Don't Disappoint (Ch. 11)
by Martin van Cooper
Welcome back to a special Summer Edition of PILCROW. For the next six weeks, we’ll be serializing Martin van Cooper’s unpublished novel Don’t Disappoint (runner-up in our last contest, back by popular demand). Stay tuned for submission deadlines for our next quarterly contest (in which each of two runners-up receive $500, and the ultimate winner - voted on by you, dear subscribers - receives $1,000).
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In Don’t Disappoint, amidst a flailing career, a displaced midwesterner in Los Angeles goes home to confront the complications of a mother with advancing dementia, only for a marital sucker punch to leave him questioning what’s left of his family to salvage.
Martin Van Cooper writes the Substack Don’t Read the Dust Jacket
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Jason was passing Vineland headed west on the 134 at a Thursday afternoon pace of 15-20 mph when he started to perceive the acute need for a bowel movement of tectonic proportions. He remembered a time when he was in grade school and was sitting on the toilet when some of his classmates opened the door of the stall in surprise and proceeded to tease him. The entire boys’ restroom erupting in laughter at the sight of him sitting down to take a shit. He thought of this almost daily when shitting in public places and to this day always triple checks the latch before turning around to wipe off the seat and deploy the tissue paper seat cover. Was there a way to prevent people from having these experiences? Anyway, the B.M. that now beset him threatened cataclysm. A two martini, five beers, foie gras tower and calamari appetizer, Caesar salad, 24 oz rare porterhouse and baked potato with side of spaghetti Carbonaro and asparagus, brownie a la mode with salted caramel, half bottle of Buffalo Trace and a 60 ring gauge triple Maduro chaser plus six Doritos Locos tacos and Mountain Dew at 2am type of shit. A black Friday, door buster day after the all-American gorge fest of bird, pig, root and pie, followed by a mid-morning four egg McMuffins, breakfast burrito, 17 hot sauces and three cups of coffee type of clog the fucking toilet at Home Depot and sidle out past the employee break room avoiding eye contact type of shit. Where your viscera settles. Where you can actually feel a release of pressure in the back of your throat. We’re talking substantial mass. We’re talking poundage definitely in the ‘teens. The kind, as Pacino said, that makes you feel like you slept for 12 hours. Giving birth. The kind that makes your pelvis expand and then crack, not uncomfortably, like a chiropractor’s adjustment. Multiple vertebrae involved. We’re talking about the kind of shit where you stride from the can with purpose, member of the realm, chin up, ready to fuck anything that moves. We’re not talking about a fire hydrant through your gastrointestinal tract. Where you have time to jot something clever on the wall of the head like would shit here again or dial this number for a good time and leave a star ranking or something clever. The college game day three pitchers of beer, dozen teriyaki wings, dozen 911 wings, dozen spicy garlic wings and large bacon jalapeno and onion pizza type. The Old Faithful pressure build up, black powder muzzle loaded ordinance and then finger over the garden hose eruption, pancake batter—burning—and intermittent, terror-inducing occlusive pellets, then back to free flow, then incendiary shrapnel. Grabbing the sides of the bowl with your hands in terror. Not that kind of shit. Not a post-curry chutney and Baba Ganoush and yogurt Bangin Bertha rapid fire oatmeal-textured projectile that starts as a piercing pain under your rib cage and progresses, in 30-45 seconds, to an intense abdominal sensation like someone has your small and large intestines in a plastic bag out behind a 7Eleven and is repeatedly swinging them against a brick wall. That makes you hunch when you duckwalk to the head. Like birdshot in the gut. The putt putt putt, paaaaaaaaaa that comes after a case of Busch Lite or eating Mediterranean. The kind where you can feel your jejunum and duodenum wrestling for space, shoving up against your other organs. Where someone is slowly probing with knitting needles against the side of your gut, then escalating alarmingly to hammering out the 1812 Overture and then suddenly applying SERIOUS ALL-AROUND FUCKING PRESSURE. Where there most certainly must be some type of chemical disruption of membranes or something in there somewhere. Acid. Faucet ass. Not that kind. Not the petrified wood kind. Not the kind, either, that stalls mid-exit, halfway breeched, you having left the Nicorette on the kitchen counter when leaving for work that morning. The morning after a night of an entire bottle of Hendricks plus copious prophylactic NSAIDs and for-emergencies-only Vicodin washed down with Alka-Seltzer and Gatorade before bed, hard coal, way down on the periodic table dense, poundage modest, but really just dense, but girthy and feeling somehow strangely coarse, as though covered with bark, drawing heat out of the colon, in a capsular contracted niche, a crucible, dense and firm and wide in a way that causes a startling but not entirely uncomfortable micro tearing of the external anal sphincter and whose expulsion, after all that struggle, is quick, and leaves little trace except the water that splashes up from the bowl and the near syncope of reactive bradycardia from bearing down. Not that kind. The kind where it feels like it requires handling and extirpation with cast iron pincers and asbestos gloves, by trained staff in aprons and flash goggles and SCBAs, some kind of plutonium turd to be stored in some bespoke lead-lined dewar and transported in an unmarked truck to be buried, in the dead of night, deep deep down, in a mountain in the desert southwest. Different than that.
His phone is ringing then, and he picks up and it’s his sister Alice. What have you been doing? My computer’s not working now. It’s down now. The internet’s not working. The wifi.
You’re roughing it.
Sad to see President Bush died. Well he was 94. I never realized that he was shot down too. He was shot down and yet he survived and look what he did with his life. He had a three-year-old daughter died of leukemia. So. But he had an interesting life. So anyways, that’s about it, that’s all I know.
How are you doing otherwise?
How am I doing? I’m alright. I’m just a little stressed with Mom, she’s pulling some stunts that I’m not liking. And I’m a little bit worried about Brady. I just got off the phone with my girlfriend Lizzie not too long ago, Lizzie found six empty bottles of beer up in the loft where they have a TV in her house and she heard Brady up there in the loft, Charlie her boyfriend was with her, he come down and left, and then Brady come down, but she heard Brady talking really funny with the baby like she never does.
Drinking again?
Drinking. And Brady’s lying to the boyfriend too, he doesn’t know about her record. So, she’s got a mess going on there, it’s just not good. I feel a responsibility, you know I am Brady’s godmother, I feel a responsibility to try to help but it’s, I don’t know what to do and Anthony. He’s no help. He doesn’t want to hear anything. He thinks his daughter’s just fine because she puts on a great act for her father. And she’s coming home for Christmas, Anthony sent her airline tickets. I’m debating what I should do, should I talk to her, what should I say.
Do you have a regular relationship with her, have you spoken to her?
I have developed one I guess, talking with her about her future about what she could do. She’s gonna work on it, she’s very. She, she lies about everything, I mean, I can see right through it. But I’m trying to get her to trust me and she does. She has been calling me and and and so I think it’s time for me to say something to her with all of what Lizzie just told me is going on I mean Brady you have to take care of the baby. She won’t put the kid on a bottle, she’s only breast feeding.
Don’t you think you need to decide what is the most important thing to talk to her about? Jason said. You just switched from potential DUI to should the kid be on the bottle. Unloading on her is not going to fly.
I mean her Mom has been unloading on her and that hasn’t had much effect. I mean Lizzie is no shrinking violet. She’s not going to sit back and be passive, I imagine she’s had many occasions to have strong words with Brady, Alice said.
I think someone needs to take a different approach.
Maybe. But Lizzie can’t get past it.
Past what?
Ok here’s what she did: she was drunk out of her mind she gets in her car and she backs up and she hits a car. In the parking lot because she’s drunk and she doesn’t know what she’s doing and so she goes forward and hits another car and somebody saw her do that and took her license plate. And then she goes to drive home or wherever she’s going and she’s stopped for speeding and swerving and then she’s arrested because she’s drunk and then they run her plate and find out she’s got two hit and runs. In that parking lot. So she’s arrested for the drunk driving and two hit and runs. So she’s got what they call a record. She’s got a record.
Ok. But she has a job now, no?
No. When she worked at the restaurant, I found this out, the reason she got fired from the restaurant, when everybody was leaving the table, she was drinking all the drinks that people left behind. She’s a mess. She got this boyfriend after she’s pregnant, this isn’t the same guy that got her pregnant, she’s letting him in her bedroom window, Lizzie found them in the bed together. She’s seven months pregnant and she let’s this guy in and she’s sleeping with this guy. You know how she found out? She went into Brady’s room without knocking, and they, they are on her bed, her twin bed, and she walks in, Lizzie walks in and there’s Brady giving this guy a blow job. I mean this is Donahue for sure.
Yikes. What about her father?
I told you, useless. He won’t even talk to Lizzie. Lizzie has asked him to call her to talk about Brady. He won’t even talk to Lizzie about it. And unfortunately, the whole incident, the first thing that happened with Brady, when she turned 16 she went to live with her father because he promised to buy her a car. And she moved in with her father and she lived there a year and that’s when she first got into trouble because she was home alone all the time because Anthony traveled a lot, you know, he’s hardly ever home and she was partying and she got caught with marijuana and Anthony had to go to court with her. You know Lizzie’s got things on him. From before. On Anthony from before they were married. Some stuff with cocaine. But so. Her problem, I mean her personality is she has what do they call it ADHD and she’s never been treated for it. And her mind just, she cannot focus. But she doesn’t want to be on medicine because her father told her she didn’t need it when she was 8 years old. Anthony refused to let her be on it. Yeah well her doctor when she was 8 years old she was having trouble focusing in school and that and they said that she should take the medicine and it would help her focus and everything and Anthony said no and the doctor said if you don’t put her on this medicine when she’s an adult she will abuse alcohol and or drugs and she’s doing both. She’s doing exactly what the doctor said would happen.
The text came through after he hung up.
<I’m sorry>
<Don’t be. I’ll see you>
<BTW…I’m the whale>
