Thy Neighbor Read online

  But at the time, the house next door was occupied by a real Gatsby type, though, sadly, not one of the old school. The guy threw a lot of big blowout parties, that’s all, with ill-gotten gains of unknown origin and seemingly endless supply. But that’s where the comparison ends.

  Jack Gordon, né Joshua Goldstein, was reliving his bar mitzvah almost every night of the week for the rest of his life, except he was doing it this time the way he as the Dennis Hopper or Peter Fonda of his boyhood hero fetish would have done it. It was like Jews Gone Wild over there, spilling out over his woefully inadequate two-acre property. It was all leather, denim, and the ravages of cheap libation visited like a plague on the holdout Episcopalian neighbors, one of whom described spectacles like Jack Gordon’s as “the lamentable effect of godless shtetl sprawl on what had once been respectable horse country.”

  Not cool. But you could hardly blame the old buzzard for complaining.

  It was a bad scene over at Gordon’s place, and it was never self-contained. I spent enough nights at Dave’s to know. From six p.m. on you got everything from Bob Seger and the Silver Bullet Band to Guns N’ Roses and Poison blasting at criminal decibels and rasping over your skull like iron-filing sandpaper.

  After the cops showed up, always too little too late, and just as you might finally be dropping off to sleep at four in the morning, thinking you were indeed living through the decline of an empire, you’d get the adenoidal whinny of a white-trash trophy wife slicing into your temple like an ice pick.

  “Jack, honey, is that my diaphragm floating in the pool?”

  Vocals just that heinous, I’m telling you. Deadly. Like the very ice pick to the head that killed fucking Leon Trotsky.

  Which, incidentally, is why Dave and I still refer to any chick whose voice gives you that ice pick in the head as a Trotsky, and why we especially enjoy banging the shit out of them from behind in parking lots and public toilets, with one hand clamped over their squealing maws and the other steering them like breed mares by their ponytails.

  It’s standard code at the Swan. We’ll say, “Trotsky at three o’clock,” and this means that one of us has the job of running interference with the target’s friends while the other bumps the sozzled damsel into the nookery of choice and sets about the business of wenching her.

  Poor girls?

  Yeah, well, no one siphoned the ten shots of Apple Pucker down their throats, now, did they? “Willing participant” is, I believe, the phrase. Or is it “informed consent”? Whichever. Same denominator. As for the rough treatment they received from yours truly and Pig Boy, they can all thank Jack Gordon for that. A nasty bit of deferred revenge ongoing against the screechier sex, and all because some errant schlemiel had a taste for tacky broads and had one too many all-night keggers that shattered the pretentious evening peace of Twin Pines.

  But, as I learned via video, Dave took his own revenge much earlier than I did, and more directly.

  And this, as I said, is where things got super strange in a hurry and made me almost regret my choice of quasi-criminal pastimes.

  Not that I couldn’t in part sympathize. I mean, understandably. I knew. Gordon’s deafening escapades could have made a madman of anyone, especially his nearest neighbor. Loud music is, after all, a form of torture employed by the U.S. military.

  And why? Because it works.

  I’ve been there. I should know. My fraternity at school used it to haze the new pledges, and I was among the supplicants the first year they tried it. They locked ten of us in a room the size of most bathrooms for twenty-four hours straight and played the theme song from Cheers on a loop at top volume. We nearly tore each other’s hair and teeth out. After twenty-three hours of that, I would have sucked cock for pocket change at a Shriners convention and given the proceeds to al-Qaeda, just to get my hands on the stereo.

  So I see why Dave went awry. I do.

  It wasn’t that he did what he did. It was the way he did it that really curdled whatever faith I had left.

  I’ve never seen the guy so focused. He was like one of those serial killers in the movies who makes his own hollow-point bullets or curare-dipped darts or whatever the fuck it is that’s supposed to make your home-fabricated ammo most potent. Except, of course, Dave doing this was the Romper Room edition, like what you’d see if a bunch of third graders lost their shit on a cooking show.

  He’d clearly planned the whole thing, made a shopping list, went to what had to have been at least four different stores to get what was on the list, and prepped his lab—that lab being the bathroom, natch.

  One afternoon at about four o’clock, he came into full view of the Sanizephyr with a tote bag full of supplies, and he laid all the contents of the bag on the counter one by one. His materials included the following: one KitchenAid mixer with beater blade and five-quart stainless-steel bowl, one small Tupperware bowl with lid (closed and full to capacity with a substance that, by color and viscosity, I subsequently deduced to be semen), one Pro-Shot 50cc syringe with pistol grip, one 1-ounce bottle of tincture of iodine, two dozen extralarge eggs (white), one 250-milliliter bottle of Norwegian Promise cod-liver oil, one Hot Melt pneumatic industrial glue gun, one stick of traditional crimson sealing wax, one Bic butane cigarette lighter, one Testors model paintbrush, one tabletop 250-watt infrared heat lamp, and one white porcelain mini ramekin of fresh, semisoft cat shit.

  The last offering came courtesy of Trajan, Dave’s then sixteen-year-old obese Maine coon who weighed in at a whopping twenty-nine pounds and whose proportionally sizable intestines had been in an uproar since kittenhood. They were a biohazardous war zone of such offensive and potentially lethal proportions that, after years of prescribing horse doses of metronidazole to absolutely no avail, several vets had refused to go on treating the beast, and his chronic colitis had flourished unchecked ever since. When Trajan took a dump, the stench was strong enough to wake you out of a stupor from three rooms down the hall, as it once did me, and send you scrambling for the pooper-scooper and the matches as though your soul’s salvation depended on it. It was on Trajan’s account, actually, that I lobbied most successfully for the Sanizephyr. Suffice it to say, that bloat-bowelled, bomb-dropping sewerbag never delivered a firm stool in all his miserable life. Ever.

  I guess you can see already why we lost the multiplex audience for our amateur Warhol picture, eh? Even the master of Pittsburgh himself, or John Waters, for that matter, and his cack-eating star Divine, would have blanched at the inclusion of Trajan’s turds.

  Cruel and fucking unusual is what that is. Really.

  But that’s the id for you when it’s unsupervised.

  Speaking of which, did I mention that through all this organizational preamble and surgical prep Dave was naked? Yeah. There was that, too. Not such a surprise, considering. There were way too many sartorially unfriendly ingredients going into the devil’s roux he was concocting. Purposely so, as it turned out.

  Wisest just to work commando and shower afterward, which he (sensibly?) did.

  Anyway, first things first. Down to work.

  Dave lifted the head on the KitchenAid mixer, revealing its distinctive spade-shaped beater blade. He removed the five-quart bowl, held it to his groin like a bedpan, and pissed into it. A lot. He must have been drinking Mountain Dew all day or taking Kitty’s hypertension medication, or both, because he let forth a flood that went on for what seemed like a full minute or more.

  He then reached in turn for the containers of fish oil, iodine, and semen and emptied the contents of each into the bowl of piss. He placed the bowl back in position under the mixer head, bent in the beater blade, adjusted the machine’s controls to the slowest setting, and left the slop to mix on low while he busied himself with phase two.

  He opened the two cartons of eggs, took each egg, and, one at a time, very carefully inserted the syringe into its rounder end. Ge
ntly, he guided the syringe in and out of the hole he’d made, puncturing the membrane. He then reversed the plunger setting on the pistol grip and extracted the burst yolk and albumen in a single neat draw. He squirted this glop into the toilet each time, replaced the intact eggshell in the carton, and proceeded to the next egg, until all twenty-four of them were empty and neatly aligned in rows.

  This task completed, he reached over and turned off the mixer, removed the bowl from its fixture, peered into it, and sniffed its contents with gagging satisfaction. He then laughed maniacally, holding the bowl aloft in triumph and dancing what I can only describe as some sort of demented Highland fling, until he had to sit on the edge of the bathtub to catch his breath.

  When he’d recovered, he stood, a bit unsteadily, brought the bowl back to the cluttered countertop, and proceeded as carefully and meticulously as before with phase three.

  Twenty-four separate times—count ’em, twenty-four—Dave filled the syringe with the fetid sepia slop from the mixing bowl and, through the same hole he’d already made, injected it into each empty egg. He then sealed the hole with the glue gun.

  Now, I don’t know about you, but I’m thinking that right about here is when any moderately disturbed person, let alone a neighbor driven mad by tinnitus, would have stopped. Am I right? I mean, enough is enough. Dave had more than covered the bases set out in whatever vandal’s handbook of down and dirty practical jokes he was working from.

  Seriously. If, in the mind of the prepubescent vigilante, stink, slime, and stain are the gold standard of noisome projectiles, Dave had done his worst and then some. Any normal revenge-bent eleven-year-old would have just thrown the eggs as is and left it at that, or gone with the tried-and-true water balloon and considered himself well served.

  Not Dave.

  He is now standing back, looking at his rows of perfect rejiggered eggs. Sealed. Shut tight. For all intents and purposes done. And I’m guessing he’s feeling proud of his work, elated by his inventiveness, and his mind, in celebration, is free-associating, maybe ringing off with Stevie Wonder—“Signed, Sealed, Delivered, I’m Yours”—and he’s thinking, “Yes, yes, of course, I have done something masterful, sealed what is to be delivered. Only one thing remains. I must sign my work.”

  Yeah, that must have been it.

  I mean, Christ. Your guess is as good as mine.

  Fuck if I know what the beasty homunculus wreaking havoc in Dave’s right brain was thinking. The deeper wherefores are beyond me. Hell, I defy any alienist to explain it.

  One thing’s sure. He’d planned his last flourishes from the start. He’d bought the wax and the paintbrush. He had the cat shit warming under the heat lamp. So whatever possessed him had possessed him at the Home Depot and beyond, and now he was just carrying out its orders to the last.

  Phase four.

  He took the paintbrush, one of the narrow-tipped sort that’s meant for gilding or painting model airplanes, dipped it in the magma of cat shit, and proceeded to paint what, given the incarnadine quality of Trajan’s stool, looked like a battle-muddied St. George’s Cross around the girth and height of each egg. One horizontal band of bloody poo, one vertical. Going all the way around. Cruciform on two sides.

  Eat your heart out, Andres Serrano.

  That completed, he took the Bic lighter, held it beneath the stick of sealing wax, dribbled a dime-size dollop onto the top of each egg, and imprinted it with the signet ring he wore on his right middle finger.

  The last abstracted fuck-you, perhaps?

  Or do I give him too much credit?

  I didn’t know at the time what was engraved on the ring. I’d never noticed it before and I’ve never seen it on his finger since, but if it was his initials, I guess you have to give the guy some credit for chutzpah, or just dumb belligerence, because it was like putting his fingerprint on the weapon and saying, “Come get me. I’ll be in the bunker out back with my canned goods and my RPGs.”

  Fucking lunatic.

  And they could have traced him that way, too, if Dave hadn’t hidden or dispensed with the ring and, more to the point, if the partygoers at Jack Gordon’s that night hadn’t been too drunk and generally disreputable to be credible, even as they stood there rankly splattered with the evidence.

  The authorities who investigated the scene—the scene being, of course, Jack’s two rowdy acres, pool deck, and aghast guests—might well have classified Dave’s salvo as a hate crime, if we had had that legislation in this state at the time.

  The St. George’s Cross, which was found and identified (or interpreted) as such on some of the less fractured eggshells on Jack’s lawn, was seen as a clear indication that the perpetrator was affiliated with the British National Front, or some loosely grafted arm thereof, operating in the disgruntled WASP diaspora, and had carried out his act of vandalism in a spirit of virulent, if shockingly puerile, anti-Semitism.

  The letters DOA, which were found imprinted on one of the uncracked wax seals, were seen as an especially sinister touch, but were never conclusively linked with our hero Dave Alders, because his birth and other official records had his middle name as Daniel. Besides, even if what had been interpreted as an O, and assigned such a chilling import, had actually been a D, for Daniel, a true monogram would have read DAD, not DDA, so the case (weak, at best) against the blubbered bandit was dropped.

  Dave must have dispensed with the evidence before he stepped out that night with his bag full of bombs, because none of the goodies—the glue gun, the wax, the syringe, the ring, etc.—were ever found. Trajan himself disappeared that night, too, thereby thwarting any link the county crime lab might have made by means of distinctive intestinal flora. I doubt the notion of a fecal smear ever occurred to those cruller-munching Keystones down at the precinct, but Dave wasn’t taking any chances.

  Of course, I had the whole thing on tape, but that was mine to do with as I liked and when I chose.

  And choose I would. Make no mistake about it.

  Meanwhile, every last mucky detail of the episode found its way into our town annals, mostly because the local press went wild over it for weeks, coining all the predictable ringers, e.g., “Fabergé Fiend Fouls Ferragamos.” (As if anyone at a Jack Gordon party, except possibly Jack himself, was wearing anything fancier than Frye motorcycle boots. But whatever.)

  To this day, that “spiteful prank of partygoer pelting,” as one tabloid described it, is known across the predominately Jewish southeastern portion of our state as Eggnacht.

  * * *

  And there, my friends, you have it.

  All set down.

  Thus, alas, was my crass and terrible introduction to the bizarre bazaar of clandestine photography. I sat goggle-eyed in my basement control room, glued to the monitor, double- and triple-checking the red record light every few minutes, just to be absolutely sure that it was still illuminated and that I was indeed getting all of this.

  Truth be told, this abject entertainment was just the right over-the-top shock-and-awe antidote to all the psychic pain, terror, and confusion I was in because of my parents’ deaths. I required hyperstimulation and distraction every bit that strong to shut out all the poltergeists of speculation and memory that came crashing in on me full tilt if given the slightest chance.

  And that’s, I guess, what got me hooked on spying, and what kept it going so elaborately for so long. The need to abscond from myself, to throw off the hounds of my own conscience.

  I watched that monitor—or later, my many monitors—for hours and hours on end, and drank until I lost consciousness, finding in that blackness a remote-channeled respite from the horror of the too immediately real.

  * * *

  Forgive me, Father, for I have sinned. It’s been thirteen years since your last confession.

  This is mine.

  I make it in the hope of meted penan
ce.

  5

  I am so afraid.

  Can I say that to you? Or to me? Myself. Nick Walsh. Whoever you are/I am. Can I admit that? Can I stand it?

  It’s true. The truest thing I can express.

  I’m afraid.

  Afraid that I am my father.

  God. How awful. How truly, terrifyingly awful.

  And yet I so want to be him. I really do. I have always wanted that. And I know that that probably doesn’t make any sense.

  But I want it to make sense. I want it to make sense in the telling. Because my father was not a bad man. He really wasn’t. That can be true, even while all the rest is true as well.

  It can.

  It is. It was.

  I remember. I remember so much when I let myself. If I can stand the sear of it, like a hot iron on my tongue, the hiss of contact, the rebellion of every sense against the information.

  I remember the trips to the Christmas tree farm when I was a boy, the dry, dry cold and the cerulean sky, the blinding sun splash on the powdered snow, feet deep in places, like sifted flour on the untracked ground, and on the boughs of every tree.

  I can hear our boots squeaking on the trail, where other trekkers have trampled the snow into trenches deep and narrow. I can feel the tiny hairs in my nostrils tightening, and I can see Dad’s yellow leather work-gloved hand toting the rusted handsaw.

  I can feel his competence in that hand, his control, and I can relax into the day and be an animal under the sun and in the air, purely alive and without agenda, following behind.

  He will decide which tree is best, because he will know, having judged its lean and its symmetry. He will make a show of consulting me and he will note my objections, if I have any and if they are sensibly put forth.

  These are the terms of the discourse. You must make an argument, a case, for the thing you want to express. This is what lawyers do, and so it is what the children of lawyers must do also. This much I know, even at eight, or seven, or six. As far back as that, surely. Emotion will get no response, except occasionally more emotion, and the only emotion Dad shows is anger, often channeled to disdain.