Don't Disappoint (Ch. 17)
by Martin van Cooper
Welcome back to a special Summer Edition of PILCROW. For the next three weeks, we’ll continue serializing Martin van Cooper’s unpublished novel Don’t Disappoint (runner-up in our last contest, ). 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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The thing about looking back at Clinton’s impeachment and all the sordid—he guesses they’re now still thought of commonly as sordid—scandals from the Clinton White House in the mid-‘90’s is Jason didn’t care then. He wasn’t dialed in. He had reflexively supported the Democrats in the few political arguments he had out loud with other human beings and in all the silent testimonials he produced for the psyche’s hard drive. But now Jason had strong opinions and go-to arguments he’d read online and deploy readily to argue whichever is the minority side in a given exchange which his friends who do the same—argue both sides of issues—tell him is a sign of intelligence. That’s not the only reason Jason does this, but it’s one reason. And something tells him that since he didn’t care enough to be informed then, that he cannot in good conscience now, no matter how well read and verbally and intellectually dexterous he may be, cannot now pass judgment on what happened in 1996.
That said, apparently the first months of their relationship—and it was a relationship, if not relations, whatever he asserted—were characterized by several instances of oral sex with the 42nd president on the receiving end and apparently he didn’t, she stopped before he could, as they used to say in Craigslist ads, go to completion. There was no finish. This is relevant because only after Ms. Lewinski started obtaining free shrink visits from Linda Tripp did their liaisons (Bill and Monica’s) go the full nine, as it were, when Monica was wearing the precious blue dress, raising the specter of entrapment and while certainly by no means exonerating the president of being a bad dude who was taking advantage of a star struck young girl and also a lying piece of shit, it certainly put what was a consensual relationship gone awry in a totally different and not totally less bad light, as far as Clinton was concerned1. But the thing that resonated with me about this fact was that Clinton wanted his presidential knob polished as a sort of security blanket, a childhood bed that he could curl up in (his mother was dying at the time) and draw his teddy bear close and just fucking be loved in some unconditional and non-transactional and physical way—the only truly honest way to give or receive love. Physical, that is. And the guy did it while talking on the phone, apparently multiple times. This was not some bastard womanizer, some horn dog lunatic chasing tail in a high school parking lot: he was in desperate, searing need of pure love and adoration.
Jason was invited to the party because he volunteered as a soccer coach that Fall and the father of one of the kids—his name was Ed—was throwing a giant end of the season bash. Their home’s off Burbank, one of the deep lots, about 8,000 square feet, with an eight-foot concrete wall out front and a metal sliding gate across the drive. He never does this, Ed’s telling him, this is his first and only residential installation. Those are my kids, Maverick and Ace, he painted on the wall. It’s not on the wall. We can remove the boards if I ever want to sell the place. It’s a false wall. But it’s a 30-year home. I treated the boards with a catalytic primer and he came here for three weeks to paint it. They’re adopted, different parents, my sons, but you know they say nature and nurture, the kids look like me. Picture of me when I was 8 next to Mav, you couldn’t tell.
Two gay dudes living together next to you in a suburban house in the Valley and you can’t even remark on it, someone is saying. Mowing their fucking lawn like nothing, sitting in the driveway drinking prosecco, offering you some. Like it’s nothing. Right out there. I’m just saying.
Ed’s wife walks through at this point and Jason is involuntarily re-evaluating her body—in light of this information about the origin of their children—as having not been subjected to childbirth. A J.A.P. (but just then Ed is mentioning his kids’ godparents?!) married a goy and adopted two white kids? Later on, she says to Jason, we’re still figuring this out, meaning getting their kids to school and to after school activities, in the year since they were adopted, related with some nonplussed wonder akin to getting used to the automated driver assist on her new Mercedes.
My parents started a commercial development, real estate development company in Manhattan, Ed is saying. When I was a kid I worked in the trash room, a courier in the mail room, road with some of the contractors. I did it. Went to school, started in architectural design, went to work for a small firm and my father says we got an opening but you’ve gotta earn it. That was 15 years ago. I worked there for a decade and we did some great builds and then I retired. Got married and figured I might as well move to LA. They walk to the backyard, he shows Jason his tortoise. My spirit animal, he’s saying. Rabbits run and hop and they live 5 years. Dogs bark and run and they live to be 10. Turtles move slow and they live to be 100. Good thing your spirit animal isn’t a great white shark, Jason say, inanely, for something to say. Ed smiles.
So, Marco, he like remembers you. Jason is stuck now peripheral to a circle with some women he doesn’t know. He like, he’s all like, where’s Julio and all like I remember Julio picking me up. No not like literally, but to pick him up. He’s in like Montessori. No Montessori, it’s like this, it’s this special kind of preschool you know where they like teach you all these things, you know? He’s doing like math, I mean not math math but like numbers, he’s working with and like reading, he’s not reading but he can recognize words and he’ll be like that’s that.
My son was running around with a light saber and my husband was chasing him and then later he jumped on me.
Your husband?
God no. I wish. No, my son.
Ed materializes back from the ether, in Jason’s ear as though picking up mid-sentence. This one over here it’s called Robot Village. This one hung in the United terminal at LAX. My mother and father were out here to visit and she’s good friends with, one of her really good friends is in the business you know and his wife is an attorney, corporate litigation and my parents are at his, they’re at his house and then they go out for dinner in Brentwood. They’re just in for the weekend. And come to find out, the wife, the Hollywood guys and his wife, they know the artist. So my mom calls me up, puts us in touch and we go over to his studio and this is just in there in amongst a bunch of pieces in his storage area. We got it for, it wasn’t some Basquiat, I’m not going to put up a 2-million-dollar painting with kids running around, we got it for 15 grand. What a great find. And these other ones were like smaller sketches of other robots that he just did and never used and so he decided to screen them onto the painting. See, there’s a hooker robot. Don’t tell the kids. And a car wash robot. A robot librarian.
I put in all the greenscaping. I put in the chain link fence too. So that neighbor over there he’s got like 6 or 8 RVs parked out back, so that’s blocked out. This neighbor over here, we call that side the dump, the Walmart, and—leaning conspiratorially toward Jason—I want to buy that and put in a dirt bike track for the boys.
One of the other kids’ fathers walks up then. He has perfect hair and tanned feet and tattoos on his feet and ankles and is smiling like Wonka is showing him around the factory and he says just then you know what, I think I will take you up on one of those beers.
That table, I had it custom welded, it’s a custom piece. I like to have this whole area open for the kids to explore and create. And did you see that artwork, that’s Ace’s, on the wall there. He points to some type of anthropomorphic blob that looks exactly like something drawn by a 6-year-old. He brought that home from school the other day and I was just blown away. And you know I think it’s from being exposed in the home to the artwork and the colors and the space. His wife is staying busy all this time putting out juice boxes and rearranging plates for pizza and running in and out of the kitchen to fiddle with things on the counter and her dress is tight and things are moving.
Jason’s roommate in college, the same guy who would years later be blown to pieces by an IED in Baghdad, took him home to meet his grandfather, who was in his mid-80’s, during the early stages of release of the most salacious details of the Lewinsky scandal, and before Kenneth Starr would go on to make a best seller out of them. An avid consumer of right wing talk radio, his friend’s grandfather told them that there was an international imbroglio brewing between the United States and the Castro Regime as a result of President William Jefferson Clinton endeavoring in carnal relations with a teenager using a Cuban cigar. My friend’s grandfather told them that the word round the campfire was Castro himself found extreme displeasure and had taken vehement, personal offense to the fact that this American president would dare make such unconventional use of his country’s most famous export. Along with his parents, they were planning an early lunch at Marie Calendars and so this outburst got my friend’s grandfather an extra Paxil and a slightly earlier than normal snort of Bushmills.