Don't Disappoint (Ch. 7)

by Martin van Cooper

Welcome back to a special Summer Edition of PILCROW. For the next eight-ish weeks, we’ll be serializing Martin van Cooper’s unpublished novel Don’t Disappoint (runner-up in our last contest, back by popular demand).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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When he was in high school a friend’s brother, the lead drummer in their high school marching band, paid for his own ticket to fly to the city to audition for the recently vacated drummer position in the then enormously popular band White Zombie. His brother and him (he played bass) and another guy down the street (lead) had a band, with both his brother and him singing (they were also in a barbershop quartet, which was quite something in the Midwest in the mid 1990’s) and they used to play free concerts for friends in their parents’ basement. He remembered showing up to one of these and expecting the house to look like a Mötley Crüe tour bus. But instead, both his friend’s parents were slightly older than his own, and conservative looking, the mother still sporting a bouffant hairdo and the father dressed like he was watching the Saturn V clear the tower and the décor of the house Rockwellian and the father was actually reading the newspaper by a table lamp and smoking a goddamn pipe when his mother answered the door and the house smelled warm and like supper. The basement had been cleared out and was unfinished which in a Midwestern early century home means concrete floors, concrete and cinder block walls, glass block windows and particle board ceiling. They played Pantera and Sepultura and Sabbath and Cannibal Corpse and his brother took the mic while sitting at the drums between songs and said I see a lot of you standing against the wall and not in the pit. And after a pause, It’s a real shame. His brother didn’t get the gig with White Zombie, I’m not a hundred percent sure if he ever even got an audition, but Joe remarked nonetheless that he, Joe, was planning to move to the city next year after he graduated from high school because that’s where everything happens and that Jason should head out there if, he wanted to.

Jason went to undergrad and then started a PhD in English at a massive school nestled in a hillside in a town of 20,000 in a state where a college football game is the NBA, the NFL and the MLB all rolled up into one every Saturday in the fall. A year into his PhD the wheels came off what had looked to be a sure marriage and three kids with a girl whose father was a dentist in a town called Stalnaker and who herself was in the final throws of a hygienist degree and he realized at the same time that he didn’t have the stomach for a dissertation, which was supposed to be on existentialism in pop culture, which, to even think now about this topic and the proposal he submitted and had approved, makes him dyspeptic. In a fantastic move of pure caprice, he moved to the city in the fall of 2000, to write, he told his parents and began looking for work (he had nothing lined up and simply drove across the country with a carload of books and clothes). When 9/11 happened he was asleep, sleeping off his usual 12’er from the previous night and he realized while watching the story unfold on television that the world had changed and that he was an aspiring writer and that he had absolutely no venue to participate in the biggest journalistic event of his lifetime and that maybe this was pretty undeniable evidence that he ought to do something else. His father had basically tapped out of his marriage when Jason was a senior in high school: his sister had gone off to college the year before and the old man, premeditated or not Jason never had the chance to ask him, up and moved out, moved across town into an apartment and bought a motorcycle, leaving his mother the car and Jason the truck. A month later he was dead, having wrapped the bike around a tree down by the Cuyahoga River riding around midnight. His father had been off the drink since Jason was in middle school and a tox screen came up negative. He wasn’t wearing a helmet, so it was quick, everyone spared protracted vigils. The man had no formal training beyond high school although he could seemingly fix anything mechanical, yet he lacked the soft disdain and uneasiness espoused by the self-taught around those who had gone to school. His father thought it was a great thing that his son loved books, even though he had no use for them himself, preferring to learn by teaching himself and the closest he ever came to scorn or almost passing judgment on his son’s comprehensive ineptitude with all things mechanical¹ – with using his hands to actually make something work—came when Jason was 15 and had just purchased a first beater that needed a brake job and oil change and had invited a friend, Jason had, to come over and work with the old man on the beater in the driveway. His father told him to place the plastic funnel under the oil pan pin and when he registered in his son’s eyes a complete ignorance of where on a vehicle one might find such a feature, and the accompanying crippling shame, paused for what may have only been an extra few milliseconds, perhaps to swallow his confusion at how someone could exist in such a state, his not disdain but disappointment, probably more at himself, for somehow not imparting that knowledge, through imprinting or nurture, on his offspring, and then a millisecond later his acceptance that this was a person he ergo probably was never going to understand, his own son, but then a millisecond later there’s a John Wayne smile, contented but focused eyes and he’s saying actually why don’t you let me handle that and you guys go grab the oil off the back of my truck to save his son from losing face in front of his friend. But also save him from ever knowing his father. Sometimes you have to really be dressed down by someone to know that love is reciprocated. When the grandfathers fought the wars and the fathers worked at the factories and the children were philosophers, what then of their children? Philosophers have no business reproducing themselves was the only conclusion Jason could come to and how much different was he than a philosopher as an unemployed English major? You needed another war to reset the system but when it came, he just watched his friends go. Most days you didn’t even think about it, even dialed in as he was to news after 9/11. There was not enough time after his father moved out and before he died to process any of the whys for this occurrence and afterwards his mother refused to speak of him, not out of disrespect or hatred, he felt, but out of the sheer meaninglessness of everything that his death made so blatant. Was the purpose to raise children, to pay a mortgage, to have a career, to someday be able to buy a motorcycle and call the game on your marriage? All these things he thought she must have wondered but could never get her to speak about in the first years after it happened and then whatever thread still held her to the social contract with family and community was not worth risking on this subject, until it too had finally, abruptly, snapped. There was no other woman, that much Jason had surmised. It wasn’t the old man’s style. He tapped out and just left, leaving her to stew in it. Jason didn’t even remember a blow up—his mother was the shouter, anyways. So he wakes up one early autumn morning in a city where fall doesn’t exist and turns on the TV to find out that some bastards from a cult he’s never heard of, or heard of and not paid attention to, and from a religion that half of his country could not distinguish from that practiced by Gandhi, have declared war on us, the media is telling him a couple hours later, on his country and that there would soon be hellfire raining down on that part of the world and he realized he claimed to be a writer and had nothing to say about this and no vehicle to say anything, even were he not saddled with a shameful, enveloping ignorance, and so with that realization he started applying for teaching jobs and within a month was subbing and then another few months full-time teaching freshman English literature and not thinking at all that he belonged doing anything else. No one held him to the fire. The rule for report cards was no C minuses because that was too close to a D but even when he brought home a D his mother would just frown and light a cigarette and mutter something about life being about choices. His father never said a word. The incapacitating listlessness in the absence of expectations. Not knowing what failure is, even when you are failing.

1. Quite frankly with all things that existed in the real world, in three dimensions. His ineptitude with anything other than ideas.