The Book of Joe

Falls.
    I sit behind the wheel of my silver Mercedes the next morning, idling at the curb just outside the Kinney garage where it’s usually parked, paralyzed by indecision concerning which route to take for the two-and-a-half-hour drive. It’s a clear, room temperature morning, but the discerning eye will note a visible diminishment of exposed flesh on the women on their way to work. Summer is over, and I can’t recall its even having arrived. I’m stalling again. I don’t want to go. My father hasn’t ever been there for me. Why should I now have to be there for him? It’s not like he’ll notice me anyway, what with him being in a coma and all.
    But I know I’ll go, for the same reason Brad calls me every year with halfhearted invitations to various holiday meals.
    Because that’s what you do. When you have a younger brother living on his own in Manhattan, you call him around the holidays, bursting with artificial familiarity and contrived bon-homie. And when your father has a life-threatening stroke in his sweet spot, you shelve seventeen years of bad blood and drive out to be there. Not to necessarily help, or even offer support, but simply because it’s where you belong. Blood will separate, if need be, but its call is primordial, and it won’t be refused.
    The Motorola V.60 mounted on my dashboard rings and I flip it open, activating the car’s speakerphone. “Hello?”
    “Misogynist!”
    Natalie.
    “You’re a petty, whining, self-absorbed schmuck without a clue how to love or be loved. You’ll never understand what it means to care for another person more than you care for yourself, and you’ll die miserable and alone!”
    I want to tell her that I’m miserable and alone now, but she’s already hung up.
    “You have a nice day too,” I say softly, affectionately even, and, with a final, epic sigh, throw the car into drive and turn onto Ninety-sixth Street, toward the West Side Highway. It’s a safe bet your world has gone to shit when an angry phone call from a bipolar ex-girlfriend will probably be the high point of your day.
    It’s nine-thirty A.M., still theoretically rush hour, but I’ll be driving north, against traffic. Keeping one eye on the road, I reach absently into the messy heap of CDs scattered on the seat beside me, an eclectic assortment symptomatic of a vague and misguided effort to transcend my actual age. It’s not necessarily that I’m afraid of aging; I just refuse to do it alone. And so, at thirty-four, I’m listening to Everclear, Blink 182, Dashboard Confessional, Foo Fighters, and a host of other contemporary stuff. My audio Rogaine. I’ve somehow managed to beat the odds and keep a full head of hair, but that’s really beside the point. We’re all going bald somewhere.
    Besides, I come from the eighties, a neon, hair-sprayed decade from which very little music made it out alive. When was the last time you heard Men at Work, Thompson Twins, or Alphaville on a mainstream radio station? The music from my youth has aged poorly and is now like a joke out of context. You had to be there.
    And yet my fingers continue to dig, past No Doubt and Ben Folds, until they locate an old copy of Springsteen’s Born to Run. There are some things that do transcend time and age, and the Boss is one of them. I slide the CD in, and it instantly takes me back, in that way only music can, to my bedroom in Bush Falls, where I wore out the record on the Fisher stereo I’d gotten as an eighth-grade graduation gift from my father. That was about nine months after my mother died, and he was still handing out consolation prizes. The stereo had been his grand finale, and soon after that he retreated permanently to his den to get drunk nightly in the company of his old high school basketball trophies, leaving the house only for work and Cougars games.
    As I drive through the tolls in Riverdale, I dial Owen’s office number. His anal-retentive secretary, Stuart, answers in a crisp, officious voice. “Owen Hobbs’s office.”
    “Can I have Owen, please?”
    “Mr. Hobbs is in a meeting right now,” he says automatically. “May I ask who’s calling?”
    “It’s Joe Goffman.”
    “Oh, Mr. Goffman!” Stuart gushes, suddenly the epitome of warmth and graciousness. “How have you been? I didn’t recognize your voice.”
    “That’s because we rarely speak.” Stuart is a typically arrogant gatekeeper, a self-important poseur Owen keeps around for the sheer amusement of it, and