A Bitter Plague Of Kyles

“He…had a vague and modest idea of himself as a legendary figure.” –John Cheever

I say silly things in public. (With pursed lips, like I’ve got a pebble under my tongue.) I make sweeping claims. If it comes at you in the shape of a whisper or a whistle instead of a scream, maybe you won’t take it so hard. The other day, I asked the chatty, Hawaiian-shirted cashier at Trader Joe’s if she had heard about the sandstorm in Cairo that filled in all the swimming pools and dammed up the Nile. Dunes to the Sphinx’s nose. Cheever’s besotted bather wouldn’t stand a chance in the realm of the pharaohs. What a world. You can’t vote till you’re eighteen, buy booze and cigarettes till you’re twenty-one, or fuck your cousin ever, but at fifteen-and-a-half you sure as hell can drive a multi-ton steel pod powered by internal combustion on America’s hundred-mph roadways. 

In the shower, I sing Johnny Cash songs at the top of my lungs. My favorite is the one about the outlaw Sam Hall. Damn your eyes! My neighbor bangs his disapproval on the wall. He’s often cooking curries. Cowboy songs must not pair well with Deccan cuisine. I used to be in a band, but until you’re famous, you’re just noise. My neighbor feeds the pigeons on our shared windowsill. Crackers, strips of coconut. The flying rats coat the ledge outside my bedroom with barium-white shit and clots of oily feathers. Something unsavory must transpire in a brain that enters REM inches from a canvas of excrement. But anything’s permissible if it’s in a dream.

I hold signs outside of TJ’s that say things like We’ve Discovered Everything Except How to Stop Killing Each Other Off if It’s Good For Business. Too many words, but no one’s ever accused me of being succinct. At least once a week, a protein-hungry finance bro in a polo or a quarter-zip hurls abuse my way, dubbing me schizophrenic as he navigates the automatic sliding doors with his cartons of eggs. I wear homemade Ted Kaczynski t-shirts. I, too, am a failed academic and feel a certain kinship. I have the title of every book found in Ted Kaczynski’s Montana cabin written down on a notepad I keep in the drawer of a bureau I inherited from my grandfather. Sometimes I check out the titles from the library. I must be on some kind of government watchlist. The notepad with the Ted books rests under a box of condoms. I rarely get to use any of the condoms. They’re just there for motivation. Daily reminders of rejection fuel fires hotter than hell.

 My grandfather called all blonde women Sue and all European guys Polack. He was a refrigerator salesman and a part-time rodeo clown. He ran over his own foot with a gas-powered push mower and contracted a fatal bedsore on his shoulder while convalescing. Is my contrarianism a product of environment or genetics? Who’s to say? Tomato, to-mah-to.

 My favorite news stories are the ones where genetically modified babies turn out to be mutants. I also like grandmothers who surrogate for their own womb-deficient daughters. Tabloid stuff. The New York Post. Sensationalism weaponized for crass political effect. A personal goal is to get divorced in my fifties and have a girlfriend who’s two or three years older than my teenage children. I’d like to have a weeklong affair with a Jewish woman I meet at a Caribbean resort who’s otherwise happily married back on the mainland. (A hunch: exploitation and generational sorrow produce lovers well-versed in the rituals of pleasure’s infrequent oases.) 

I have only one tonsil. Sometimes I show it to the teller at the bank. He crinkles his nose behind the bulletproof glass and says, Why, Lerner, why? (My dear boy, that’s precisely the question we all ought to be asking.) Everyone in this town knows my name. I have an old-fashioned name because my grandfather’s my namesake. Someone with my moniker should be a collector of antique bicycles with three-speed British-made hubs. Half-baked puns on my name throughout my school years spilled into my professional life. I’ve heard them all. Instructor Lerner, how cute! Like George Carlin, my mom thought names like Kyle, or Jackson, or Brady to have as much backbone as a snake. She hisses at boys with such names. Joke’s on her that snakes are vertebrates! (The misanthropic comic hardly would’ve found my name suitably virile, but my mom made the rules—Complaints and Grievances didn’t air until I was already nine.) I graduated from high school on the sixty-fourth anniversary of D-Day. My mom made a sign that said Storm the Beaches of Life, Lerner! which many in the audience found distasteful. She got into an argument with an eighty-year-old veteran who had to be restrained by a school resource officer. 

My mom’s a medium who’s been embroiled in a decade-long legal dispute with the township over how big the sign in her front yard advertising her services may be. Like many mediums, she works from home. Neighbors don’t want their properties devalued or their social credibility diluted by a sign advertising proximity to the underworld. Even though in secret, many of them visit her to talk to dead lovers, parents, children. In the words of John Prine, That’s the way the world goes round. When she’s drunk (Pinot Grigio), my mom invariably recounts going to senior prom with the town’s current mayor. Sweet, but a little pushy, is her description of His Honor. 

A young mother in yoga pants and a downy, name-brand parka suited to, but a century late for, the Shackleton expedition calls the police on me for eating an unsliced, raw cucumber in the park. (To my grandfather, a guy who donned chaps and face paint when he wasn’t hawking Frigidaires, she would’ve been Sue. But I know better. This generation favors trendier names to make their bearers feel they aren’t a dime a dozen). She complains that my behavior makes her and her young sandy-haired son, Baxter, feel threatened. These silver-spoon types will misconstrue anything they don’t like as a cause for alarm, even healthy eating habits! But the cops know me as the local Ted Kaczynski fan. They’ll take any excuse to move me along. 

I put up flyers for a Fans of Ted meet-and-greet at the library. Nearly the whole community college girls’ soccer team shows up. None of them were my students. Phew! There’s a gorgeous young Ecuadorian on the boys’ soccer team named Ted Moreira, and they think this is his fan club. I changed my discussion points so as not to disappoint them. We compile a list of every fact we know about Ted Moreira. We eat animal crackers. I hoard all the elephants and tell the girls to consider this my collection of club membership dues. Information just odd enough that they take it in stride. A few eyerolls, but no one solicits an explanation. The girls bicker over who knows more about Ted. The librarian asks us to keep it down. The undisputed champion of Ted Knowledge is the star forward with crimped hair, Christina Applegate. (No relation to the actress. When I ask, she claims she’s never even heard of her famous namesake). I congratulate Christina on her thorough research. The other girls are jealous, and they accuse me of being a pervert. They tell the librarian I’ve been staring at Christina’s boobs for the duration of the meeting. They employ the case-closing terms desperate and freak. I’m expelled from the premises by a clubfooted security guard named Doug. I’m ousted as club president at the inaugural meeting. 

In protest, I file a complaint via email with the Southern Poverty Law Center denouncing the Fans of Ted as a domestic terrorist organization. That’ll teach those ungrateful, hormonal gum-chewers. (On second thought, they’ve probably already forgotten me. Their memories have been economized by a steady diet of TikTok, short-circuited by synaptic paroxysms of pleasure and outrage. To exist in the twenty-first century is to be guilty of recency bias. What’s a warhead matter when your job’s threatened by AI? Who cares what’s happening in Congress if there are cute viral pygmy hippos?) No one at the SPLC responds. Not even to dismiss my request as petty, juvenile, and without footing. I’m a prophet without a home.

 I’d included my address on the meet-and-greet flyer for any true believers wanting to visit the Fans of Ted National Headquarters. Feeling sorry for me, Christina Applegate appears at my apartment, where we drink bottles of blue Gatorade in the bathtub because there are crumbs in my bed. I have no couch or table. She holds my hand. Her fingers are long and lithe, the fingers of a concert pianist. She tells me she hopes I don’t mind, but she’s just practicing for Ted. I do not mind. Ted, dear Ted, dear, dearest Teddy, she whispers while caressing my palm, eyes closed in rapturous fantasy. I sing “Sam Hall” at the top of my lungs when she scoots herself closer to me in the tub. My curry-crazed neighbor pounds on the wall. Christina tells me somberly that she respects a man who has enemies. I regale her with the saga of my firing as an adjunct music instructor. I’d thrown a stack of sheet music at a recalcitrant pupil in a practice room. By the student’s own admission, he’d chosen beginner piano as a last resort elective and had been scrolling Instagram at the time of my assault. The college’s judicial committee refused to interpret the gesture as motivational à la the cymbal Jo Jones pitched at Charlie Parker. Christina sighs politely, a breathy effusion confusingly situated somewhere between pathos and ennui. 

When I ask, she explains the process by which she crimps her hair—wash hair, braid tightly whilst still wet, let dry, release braids once dry, a two-to-three-hour regimen. I never see her again. She runs away to Las Vegas with Ted: typical adolescents. Before she leaves, she complains to me about the local movie theater, The Rat (short for Ratner, established 1962), being converted to loft-style apartments by a developer called Regency Prospects. In her memory, I pen editorial screeds and send them to the more open-minded of the two hometown papers, criticizing Regency Prospects for its pernicious opportunism. Soon there will be a bitter plague of Kyles, Jacksons, and Bradys sterilizing our town’s cultural possibilities, I suggest. The coiffed blond-haired, hard-bodied yuppie aesthetic will whitewash our varied milieu. It’s only a matter of time before the taquerias are rebranded in the style of some suburban marketing major’s south of the border fever dream. Only a matter of time before the water fountains emit rosé. Only a matter of time before the sidewalks are cluttered with eight-hundred-dollar strollers. The Rat is domino number one. 

I submit my jeremiads under the pseudonym Sylvester Kubiak, a concerned patriot (of Polish extraction). None are published. My soul is a factory of chaos. I research job opportunities in faraway cities, but learn you can’t fly these days unless you have a special gold star on the upper right corner of your ID card. I spend five hours in line at the local DMV only to be told I haven’t brought the appropriate documents. I’m thirsty, tired, and forgot my harmonica, so instead I debate the telltale signs of Quentin Tarantino’s foot fetish with a cinephile in line. The cinephile moved here from El Salvador because she thought America would be like it is in the movies. When she discovered she’d been hoodwinked, she stayed here anyway because her friends and family back home still think America’s like the movies, and she doesn’t want to break their hearts. She’s here with an International Driver’s Permit, hoping to get an official state license. She commends QT’s artistry but thinks he should be lynched for that Uma Thurman car crash. 

Speaking of lynching, there’s a water jug in the DMV’s lobby with a stack of conical paper cups that look like origami Klan hoods, just a bit less droopy. My companion asks me to hold her place in line while she gets a cup. She offers to get me one too, but I drink only blue Gatorade because, despite what my dad used to tell me about its tastelessness, I’m sensitive to the flavor of the fluoride fortifying our water. (I hate milk also, the way lip-shaped colloidal detritus collects at the rim of a glass.) What I fancy about Ted (the Polish American, not the Ecuadorian): he defied expectations. He thought life on this earth was so morally important that he’d commit heinous acts to wake people up to the fact. He advocated a system of ethics that his peers declared repugnant because they knew it would find them wanting. I mention this to the cinephile who thinks I’m talking about the comedy film with the bear, Mark Wahlberg, and Tom Brady. She tells me she doesn’t remember the part I’m referring to, and certainly didn’t realize the bear was supposed to be Polish. I resign myself and the universe to a future scourged by darkness, blood, and frogs.

At my mom’s birthday party, all the attendees stand in a circle, chest-deep in her aboveground pool. Her tattooist friend, Dave, a member of the local chapter of Hell’s Angels, says a dislike of drinking water indicates an overstimulated palate, a biology cheapened by abject, thoughtless consumption. He tells me I need to take the sodium usage down a notch, maybe knock off the takeout Chinese. (His name must be sufficiently innocuous to avoid my mom’s sibilant censure, though I think it’s a pussy-ass name, a name for rats and stoolies like Ted K’s brother.) I tell him he ought to wear a helmet. Clearly, he’s experienced head trauma in a motorcycle crash or two if he doesn’t know fluoride is a salt. I accuse him of racism, saying he’s a product of an epoch where MSG was an unsubstantiated fact rather than a xenophobic myth. He snarls. 

To sidestep the subject, I go off on a tangent about the propensity of elephants to bury their own dead. My mom nods along and tells her guests that elephants always were my favorite animal. As a child, I had more elephant figurines and tapestries in my room than your run-of-the-mill cultural appropriator or wannabe Buddhist, and even at twelve, when asked, I told people that I wanted to grow up to be Babar. Awwww, everyone coos except Dave. My mom wears a leopard-print bikini and has a tattoo over her butt that says Angel in Disguise in calligraphic script. She’s fifty-seven today and going through a phase in which she tries to get in touch with what she calls her masculine side. Her primary tactics are belching unapologetically and saying the word Dude an inordinate number of times. My mom is a phase person: paleo, yoga, leather pants. Her attic is clogged with the offal of her phases. 

Dave, annoyed by the elephant digression, calls me a social deviant. Between burps, my mom chimes in her agreement, saying it makes sense considering my dad was a dentist by profession, which is the only means of normalizing one’s personal penchant for staring at and touching other people’s teeth. She says my dad used to brush and floss her teeth for her till her gums bled and the drool and blood poured down her chin, at which point my dad would penetrate her, and they’d orgasm together so powerfully it was as if they’d generated their own electrical field. She says it’s likely on one of these occasions that I was conceived. 

The implication here is lost on no one. I have a genetic predisposition to sociopathy, though it hasn’t manifested itself as an obsession with my teeth or anyone else’s. My mom’s an open book, too open for many, though it’s a trait that serves her well in her oft-derided profession. For a birthday present, I give her a custom garden shed with the exact dimensions of Ted Kaczynski’s Montana cabin. (I used her credit card to buy it at Lowe’s, but hope she’ll forgive me since the card I used is the one she’s always preaching the points-accumulating merits of). I expect the shed to house her mushrooming collection of pool floaties, including my personal favorite, an inflatable bull. 

Ecstatic with gratitude, she tells me my career will take off yet; it’s just a matter of time. She says that to the rest of society, musicians frequently appear to be footloose deadbeats, but their aimlessness is the very means by which they acquire each individual note for their glorious symphonies. True poets are the ones who’ve learned patience, who sit silently waiting for the butterflies to alight. Idle hands may be the devil’s workshop, but the devil lives in pandemonium, a place of bedlam, a tunnel of sound. This is why she subsidizes my rent. I’ve lost the thread of her logic, but she sure has a way of making insolvency sound grand. She tells me my scraggly beard makes me look like a criminal mastermind. This is the kindest thing she’s ever said to me. 

When I leave the party, two teenagers are in the street, plastering my mom’s T-roof Daytona with provocative bumper stickers. IF YOU’RE GOING TO RIDE MY ASS, AT LEAST BUY ME DINNER FIRST. BETTER TO REIGN IN HELL THAN SERVE IN HEAVEN. DODGE THE FATHER, RAM THE DAUGHTER. Medium-haters in training. One of the teens is the Adonis-like soccer star, Ted Moreira. The other is a large, square-faced girl who looks as if she’s consumed nothing but pizza and Coca-Cola for all her nineteen years. 

Where’s Christina? I ask Ted. 

He shrugs, won’t look at me. 

I threw the skank off the Hoover Dam, the fat girl says with a gold-toothed smile.

I ask them politely to help me scrape away the stickers they’ve so recently affixed to my mom’s car. I suggest we use our library cards.

Fuck off, you involuntary celibate! Ted’s friend barks.

I think of the boxful of condoms in my grandfather’s old bureau. How does she know?

Nodding, I tell Ted, It took Christina three hours to do her hair. She loved you, you know?

Ted hangs his head as if it’s a biblical curse to be hounded by paramours. His companion places her palms on either side of his chiseled face, lewd stickers falling from her jean pockets like confetti, and screeches, I love him! I love him! She cradles him in her arms and carries his wriggling body down the street, jostling trashcans and mailboxes with her formidable hips. 

This town is too much for me. Like a hemophiliac Russian crown prince, it bleeds too easily and can’t stop. There’s so much blood and I’m woozy. I root around in the dregs of history for a tourniquet. Whatever corrective I scrounge up will be a sign, a star to follow. A good Cartesian, I’ve adopted a program of systematic disbelief. For one thing, I’m skeptical about recycling. I think recycling initiatives are a bluff corporations employ to ease consumers’ consciences while they surreptitiously produce more plastic. The common issues bore me. I don’t care about rewriting the past to expunge the record of any hint of inconvenient evil. I don’t care who owes what based on historical grievance. I don’t care which sex organ occupies the inner thighs of our politicians. What I want to know: did Jesus really compare a rich guy going to heaven to a camel struggling through a needle’s eye? Or did a tired (or drunk, or prankster) monk confuse the Greek words for rope and dromedary and bastardize the metaphor for all time? When a dam breaks, the truth hardly matters—I learned that from the internet. Constant data input makes it inevitable that you forget where you got something, and if you’re savvy, you can even manipulate the timestamps to pose as an original. Life has become an overproduced pop song with no way to track sample clearances. Still, I care about the little absurdities that an entire civilization accepts as a matter of course. The core of all our troubles is the things we take for granted.

Like everyone, I’m inextricable from my time and place. Some people have causes, some people make money. Some people’s causes make them money—the American Dream. My parents, for instance. My mom is a medium—she speaks to the dead. My dad was a dentist—he drowned in a deep-sea fishing accident, tangled up in the nets. All his war on tooth rot didn’t make him any more buoyant. My mom doesn’t summon my dad. They didn’t speak much in life. They screwed with great fire and frequency, but even a quack like my mother hasn’t invented a way to boink the departed. 

Despite what my mom wishes for me in the benevolent depths of her pulsing pink heart, I’ve never once generated an original composition. Music is the sublimation of whim and discrepancy, a cathedral built of hodgepodge materials leftover from a project as mundane as another shopping mall. I could never make music, so I decided to teach it. Now that I can’t even do that, I’m reckless, even magnanimous in my pettiness and discontent. Some people have neither causes nor money and spend their days praying to be struck by lightning. My heart is an empty bag waiting to catch the wind. 

There’s a Polish day laborer who sometimes sleeps in the alley behind my apartment. (My grandfather would be astonished to know the Poles are a real people and not a catchall slur). When it’s warm, he rolls his waistband to hike up his cargo shorts and expose his thighs like a tween who spices up her wardrobe after leaving her parents’ house. His thighs are round and red, twin lumps of Oklahoma silt loam. He gets drunk and sleeps in the alley on the days he doesn’t find work so that his wife won’t find out. She knows anyway. He wakes up, and there’s a Ziploc bag of hard-boiled eggs in his arms, along with a fresh sack of beer. He gives me the thumbs up when I pass. If a police cruiser goes by, he mimes jerking off. When you watch the news and see stone-faced three-letter operatives in flak jackets rounding up immigrants in federally sanctioned raids, my drunk alley dweller isn’t who the media-saturated citizen’s conditioned to imagine being targeted, but he’s probably in danger. Especially in this neighborhood teeming with Blaines and Bridgets. It doesn’t seem to bother him. He sings to the bruised elms and pisses in the window box planters hung by the ground-level tenants. His worldview is as incoherent as his work schedule. He offers me an egg from his bag. I decline. He grimaces as if it is the fate of all good men to suffer the rejection of their largesse. Then he raises the bag towards me, its corners laden with a brackish juice and says in broken English, My wife. She is bald from the cancer. But I keep her all the same. She kept me first. I have love in my heart no matter what I do.

Just like Ted, I say proudly.

Who’s Ted? he asks.

A brave Polishman like you.

He looks at me, incredulous. 

Ai, stupid güero, he says, clicking his teeth and hammering his index finger into his chest. I’m not Polish. I’m from Oaxaca. 

I walk away humiliated. All my bluster reduced to rubbish. How have I so badly misinterpreted the signs? Is he fucking with me? Unlike General MacArthur, I’ve no plans to return to the scene of my defeat. My mind seeks out a workable theory to justify my susceptibility to mistakes. Like my grandfather, who took his cues from a series of dissembling Cold War presidents, I refuse to stand corrected. What I hate about Ted K: he was smart enough to make bombs, disseminate them undetected. The gods smiled on him fondly enough to feel vindicated when they chained him to the rocks for his insolence and sent an eagle to nibble his liver. His superior intellect and suspected perversion by MK-ULTRA rendered him a minor celebrity. I envy a man with straightforward convictions. The vigilantes and small-time revolutionaries wage war in his honor. As for me, I’m an ally without any tools. I stumble over the wreckage of my own efforts.

To compensate for my defects, I introduce an idea to a room just to see if it displaces anything. I suppose this is hypocritical and unfair since, like most people, I just want to be in love or left alone. Whatever’s displaced becomes my credo, even if hitherto I would’ve found the idea anathema. I consider the Oaxacan’s bald, sick wife and am inspired. I call up the cinephile from the DMV and ask if she wants to see a movie. She says seeing films with gringos makes her feel icky. It’s like going to church with somebody who really wants you to believe. We get sushi instead. She asks if I’ve gotten that gold star on my license yet. I ask if she thinks the revolution remains possible in an era of Uber Eats and streaming services. Neither of us answers the other’s question. The whole thing derails the instant she orders a glass of milk. 

Why milk? I say.

I like it, she says.

People agree on what they hate a lot faster than on what they like, I say. (If I ever opened a bar, I’d call it The Circle Jerk.)

I like milk, she repeats impatiently.

Milk is disgusting, I say. 

She laughs at me and tells me her father, a dairy farmer and coffee harvester, was murdered by the Atlácatl Battalion, financed by the US government. What do you know of milk or revolution? she says. 

I thought you moved here because it was like the movies.

Exactamente. I’d hoped to get my bloody revenge without reprisal.

I tell her about my grandfather—huckster by day, barrelman by night—and his fatal bedsore. I tell her about my drowned dentist dad. 

She raises an eyebrow, says, So? Some people die for principles, and others because they are unfortunate idiots.

I’m sorry, I say, chastened despite the milk and her insult. 

She salutes me with her glass, softens.

Death doesn’t make the same distinctions with which we afflict each other, she says.

(If I don’t look at her glass, the milk isn’t there, and I can still love her.) 

Perhaps it’s easy to think charitably when the indignities one faces are of lesser stakes, I admit. 

Perhaps not, she says. The rich are notoriously stingy. 

I tell her the four regrets of my life: not going to Harvard; not being tortured by the CIA; not caring a lick for trees, plants, and woodland creatures; and not having a snitch for a brother (or a brother of any kind). 

Hmm, she says, not thinking about it any which way.

I ask her if it’s possible she could ever confuse an Oaxacan for someone Polish. 

She searches deep in her purse for something (a penknife? a miniature revolver?), then pushes away from the table. A full assortment of sashimi still glistens on her plate. 

What is it? I ask nervously.

I’ve just now remembered how, after a date, I often feel an intense wish to be gay, she says.

She leaves. Damn her eyes!

I wake in my bed full of crumbled elephants. A dream so real I can taste the wasabi. Realizations separate from my consciousness and hang gleaming and unreachable above me like oil in water. You can’t hijack a plane if you don’t know how to fly it. You can’t shock the system if you don’t know where to attach the cables. The world’s no worse off for my obscurity. Anonymity accelerates my coarser feelings, only to repudiate them with my lack of an audience. I shouldn’t begrudge someone a glass of milk. I shouldn’t mind if their feet are bigger than mine, or their knuckles erupt into little shrubberies of hair, or if they work as an adjutant for a seedy capitalist. Protest is just a fashionable way to get attention—I learned that from the internet, too. I argue with strangers and point out their inconsistencies if only to distract me from my own. I’ve no cause to expect finery to spontaneously elevate a life so enmired. Even so, if hope is a siren, I refuse to stop up my ears. There’s very little to diminish me further. Often, at breakfast and lunch, animal crackers are my only sustenance. To avoid my neighbor, I sleep in my car a lot. Like the Oaxacan in the alley, I like to sing without being reprimanded for it. This is all I ask.