blind-fractured light spilling in across the walls and floor reminds me of the scene in Apocalypse Now where Martin Sheen does drunken karate and breaks the mirror with his fist. Wheeler’s in his boxers, scanning the floor for something to wear. “We have to quit meeting like this,” he says.
Helene’s hickeys or love marks or whatever he calls them are still visible, about a dozen fading strawberry birthmarks. Wheeler digs out his old Joy Division Unknown Pleasures T-shirt and slips it on. He pushes the sheets and blankets into a pile in the corner of the bed and sinks into it. I sit backward in the room’s one chair.
“So how you doing?” he says. “Okay. I just got back. I went up north for a while.”
“I heard. How was it?”
“It was uh... restorative. In some ways.”
“Well that sounds good. Looks like someone might’ve popped you one.”
“That was the non-restorative part. Do you mind if I open a window?”
“No, go ahead. I had them open earlier but my dad was doing all his lawn shit. It was so fucking loud it was like he was in my room with his weedwhacker.”
“There we go. That’s better.”
“It was like he was holding the weedwhacker up to my screen just to spite me.”
“Out on the porch just now he told me he doesn’t know what you are.”
Wheeler’s face clouds over. “He said that?”
“No,” I say. “He didn’t. It was just . . . it was a dumb joke.”
“Ah yeah. Vim Sweeney and all the kidding. So was that whole scene over at Helene’s, was that like, another one of your hilarious jokes?”
“Yeah,” I say, clearing my throat, “about that.”
“Yeah?”
“I’m really... shit. I would like to tell you I’m sorry.”
“You would like to or is that what you’re actually telling me?”
“No. That’s what I’m actually telling you. I am here now to say that I’m sorry. Wheeler. Fuck. This has been,” I pause and take a deep breath and think about exactly what I want to say. Only now do I realize I want to tell Wheeler the truth, in a way. Not the whole truth but a version of it. “The last couple months have been a... strange time for me and I, for some reason I gravitated toward Helene, not necessarily out of some romantic or sexual thing but because she had a presence—she has a presence—and I thought, I mean I perceived on some level that she and I could . . . relate somehow and . . . you know the rest.”
“No I don’t, Vim. Why don’t you tell me.” His tone is neutral. I search for clues as to what he might be thinking but Wheeler only stares at me, unblinking.
“Okay,” I say, licking my dry lips, “I mean as long as you’re making me say it, the next thing is me showing up at Helene’s and freaking the fuck out after staying up all night and drinking enough caffeine to cause a heart attack and driving back and forth on I-94 like it was a go-cart track. Like I was fucking insane.”
A strange, prickly feeling overwhelms me as the words flow, like spiders crawling around in my bones. A long silence follows.
“So it’s not some sexual thing,” Wheeler says. “So tell me. What would have happened if I hadn’t been there? What is it you wanted from her, Vim?” He looks at me until I look away. “Or what do you want from her still?”
“Someone to listen, Wheeler. That’s all. Just someone to listen.”
“So call a fucking hotline,” he says.
“I wanted someone to... understand.”
“Understand what? You? How deep you are?”
“Wheeler, no. Listen. There are things happening inside my brain that you don’t, that you couldn’t possibly understand. And I’m not trying to be arrogant here, I’m just saying how could you possibly understand when I don’t fucking understand? I don’t understand myself. Okay? I don’t know what I want. I don’t know why I’m here.”
“You mean here in my room?” he says. “Because I can answer that one easy.”
“No, asshole. I mean Here.”
Wheeler clasps his hands behind his head and stares at the ceiling. “All right. Now it’s your turn to listen. One day I woke up and my mom told me she was going away for a while, on a trip to New Mexico. She told me she just had to get away. It’s not your fault, she said, it’s not anybody’s fault. She was just feeling a little burned out. All right, yeah, mom, sure. I’ll see you when you get back. That was four years ago. So now it’s just me and my old man. And me and my old man, we don’t even talk now. Unless we have to. Are you hungry? Yes. Turn your music down. Fine.”
As Wheeler is talking it occurs to me that Jake’s parents may be the only ones I know who are still together and doing okay. How can so many people fall out of love?
“And then, you know, time passes. And one day I wake up and realize I don’t wanna hang around with a bunch of fake-shit Christian hypocrites anymore. And be taught by a bunch of god-squadders who only like kids who play soccer and call me, you know, pretty much call me a fucking faggot behind my back. So I quit. I dropped out. It was the scariest thing I ever did in my life. Some people think it’s stupid or cowardly or lazy or whatever but. It’s scary. And now I gotta like, live with my decision. The same way I gotta live with dear old dad for two more years, till I can move out and . . . I don’t know what. Do my own thing.”
He sits up and wipes at the tears spilling down his cheeks. I’m surprised to see him crying. His voice is very much under control.
“So don’t come into my room and tell me what a strange time in your life it is or how there’s things I don’t understand. I’m sure there’s plenty of shit about you I don’t understand. But you know what? I don’t give a fuck. My own life is strange enough. And right now I’m just trying to fight my way through it. And as far as why you’re here.”
A whiny, high-pitched buzz. His dad is in the yard, working some machine.
“Fuck!” Wheeler says. “Do you see?”
He slams down the window and flips off his dad through the wall. “Fuck!” he says again, tugging at little bits of his hair. Finally he sighs; he laughs darkly.
“I don’t know why you’re here, Vim. I don’t know why anybody’s here. I just know that in this world. Man, this world is so fucked that you just . . . gotta be good to people. And then good stuff... the hope is that good things come your way.”
“Like a karma kinda thing?” I say.
“Yeah. I guess so.”
“Wheeler,” I say, staring at the floor. “Wheeler, I’m truly sorry. I am.”
There is another long silence. The sun continues to beat through the blinds and with the windows closed the room heats up again. Now, in addition to Wheeler-musk, it smells like gasoline and whacked weeds and dirt. Wheeler is the first to speak.
“Do you wanna play music?” he says.
I glance around the room. “Now?”
“Yeah. Why? Where else you gotta be?”
“Nowhere.” I shake my head, grinning. “Absolutely fucking nowhere.”
So we go to the basement and bash it out. Ordinarily I don’t jam but it can be great what happens when you shut off your brain and let the music come. An hour or so later we have a new song and it’s a huge leap forward, a breakthrough of sorts. I hum the lyrics to myself as we play it over and over again.
I had a good life
I had a good life
I had a good life but I was underfed
I had a
Would you excuse me? Do you believe me?
Life is a movie and dying is TV.