The Night Listener : A Novel

little…vivid sometimes. Maybe we both are. It’s just a mechanism, sweetie. It’s how writers explain things to themselves.”
    “I know,” he said, with only a trace of irony.
    Jess, of course, had mechanisms of his own. A rough childhood and a decade of near-death experience had turned him into a hardcore skeptic. He distrusted most things until they were proven certainties, until they seemed incapable of disappointing or betraying him.
    “Will you talk to him again?” I asked.
    “If he wants to. I gave him my number. Don’t these calls get expensive for them?”
    “Donna doesn’t seem to mind. It gives him something to do, I guess. And I call him sometimes.” Jess’s eyes darted into the coffeehouse where his buddies were deep in conversation. “I should get back.”
    “I know.”
    “Are you okay?” he asked.
    I nodded.
    “Are you really writing?”
    I rolled my eyes.
    Jess smiled benevolently. “It’ll come. Don’t sweat it.” His face slipped into a scowl when he was jostled by a chubby guy in flannel headed for the terrace with a tray of cinnamon rolls.
    “These fucking Bears,” Jess muttered, and went back inside.
    When I was about Pete’s age I took a cross-country bus trip to New Mexico with the other boys in my Explorer post. We were heading for Philmont Scout Ranch, where most of us would experience the West for the first time. I remember our excitement when we learned there really was a Dodge City, and the rumble that ran through the bus when we heard we would stop there to buy cowboy hats. The other guys went for the ten-dollar model, a cheesy fake with wire in the rim, obviously intended for children. I spotted the word “Stetson” on an upper shelf and decided to go for the best: a mole-colored dome of genuine felt that screamed authenticity. It would take most of my spending money, but my souvenir would be one for the ages.
    Alas, the hat was less suggestive of Steve McQueen (the person my mother said I most resembled) than of Tom Mix in one of those silly silent westerns. I learned this the hard way when I wore the bulbous monstrosity back to the bus, only to be greeted by a burst of rude laughter and a new nickname—Penishead—that would dog me for the rest of the trip. I told myself I’d be vindicated once the hat had been properly blocked in a mountain stream, but the taunts continued. I shed secret tears that night when we bunked at a nearby army base. And I considered thumbing into Dodge early the next morning, so I could throw myself on the mercy of the haberdasher and beg for my forty dollars back. But I knew there was no undoing the damage I’d already done.
    I was never very happy at camp, and Philmont was no exception.
    I became the Designated Dork—an easy mark for the other boys—who, oddly, had never been that mean to me back in Charleston. This was the wilderness, though, and all rules were apparently off, so I kept to myself as much as possible and counted the days to my release. The only break in my misery came after a huge thunderstorm, a biblical downpour that loosened our tent pegs and drenched us to the bone. We were rescued by some Yankees at a neighboring campsite—New Jersey boys, as I recall—who shared their food and dry clothes with us. That night, as the rain pounded down, we joined them around their campfire. One of them put his arm across my shoulders so I could inhabit his poncho, and urged me to lean against him for warmth. The comfort I felt was a revelation. I can still conjure up the smell of that mildewy tarp, the toasty warmth of his chest against my back, those rough Yankee vowels forming so close to my Southern ear.
    I had learned to jerk off earlier that year, but the experience had seemed more of a medical emergency than an act of lust. At Philmont I became an expert. I would jerk off in my sleeping bag after Taps, drawing on the images of the day: those olive-skinned Yankees in their wet underwear, the loinclothed braves of the Order of the Arrow, the time Bo Brandt dropped his shorts to prove to us how he could stick the tip of his little finger in his pee-hole. And when Taps was too far off, I would lock myself in the outhouse and pound away. It was there that Penishead (a limber lad in those days) made the useful discovery that he could suck his own dick—or at least, with some effort, lick the end of it. It wasn’t exactly Nirvana, but it was a lot closer than he’d ever been to his heart’s desire.
    This came back