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it was covered in leaves. Easy to spread my arms, fall through the tarp, drop to concrete. Eight feet isn’t enough, though.
    Wife Three was on the phone.
    “I’m sick of it,” she said. “It’s like I’m married to Tiger fucking Woods.”

fourteen
    American Dream:
    • Seen all my fantasies enacted in movies, brought to their inevitable conclusions, upended by credits.
    • Never seen a movie about a fuckup kid becoming a star chef, loved, in love, reuniting his divorced parents. That movie doesn’t exist because it’s a stupid idea for a movie.
    • If it did exist, it would be cheesy, romantic, mostly bullshit with a few good jokes and close-ups of food.
    • Or an indie, end all boo-hoo tragic, hero corrupted by wealth and fame, alienating those who supported him, ultimately returned to loneliness.
    • Maybe my problem is foresight.
    • Then there’s the dream where Jennifer is a mermaid. I’m an eel, the sea our home. Her life-buoy breasts float un-clammed, as yet unclaimed.
    • Real dream is everyone’s dream, just as unlikely: intact fam, all mushy, love-struck, looking at photos, recalling old warmth, birthing new warmth, fresh bread from the kitchen odorizing everything with promise.

fifteen
    Alison Ghee was waiting for me, leaned up against the black gates that separated the Dan Clan from Quinosset’s manicured claws. She puffed a cigarette undramatically: deep, quick inhales, incessant ashing. What I mean is she didn’t look cool: no knock-kneed sexy feigned innocence, or lips-of-lust cigarette-as-phallus ring-blowing. I looked less cool than Alison. I was wearing sweatpants.
    “How’d you beat me out here? Didn’t you just go inside?”
    “I’m everywhere. I’m a ghost.”
    “Oh.”
    “You’ve been standing there spacing out for like fifteen minutes.”
    “I have?”
    “Let’s go,” she said.
    Walked up Faber Street, then left on Wilson toward the north side. Houses were older, less ugly, equally expensive. Halloween decorations already up: hanging rubber skeletons strung from second-story verandas, crudely carved pumpkins staring through windows like judging shut-ins.
    “Where are we going?”
    Said it because I was stoned, wanted to make sure I wasn’t dreaming. Not because I cared where we were going.
    “Not that I care. I just go with the flow … that kinda guy. Just a flow-goer. That’s me. Eli.”
    Sensed I was about to start talking stupidly, so I shut up.
    A few minutes later, Alison said, “You’re funny.”
    Tried to make a funny face.
    “Now you just look retarded.”
    We arrived.
    Door in the ground led directly to the basement. Knew about these doors, the girls who used them. They were the sassy lovers who didn’t love me. Snuck out at night, walked alone in lamplight, cut through yards, arrived at entrances, let themselves in, let themselves be entered. Most people called these girls sluts.
    Maybe the problem was basements. Me, Dan, Alison, Jeremy, cut off from sunlight, subterranean suffocating. Damp floors when it rains. Ugly boom boom of a broken clothes-dryer. We were humans, not worms. Needed clean air, overheard birdcalls, windows.
    “I live in a basement too,” I said. “We’re bottom-dwellers, I guess. Maybe that’s why we’re such losers.”
    “We’re losers?”
    “Buried alive.”
    “Speak for yourself. And who said I live here, anyway?”
    “Do you live here?”
    “Yeah.”
    No pics of Jeremy, no shrines. I’d expected a mausoleum: framed diary entries, cut-up yearbook photos collaged on cardboard, obituaries, rosary-strung crosses. Wanted the room to feel like mourning, to wear its sadness on its paint-chipped walls.
    Clothes on the floor and on the bed. Computer, empty beers, couple old paperbacks. Open guitar case next to the bed.
    “You play?”
    “It’s Jeremy’s.”
    Could picture it: Jeremy: ignored troubadour, gentle songsmith. Quinosset bard unheard beneath the din of SUV engines, MP3s, electric toothbrushes; sensitive