The Feast

I just found out my girlfriend’s pregnant, a pastor’s daughter. I tried the Hemingway maneuver, I tried to tell her about a simple operation, not really an operation at all. I offered her the whole world the way Satan did to Jesus, but it didn’t matter. She is having this kid. I keep dangling the operation before her, she’s got time.
We’re in high school. I go to Reeths-Puffer High School, she goes to a religious academy on the other side of Apple Avenue.
My mom is telling the world I want to be a writer. She told my writer-cousin, so he gave me some unsolicited advice. He wrote me letters, since he likes to hear himself write. He’s a published author, he’s an English professor at Hillsdale College. “Do you want to be alone the rest of your life?” the letter said. “Are you willing to sacrifice relationships for the sake of your writing?”
His advice is basically don't write.
This is the same advice I received from a lifelong smoker with a tracheotomy, who came to a school assembly last week. “Don't smoke,” he said, through the hole in his throat.
My mom told my cousin that I like to read Stephen King. Stephen King is very bad taste according to my cousin.
“Don't read Stephen King!” he said.
My first two classes are English classes, both with Mr. Heaton. First creative writing and then his Lord of the Rings class, where we read and study J.R.R. Tolkien (Heaton is slowly turning into Gollum). In creative writing class, Heaton tells me I have a powerful imagination. He likes my story about Shirley Jackson winning the jury-duty lottery.
Heaton likes to tell us about his former student Steve Vaillancourt. He is now famous, he’s a famous writer. He went to school with my big sister. He writes about hunting and fishing, like Hemingway, like Norman Maclean.
My third class is art class. My friends Ray and Craig are in my art class.
There’s this very dramatic girl, Sidney Cox, who is clearly the best artist. She makes a point of hating everything she draws, she hates her art.
The art teacher, Mrs. Smith, is in love with my sister because my sister is in college studying to be an art teacher.
We’re studying abstract impressionism. We’re studying Cezanne and his still lifes. Mrs. Smith sees my still-life drawing. She’s surprised. She raises her eyebrows like flying buttresses.
“I told you he could draw,” Craig said.
After art class, we take a cigarette break. We are not allowed to smoke on school grounds, so we smoke on the church property just north of the high school parking lot.
Frankie is already there. He says that Faith Daughtry is infatuated with me, he says he was at a party last night and all the girls were talking about me.
“Most of the girls said they don’t think you’re handsome, but Faith said she wants you to rape her.”
“She wants him to ravish her is what you mean to say,” Ray says.
“Same difference,” Frankie says. “‘Do you think he will rape me?’ were her very words. Everyone said you would never do that, you’re too quiet, shy. Then Faith prophesied she would get you to do it.”
“She wants you to batter her heart like a three-personed God,” Craig says. “She wants you to make a meal out of her.”
J.J. shows up in his dad’s Cadillac, and me, Craig, and Ray decide to skip school with J.J.
Ray’s a tattoo artist, he tattoos himself and his girlfriend, and anyone else who wants a pro-bono tattoo. He’s letting me look at his notebook with all his tattoo designs.
We pick up Ray's girlfriend and another girl. They go to North Muskegon High School.
North Muskegon is probably the most beautiful high school I’ve ever seen. It’s on a peninsula, a sliver of land no wider than Hitler’s moustache. And when you’re inside the school you look out one window and can see Muskegon Lake, and looking out of the other window you can see Bear Lake. It’s a rich-kid school.
North Muskegon has a half day of school today.
So, I’m saying it’s J.J. and Ray in the front seat, Ray’s girlfriend on Ray’s lap, and in the back seat is Craig, this North Muskegon girl named Leanna, and myself.
We listen to heavy metal on the radio, making sure we never go anywhere near the country station 107 WMUS, which we all said stands for We Make U Sick.
I stab an unlit cigarette into my mouth.
“Do you want to buttfuck me?” Leanna says.
It took me a second to realize her meaning. She is asking if I want to use her cigarette butt to light mine.
The conversation turns to Kyle Botbyl and his girlfriend, who just found out she’s pregnant. Their parents are forcing them to get married. Everyone in the car has something nasty to say about them for getting pregnant. I even jump on the dog pile, and pretend I’m mortified.
“I wonder if she knows there’s a simple operation,” I say. “It’s really not an operation.”
I can’t stop thinking about Faith, wanting me to ravish her. It’s as if a huge feast is being prepared for me, a feast I’m expected to eat like an athlete. I must eat this feast or offend the host.
I imagine a table covered in fine-white linen, a vase of trilliums, a basket of fruit, with red and white grapes, pears with their feminine shapes, varieties of apples with their rosy complexions. Colorful heirloom tomatoes, baby cucumbers with their bumps. Peaches so soft there are dents in their skin. Multigrain crackers and stinky cheeses. Brussel sprouts cut in half and seared in fat. Soups started with bones to achieve their golden broths. There’s seafood even, shucked oysters waiting to slide down my throat, a bright red lobster with lifeless claws. Breads dusted with flour and scored with clever designs, soft butter waiting to be slathered. Wine in a decanter and a chalice beside it. This is the wine Jesus said was his blood. It was going to mix with my blood, it was going to be my blood. There’s an ornate set of salt and pepper shakers, of course. Vessels of roasted meat, a glazed ham crusted with sugar, a leg of lamb with mint jelly, a roasted chicken with savory spices rubbed under the skin, prime rib with ribbons of fat, a pork crown roast with paper frills on each bone, a whole fish, branzino-style, with deep gashes cut into its silver skin, stuffed with dill and lemon slices, and covered in briny capers. Even a suckling pig fed on its mother’s milk with an apple in its mouth! Little neck clams on the half shell. A bowl of glistening green olives, without pits, with holes just large enough for the tip of my tongue. For dessert, fancy cakes and ice cream, French coffee and cigars. A guitarist for my entertainment. A servant in white gloves. And lastly a dog, living a dog’s life, lying at my feet, its head on its paws, remembering the last time it hunted. I would eat, eat, eat. Then Faith would press me to eat even more. I have the desire to have it all, to eat everything, but after a while I wouldn’t even know what I was eating.
This is a meal where you lick your teeth long afterward.
I was going to be loaded with guilt after this meal. Guilty in fact. Others would condemn me for show but secretly they’d wish they were me.
We go to the Blockhouse, which is on the highest elevation in the county. The Blockhouse was built a hundred years ago by the Civilian Conservation Corps. It’s a two-story wooden structure with small holes for windows on the top floor. You can see just above the treetops.
I look out the windows like I was looking for my life.
We carved our initials, nothing clever. There were clever things already carved in the wood, ‘limp dick,’ ‘dick weed,’ ‘fuck nut,’ ‘penis breath,’ and so on.
I start a fire right on the floor. Everyone tells me to put it out. Ray yells at me, like I’m a Visigoth setting fire to Rome. I don’t like that. I don’t like Ray yelling at me.
“Stop doing stupid stuff!” he says.
I look up to Ray. I admire and respect him. I am jealous of him even.
I stamp out the fire, but now there's a smoldering hole in the floor.
We went to Pioneer Park. We found a picnic table and we started endlessly rolling joints like Sisyphus rolling his ball of death.
We walked to the beach. We played frisbee and football. We swam in Lake Michigan. We built sandcastles.
I was among my own people. People kept coming, showing up. People from school, even Gilbert Garcia, who is not one of us. He doesn’t smoke or drink, I mean. He’s carrying a paper cup and spitting into the cup constantly. He’s trying to lose two pounds for an upcoming wrestling match.
Gilbert can fight like a wolverine. I’ve seen him take down guys twice his size. One fight I saw between him and Pat Hudson, where Pat ripped out one of Gilbert’s nipple rings. (It makes me cringe to think about it.) And that sent Gilbert into a rage like Ajax right outside homeroom. He attacked a teacher even.
We started drinking Mad Dog 20/20. I felt like a man.
I had my bare feet in the sand. I put an hour’s worth of sand in Craig’s pocket.
We saw kids from Whitehall, our rival school. Craig and I went over and told them to leave or there was going to be a fight (we have Gilbert, and they don’t). They left, then they came back in great numbers, like they were Vikings, trying to start something. Ray made the peace. Ray is the reasoner among us, he has a fully formed brain.
We started a fire on the beach. Sidney threw her sketchbook into the fire. Her soft chin quivered. She started to cry. Everyone tried to stop her, but it went on for so long we were defeated.
Then Faith shows up. I vowed to myself not to touch her. I was sitting on a log by the fire, smoking and drinking a Bud Light. She sat beside me right away, she just put her head on my shoulder and held my hand. Then Faith sat in the sand between my legs.
My conscience paced back and forth in its cage—it wanted out. I was thinking of my lavish meal. I wanted to eat.
We all watched the sunset. A photographer was there with a tripod trying to capture it. To me it was supernatural, a red balloon being pulled into the sewers by an evil clown.
It was getting dark when Faith asked me to escort her into the woods. She said she had to use the bathroom and was afraid to go alone. But she had a blanket over her shoulder.
We went past the sand dunes and into the woods. I got slapped in the eye with a branch.
We came to a glade in the woods, where we could see stars. The sky was a star-spangled banner.
We stopped walking and just looked at each other. We could hear the chirrups of grasshoppers saying, “Don’t do anything we wouldn’t do ourselves.”
She tossed her red hair. Shadows from tree branches were on her face.
Her eyelids fluttered like e.e. cummings had predicted.
All sorts of notions were in my head.
I wondered if people were watching, if our friends were watching. This glade was maybe built like the Roman coliseum, for spectators. I looked in the trees.
I wanted to call her ‘Good Faith,’ or ‘Bona Fide.’
The fact that she wanted to sleep with me made her so beautiful to me, even her being a few pounds overweight became an endearment.
This is like ancient times. We left our village for the forest. After we were done, we would know each other. We’d try not to show it, but the rest of the village would see it in our filthy faces, our new faces.
“Did you guess my intricate purpose?” she said.
“I have a girlfriend,” I said.
“You do not.”
We kissed awkwardly. It was like I was helping her with a homework assignment. Did she really want me to manhandle her?
“I love you,” I said, only half meaning the words. I could see in her face, it was a sad sounding I-love-you, like the starving child’s prayer before a meal.
“You do not,” she laughed. “We better go back.”
We walked back to the beach.
“Everyone’s going to think we had sex,” she said.
“Do you think Romeo and Juliet had sex?”
“Of course they did!”
“It doesn’t say they had sex.”
“Do you really think they just sat and talked all night? They had intercourse.”
“Verbal intercourse.”
Back at the beach, Craig proposed to ransack the superintendent’s property. His house was a few beaches down, the one with a rocket for a mailbox.
“My sister dates the superintendent’s son, if they get married, I’ll be family,” I said.
“No shit, Sherlock,” Craig said.
“Fuck you, my dear Watson,” I said.
It was dark on the beach. We vandalized the superintendent’s boathouse as much as we could, but we couldn’t really see what we were doing.
There was a rowboat on the shore. We were going to row back to the fire, hugging the shore so we didn’t end up in Milwaukee.
“Do you hear that?” Craig said.
“Hear what?”
And Craig disappeared so fast, all sorts of lights came on. I got hit in the chest with an oar and fell over right in the boat. The superintendent is standing over me holding the oar, like a gondolier in Venice. I can see my expulsion from school in his round face.
I caused twenty-thousand dollars’ worth of damage to the Blockhouse.
The city took the arson very seriously, like I’d disrespected all of them. Like I desecrated something holy.
I got sent to boot camp by Judge Hicks.
My mother at the court hearing begged Judge Hicks for help.
“Help us,” she said.
She told the judge about her dream. My mom had a dream we were inside a car, the whole family. A lion is outside the car trying to get in to devour us. In the dream, I roll down the windows. She told the judge that that sounds just like what I’d do in real life.
Judge Hicks said I was juvenile delinquency incarnate.
In the fall, I got sent to an alternative school, in Dalton Township. It’s official, I’m a loser. Reeths-Puffer didn't want me back. I didn’t see my friends at all. I didn't want to see them really. I graduated a year late, but I graduated.
I want you to know I ended up okay.
My cousin is now writing plays for an outdoor theater. He’s married to a parrot whom everyone finds darling.
Vaillancourt is rich, he has his own television show like Babe Winkleman. I think he lives in Seattle.
Heaton is dead. Just old age.
Craig went to Iraq. He enlisted right after 9/11. I saw Craig at one of the summer beer tents. We're the beer tent capital of the world. We were in line for the port-a-potty (we’re also the port-a-potty capital of the world). The hair on top of his head was thinning. We started talking and he started sweating and shaking. PTSD.
I work in my father’s grocery store, I’m not complaining.
Stephen King is still bad taste, as we all know.
Recently the Blockhouse burned down, all the way to the ground. So, the paper mentioned my old crime. It was six teens. They ended up being sentenced to help rebuild the Blockhouse, it was like they were rebuilding the temple in Jerusalem.
My sister broke it off with the superintendent’s son. She dumped him, all because he refused to put grocery carts back in the cart corral.
I found out Faith lives on a farm in Twin Lake. She keeps horses. She married a veterinary surgeon. She goes to First Reformed. She has five children, all girls.
I saw Faith at Duck Lake State Park. She didn't see me. I didn’t want her to. She was at a picnic table, with her girls around her like a cloud. She looked like the mother of all mothers.
I drove by her farm once after that. I saw her and her family in the middle of their garden looking at the sky.
I have no idea what happened to Ray…
Today, my twenty-two-year-old daughter came home with a tattoo!
“Who gave you this tattoo?”
“This guy, he does tattoos downtown,” she said.
“A man did this to you?”
“He said he knows you, Dad. His name is Ray. He said he went to school with you.”
I shake my head.
“I don't know anyone named Ray,” I said.
And just like that I feel the old load on my heart.