The Book of Joe

connected to his nightly obsessive review of game tapes. The coach in his boxers, watching teenaged boys run and sweat as he pulls and twists his way to violent, angry orgasm. It’s pure fiction, petty and mean-spirited, but I’ve never felt an ounce of remorse for writing it, in part because I hold Dugan responsible for what happened to Sammy and in part, I guess, because I am petty and mean-spirited.
    I look at Brad. “So you work for Dugan.”
    “That’s right,” he says pointedly.
    “I imagine he wasn’t too pleased with my book.”
    “You think?”
    “His wife either, I guess.”
    “Seems that way.”
    “I’m sorry,” I say to Brad, although I’m not sure I am. “I guess it couldn’t have been too comfortable working for him when the book came out.”
    “He didn’t take it out on me,” Brad says evenly. Then, looking directly at me, he adds, “Most people didn’t.”
    “Glad to hear it,” I say, getting to my feet. “Are you done?”
    “Yeah. But you barely touched your burger.”
    “It tastes like milk shake,” I say.

Nine
    Memory is never beholden to chronology. Even though I know my nephew, Jared, is now eighteen, in my mind he’s still the scared fourteen-year-old I last saw that night in my apartment a few years ago. So when I come upon him stripped down to his underpants, rolling around on my father’s living room couch with a girl in an equal state of undress, I am doubly surprised. The girl, upon hearing me enter the room, lets out a piercing shriek and dives gracelessly behind the couch for cover while Jared reflexively yanks up the tangled pile of clothes from the floor and pulls them onto his lap.
    “Shit, I’m sorry,” I say, spinning on my heel and quickly leaving the room. I seem oddly predestined to be continually interrupting my relatives in midcoitus. There’s a pattern forming here that might merit future study: the observation of lovemaking rather than the making of love. Always the bridesmaid and so forth.
    “It’s cool,” Jared says, and I realize that he’s talking to the girl behind the couch. “It’s not my dad.” A minute later he joins me in the hall, pulling up his jeans as he walks. “Hey, Uncle Joe,” he says. “How are you doing?” Now horny, naked teenagers are calling me uncle.
    “Not as good as you, I guess,” I say. He snorts and casually buttons his fly one-handed, then stands up straight and looks at me. He’s grown significantly since I last saw him and is now over six feet tall, lean and broad like his father. He tucks his long dark hair behind his ears, the lobes of which are marred with a wide assortment of gold and silver hoops and studs. Seeing the earrings, and the small patch of hair just beneath his lower lip, I instantly understand the quiet frustration Brad expressed earlier.
    “I’m sorry,” I say. “I didn’t think anyone would be here.”
    Jared runs his fingers through his hair and shrugs. “We were just ... ”
    “Yeah.”
    “I thought you were my dad,” he says. “I would have been totally fucked, man.”
    “From where I was standing, you looked about five minutes away from that anyway,” I say.
    He smiles at me. There’s an easygoing manner about him, a relaxed cool. He speaks in short, soft bursts and exudes a charismatic intelligence. There are no outward signs of anger in him, like you see in so many teenagers with a laundry list of things to prove to the world, but only a slightly sullen impatience typical of his age, evidenced in the way his eyes distractedly wander around me without ever coming to rest. “I hope you’re not pissed,” he says.
    “What red-blooded American teenager can resist an empty house?” I say. “It’s practically your patriotic duty to be in here with a girl.” I hook the strap of my duffel bag over the head of the banister as I did a million times before, a lifetime ago. The act, completely instinctive, sends a flutter through my stomach, and for the briefest instant I can smell my childhood again.
    “What happened to your shirt?” Jared says.
    “A woman poured her drink on me.”
    My nephew grins. “Chicks.”
    “This chick was upwards of sixty years old.”
    “Why did she do it?”
    “She had her reasons.”
    “Hey,” he says, absently rubbing his impressive abs. “I really liked your book.”
    I raise my eyebrows. “Well, that would put you in the minority in this town.”
    “Literacy in general puts you in the minority in this town,” he says.