The Book of Joe

towel by the pool’s edge so that when I eventually, regretfully climbed out, I could artfully hide the rampant monster in my trunks.
    Showering at Sammy’s house after swimming became a daily necessity, my lone opportunity to spank out my excess sexual tension. Afterward, Sammy and I would head into town in Brad’s car, which I’d been grudgingly lent for the summer while he was away. We’d meet Wayne for burgers or pizza and then see a movie or hang out.
    Sammy and Wayne had hit it off right away. I could see how Sammy’s frenetic nature and constant chatter might rub some people the wrong way, but Wayne’s steady, easygoing demeanor was perfectly suited for it. Sammy seamlessly merged into our rhythm like a traveling musician sitting in with the band, and we became a merry little threesome.
    The days of that blistering summer were fused together like something mass-produced, each one identical to the one before and after it. Long, smoldering afternoons spent in masturbatory fascination with every languid movement Lucy made, each luscious curve and mysterious crevice, and nights hanging out with Sammy and Wayne. Even knowing everything that happened afterward, that was already happening, I remember how much I enjoyed that summer: a hazy, wet, shimmering eternity of thoughtless, menial labor, the splash and smell of chlorinated pool water, and Lucy’s deliciously pornographic body. As far as summers went, you could do a lot worse.

Six
    I thought that I’d recalled Bush Falls rather well when I wrote the book, but as I drive through the town for the first time in seventeen years, I realize that all I’ve had are superficial recollections, cardboard stand-ins for real memories that are only now finally emerging. The corporeal experience of returning is the trigger to long-dormant memories, and as I gaze around my hometown, I’m stunned by the renewed clarity of what I’d buried in my subconscious. Memories that should have long since crumbled to dust from seventeen years of attrition turn out to have been hermetically sealed and perfectly preserved, now summoned up as if by posthypnotic suggestion. There is a sense of violation in learning that, unbeknownst to me, my mind has maintained such a strong connection with the town, as if my brain’s been sneaking around behind my back.
    Bush Falls is a typical if smaller version of many middle-class Connecticut towns, a planned and determinedly executed suburbia where the lawns are green and the collars predominantly white. Landscaping in particular is taken very seriously in Connecticut. Citizens don’t have coats of arms emblazoned above their front doors; they have hedges, fuchsia and pachysandra, flower beds and emerald arborvitae. A neglected lawn stands out like a goiter, the telltale symptom of a dysfunctional domestic gland. In the summer, the hissing of the cicadas, invisible in the treetops, is matched by the muted machine-gun whispers of a thousand rotating sprinklers, some dragged out of the garage after dinner, others installed beneath the lawns and set on timers. Soon, I know, the sprinklers will be put away for the season, replaced by rakes and leaf blowers, but for now they remain heavily in evidence as I drive down Stratfield Road, the main artery connecting the residential section of Bush Falls with its commercial district.
    Even though everything looks pretty much as it did when I left, I know the Falls is suffering. P.J. Porter’s went bankrupt five years ago, resulting in over a thousand lost jobs. While the majority of people in the Falls were able to find new jobs in Connecticut’s then still-solid market, many of them ended up at Internet start-ups, only to be savaged by the overdue collapse of the whole industry at the end of 2000. Now the town is solidly immersed in recession, and every block has at least one FOR SALE sign planted on the front lawn. Even though the houses generally look well maintained and the lawns immaculate, there’s a sense of desperation in this quotidian tidiness, as if now, more than ever, these carefully tended homes are nothing more than facades concealing un-knowable and irreparable damages.
    I turn left onto Diamond Hill Road and drive past my father’s house, which concealed its own share of damage long before Porter’s went belly-up. I slow down to take in the slightly sloping front lawn, at the top of which sits the square two-story colonial in which I grew up. The aluminum siding, a pale shade of