excerpt

from the book Home Land by Sam Lipsyte, which I bought today with part of a generous gift card from a generous uncle. I am typing it out for you because I am so deeply tangled in a lonely, oddly panicky boredom, uh, twine, that this really is a relief for me, to painstakingly type out pages for you. Arrested Development will be on soon though. Soon.
Anyway, I highly recommend this book. Am halfway through already.

Tonight I took a walk down Venus Drive, cut through the woods to the Pitch-n-Putt parking lot. The stars were out, what stars we get in our dirty sky. Some old golf carts stood near the field house, more for after-hours ball retrieval than for play. Nearmont has an eighteen-hole course and a state-of-the-art driving range. The easter Valley Pitch-n-Putt, with its culverts of broken glass and unmowed greens, must have been designed expressly for trespassing, teen sex, vandalism.
Gary and I used to come here to drink beer and smoke bones and talk about the future, when we'd drink beer and smoke bones with girls. Gary was going to be a rock star, or a rock journalist, maybe both.
"I don't want to be a superstar," he said. "Just a star. I want to have influence. I want to be the visionary all the hacks steal from."
"Why would you want to be that?" I said.
"It's cooler," said Gary. "Maybe I won't even start a band until I'm twenty. You shouldn't even attempt to rock until you've run the gamut of human experience. All of my records will include essays I've written about why the record rocks."
"I don't know if that's such a good idea."
......
Sometimes others came to park and smoke with us. Randy Pittman would drive up in his Pittman Liquors family liquor van, offer us in-state vodka, bitch about his vicious father. He had a plan to run off with his sousaphone, join the navy marching band.
"I need the discipline," he said.
One night he came by with a bottle of apricot schnapps and we got sick on the stuff while he told us how his father really wasn't all that mean, just a little tweaked from his tour on a patrol boat in Vietnam. Old Man Pittman was only a cherry when another piece of new meat caught a bad case of nerves. Everybody got scared Charlie would hear the sobs, the whimpers. A corporal named Van Wort slit the kid's throat, dumped him into the Mekong. Randy's father made Randy swear to keep the whole thing secret, but Randy figured he could trust us. We didn't know anyody in the navy, and who'd believe us, anyway, a couple of ass clowns from East Valley?
"What a load," said Gary.
"True fucking story," said Randy.
"Well, the patrol boat's a nice touch, but really, I doubt your dad told you all of that. For one thing, guys who were actually in the shit talk squat about it. That's just how it is."
"I'm his son."
"He still wouldn't tell you."
"You can't speak for everybody."
"No, I can't, dude, and neither can you."
"What the hell does that mean?"
We never really got to hear what that meant because suddenly there was a loud crack from out past the woodline.
"Shit," said Randy Pittman.
The kid was bleeding from all these tiny shallow holes in his chest.
We drove him to the East Valley clinic in my father's Dart. Randy bled all over the seats, but they were vinyl and I didn't mind. He wasn't dying and this was a nice vacation from our usual Pitch-n-Putt bone routine.
The way the doctor figured it, or whoever the guy in the white coat who tweezed out the buckshot was, somebody had fired on us from far off. The pellets had petered out right as they hit Randy. The police never found the shooter, though they did undertake a token manhunt, once through the trees with a flashlight. They also issued a sketch of the suspect, a suave-looking black man with slicked-back hair. We had no idea where they came up with that one. It looked copied from an old Duke Ellington album sleeve.
Later we figured it was Georgie Mays who'd fired on us, this nutjob from Nearmont who'd been bragging all week about his new shotgun. He'd never be brought to justice, though. Georgie's family went back to Revolutionary War times, descended from the guy on the Nearmont town seal, Matheson Mays, who either spied on the British or spied for them, scholars have never decided. Matheson Mays was hanged before he could clear up the debate.
It didn't matter now. The man was on the town seal and the Mays name was under municipal protection. Besides, everyone was too riled up about the gangs of dead black jazz geniuses, apparently roving our district with heavy armaments, to give the Mays connection much thought. You may recall Glen Menninger's editorials in the school paper about the need to balance tolerance with safety, arguing we should err on the side of safety. I wrote a short rebuttal, which he tried to pull, big surprise.
But most of our times out here were not so eventful. It was usually just me and Gary and maybe Randy Pittman or Dean Longo. We'd sit around and talk about the unrelenting boredom of our town. The unrelenting ferocity of the world was a different problem. Only Dean Longo found a permanent solution, a bag of dope that, according to the coroner, would have killed a rhino. I think about Dean sometimes, not that I ever knew him so well, because we all dabbled in rhino death, and Gary did more than that, got himself a habit that was scary and embarrassing at the same time. We were all so grim and invincible then. I guess we figured we were trying so hard, there was no way we could die. But you can always die.