Read Online Knuckleheads by Jeff Kass - Free Book Online Page B

mistake.
    Still, I have never touched a woman as beautiful as Natalie.
    Nancy may not be a toasty oven-woman of a person, but she’s honest. She’s counting on me. We’ve set a date for next April and our parents are excited. They will help us with the down payment on our house. I have had fun today, no doubt, and a bit of luck, but there will not be any grand moments of defiance. I will not, literally or figuratively, throw any golf bags into a pond and strut blithely from the course of my life as if I’m some kind of fuck-it-all legend. I will not be ripping anything. I will be marrying Nancy and playing it safe.
    Still, I have never touched a woman as beautiful as Natalie.
     
    A few years ago I represented Gordon during his divorce. It was an easy job. The split was amicable and all Gordon wanted was to keep the health club membership in his name and to have Lenora put it in writing that she wouldn’t work out there anymore. “If I’m gonna have to convince a whole new slate of women that I’m worth doing,” he told me, “I have to get myself in shape. I can’t be spending hours at the gym if she’s there too, if she’s trying to build herself a new body to share with other dudes.”
    Lenora saw the logic in that argument and the whole thing was settled in a trio of brisk two-hour meetings. “It’s not that I don’t love you, Gordon,” she said to him as they left my office for the last time. “It’s that I’m not sure I know how to love anyone. I’m not sure I even love myself.”
    Gordon described this assessment as both truth and bullshit. “What she’s saying is true, but she has no understanding of it. She doesn’t know how to love anyone, especially herself, and she has no clue about how to learn. She’s just mouthing those words like the doctor told her to in therapy.”
    “What will you do now?” I asked him.
    “I’ll be me,” he said. “I’ll go to the gym. I’ll make money. I’ll lose more hair. I’ll meet new women. I’ll be all right.”
    Immediately after the divorce, we hung out quite a bit. Not at night when he presumably chased women—“I’m having success in that department,” he’d tell me—but we’d meet twice a week for breakfast at a beat-up diner. “Best pancakes in the city,” Gordon said. “Good coffee too. None of that tapioca-machiatto absurdity.”
    Once I asked him if he ever heard what happened to Newfeld and Bloch.
    “Bloch died. Massive stroke. Newfeld’s still alive. Stopped playing golf though. Ninety years old and still goes to the club to criticize the soup and terrorize the waitresses.”
    “How’d you ever make it through loops with those guys? How’d you survive that?”
    “How you survive anything, man. How I survived Lenora. You just go inside yourself and think about something different. Think about how the world would be better if you had more control over it, how one day you will.”
    He went back to eating his pancakes. He didn’t like to cut the whole stack and then spear large syrup-soaked chunks with his fork. Instead, he separated the pancakes like an Oreo cookie and chewed through them one layer at a time. What he was saying felt to me like truth, but with some bullshit mixed in too.
    “That’s all you did?” I said. “Just sucked it up and imagined a brighter day?”
    He paused then, mid-chew, looked at me like he’d trusted me with the dissolution of his marriage and I’d managed to prove I was no longer a retard. Then he chuckled. “It’s easier to ignore a couple of bitter bastards when you’re not worried all the time about your hard-on.”
    I looked out the window, saw the beginning of snow, how it swirled over the black roof of the hardware store across the street like somebody was puffing soft, mint-flavored crystals.
    “Actually, there’s one other thing I used to do,” he said. “You remember how Johnny Jones used to cheat for members and give them better lies?”
    I nodded.
    “I did the exact