BENEATH THE COYOTE HILLS

William Luvaas

1

They say you never get more than you can handle. So how do we explain suicide, then, or divorce, or crimes of passion, or parents who murder their children, or fall to pieces after having them? How do we explain people like me?

I am akin to Dostoevsky’s underground man, living in my own underground in an olive grove outside the town of Hamlet in SoCal. Hamlet longs to be a quaint English village rather than a scrappy burg in the high desert. Once a prosperous farming community, it is now down-at-the-heels, peopled by social security retirees living in run-down trailers inherited from former retirees who died in them, ex-cons and sexual predators, evangelical shouters (a church on every corner), recyclable collectors, and nutcase old farts tooting around in golf carts decked out with American flags. Diabetic tubbies trip out of Walmart pushing shopping carts full of cheap carbs and gizmos from China. How can they afford all that shit? Gun nuts blast holes in mudstone cliffs in the wash below my place or take aim at the cross atop “The First Church of the One True Christ,” modeled on the Crystal Cathedral in Garden Grove. They dodge through the sagebrush in cammo gear, assault weapons at the ready, hunting “Feds.” Scares hell out of me when they invade my grove. I’ve fashioned a suit of palmetto fronds, a raffia affair, which I clamber into when they come, blending so seamlessly with the landscape that the bastards brush right past me, unaware I am there.

Doubtless there are wage earners among our Hamletites (how else could the stores stay open?). Although I hear the cash economy is obsolete anymore. These days, banks fund credit vehicles which consumers use to buy products, the banks take their cut, then securitize their risk and sell it to investors via hedge funds, which cleverly bet against prosperity via credit default swaps or some such, and make a killing in the next big crash, so they can start the cycle all over again. No one really understands how it works. It’s Rube Goldberg economics, a self-perpetuating prosperity machine. Those of us on the economic outskirts get by on its leavings. One thing you can say about capitalism: it produces one helluva lot of trash.

I have furnished my hut with its castoffs: pots, pans and utensils from the county dump, used carpeting on the dirt floor, a mattress and La-Z-Boy I picked up on the street, prints I took off walls of an abandoned motel—then the walls themselves to construct my hovel. I had a palm frond roof at first, watertight and sun-reflecting (nature has its leavings, too). The Cahuilla and Soboba Indians roofed their shelters with fronds. After the housing crisis, I salvaged Spanish tiles from foreclosed homes in a nearby development, brought them home in a shopping cart, and tiled my roof. Damnedest thing you ever saw: a beautiful Spanish tile roof on a shack! I brought windows home from the development, too, a laundry tub which I use for all my washing needs, and Romex electrical cable, which I’ve run to a nearby power pole and tapped into the power grid, so I have free electric lights and heating. How else could I do my scribbling half the night on a laptop I found in mint condition beside the caretaker’s shack at the county dump? I had as much right to it as the caretaker did, since he salvaged but didn’t secure it. So I salvaged it from him. Finders keepers is first principle in the long-standing conventions of salvage. First principle of us freegans. Besides, I had more need of it than he did. He would sell it, while I use it to keep myself sane, pecking away at the keys:

Call him V.C.: Voltaire Cambridge Hoffstatter. His parents loved the great French satirist, inventor, provocateur and entrepreneur and hoped their son would emulate his namesake, especially Voltaire’s business prowess. V.C.’s father, J.D. Hoffstatter, was founder and CEO of the First National Bank of Enterprise (the noun not the town). Voltaire’s boyhood friends did not call him V.C., as he would call himself once he launched his career, but simply “Volt.” The nickname fit him perfectly. Not just his personality and life trajectory, quick wit and high-voltage charm, and his luck with the ladies, but also even his physique. His body zigzagged on an upward trajectory: runner’s thick legs zagged to a trim waist, then bulged outward in a broad upper torso, muscled abs, shoulders and biceps, and zagged again into a thick neck and elongated cranium. All that native energy seeming to explode out the top of his head. At track meets, onlookers could swear Volt was wielding the Olympic torch: running perfectly upright, a Pentecostal flame licking off his skullcap.

His father, J.D., once told a golf companion that his son would one day grace the cover of Time magazine as “Man of the Year.” The companion chortled. “Right, J.D., and my boy will be president.” J.D. skunked him on the next hole. He did not much care for snideness or negative thinking. A man who kept his chin up would see what was coming on the horizon; a man who did not would miss his chances. Hadn’t Shakespeare said something of that sort? When Volt was a toddler, his mother couldn’t keep the boy’s head down on the pillow; he was already looking to the horizon, already insisting that he would make a success of himself. It tickled J.D.to no end.

By age nine, Volt had a thriving banking business going at his grade school. He loaned lunch money to his classmates at usurious interest rates, even worked lunch vouchers into the mix, using them as primitive credit default swaps. One might think such usury would earn V.C. enemies. Actually, it earned him admirers. Everyone knew from early on that he was going places—and hoped to go with him.

I had a normal childhood until Pop lost his job and took up the bottle. Mom became depressed soon after. My brother Zack and I would arrive home from school to find her lying glumly on the couch watching TV in her nightgown, too blue to greet us. Still, I got good grades, made the junior high varsity baseball team, was popular enough. Though nothing compared to my brother Zachariah: two years older, first in the state in the 440 yard dash, class president, ladies’ man. Zack was still big brotherly in those days; he showed me the correct way to slide into base, advised me on my swing, helped me with algebra. He seemed to know everything, born like a computer with many gigabytes of information pre-stored in his brain.

Pop’s fall and Mom’s depression were my first lesson in life’s vagaries. I’d been indoctrinated, like every American kid, to believe that life is a rock climb: you secure hold after hold until you reach the top. But I soon learned that our fate often arrives like a pizza we haven’t ordered. Suddenly it’s just there, and we must pay for it. Perhaps you have heard it said that when bad luck comes good luck is sure to follow. I believed this once myself, and still struggle to believe it. However, I have learned that the only certain thing about life is its uncertainty.

#

“It can happen to anyone,” Dr. Napier told me after my first episode at age twelve. “It afflicted Julius Caesar and Alexander the Great, Napoleon and Handel, van Gogh and Flaubert. So you’re in good company, Tommy. These names may mean little to you now, but they will bring you comfort as you grow older.” So I had it in my mind from early on that I would be famous.

I still wasn’t fully conscious after experiencing my first spell the night before, still in a twilight zone between sleep and waking. Dr. Napier’s words echoed in my head as if in a cathedral; they clung to white walls of the examining room and slid down in thick yellow streaks like egg yolk. Yolky talk! But they made an impression on me. After all, I had just awakened from death as some do on the operating table, and was—on a certain level—keenly alert. Everything seemed new and clean. I had never before noticed how people’s lips shape the words that emerge from their mouths. Dr. Napier was saying mine wasn’t a “disease” at all but rather a “neurological condition.”

Mom, Pop, and Zack were totally freaked out by my spell at the dinner table the night before, against which I cracked my head as I fell to the floor. They slid me uneasy looks for days after and reached out their hands to help me walk, when I could walk fine on my own. Mom spoke to me in a hushed voice as if in church. She took me aside in the kitchen after school and whispered in my face that it was all her fault. When I moved away, she stepped closer, talking rapidly, head turned sharply to the side as if she couldn’t bear to look at me; her breath stank of coffee. She insisted her “weak genes” had triggered it. “Your great-grandfather Seymour was schizoid, you realize, and Uncle Sam had fits, his wife Millie was slow. And your Dad’s father, Grandpa Aristophanos, is peculiar. Mental illness runs in the family, don’t you see? On both sides! I’ve expected it to show up in you boys one day.” She looked at me then, eyes brimming with tears and something like dread, whispering how awfully sorry she was in a hushed, imploring voice that scared me more than the spell had.

“I’m not mentally ill,” I whispered back, “only ‘neurologically impaired.’ That’s what Dr. Napier says.” I didn’t know what he meant, but I liked the sound of it.

I didn’t actually experience that first one. I never do; I am unconscious throughout. “It is a loss of muscular control and consciousness,” Dr. Napier told me. “Thank God for that.” I do recall far-off music, like a pipe organ playing inside my head just before it hit the table. Bees swarmed in my belly and came buzzing up my esophagus into my brain. Now, whenever I hear bees buzzing around flowering olives, I hunker down, expecting a spell.

I couldn’t recall what we’d had for dinner that night or what we had studied in school that day. Didn’t remember that I’d hit two home runs in our game against Whitethorne. How excited my family was. “So you gone brain dead or what?” Zack asked me next morning. “Real pisser, huh? So like what day is it, Dick For Brains?” I wasn’t sure. A slice had been cut out of my life, leaving an empty space. “Tuesday maybe,” I ventured. Zack pounded fists against his stomach. “It’s freaky Friday, dipshit. The day after fairy day. Remember? Hey, I got a dipshit space case for a brother. Just beautiful.”

He regularly called me Dick For Brains, but he’d never called me “dipshit” before; it hurt.

“You think my brain got scrambled, Zack?”

Zack shook his head as he left the room. “I think it was already scrambled, like Mom’s. Just didn’t show up until now.” My big brother wrote me off as a loser that day (maybe I did, too). That hurt more than anything else I can remember from my childhood.

Volt Cambridge Hoffstatter (V.C.) was known as a lady’s man in high school, as well as a wrestler, debater, and football star. He fucked half the rally squad and the football coach’s daughter, then his wife. He balled the wife of the Episcopal priest at the church the Hoffstatters occasionally attended. She had eyed him from down the pew, and after services they screwed in the backseat of Volt’s Mustang in the church parking lot. He took her panties as a memento and tucked them away in his “nooky drawer.”

He knew that women are attracted to two kinds of men: Alpha-male winners and men-boys who make them laugh. He was clearly the first type. Years later in New York, he confessed to a fellow executive that he had screwed over 3,000 women in his life. “I lost track years ago. I don’t have time to do as much of that anymore.”

Once, in the semi-final round of the state’s high school debate championships, he tussled with his opponents over the definition of morality. “Take war, for example,” he said. “I would submit that war is moral if we define morality as ‘the greatest good for the greatest number of people.’ War is not only good for the victor’s economy—it ended the Great Depression, after all—but it also eliminates large numbers of one’s enemy and culls the weak from among the victor’s population, since it is a law of nature that the weak shall fall and the strong prevail. So it’s ironic that Hitler made Social Darwinism the pillar of his Teutonic church, only to fall on his own sword. Pitiful loser!”

V.C. didn’t notice the judges leaning forward over their score cards, trying to decide if he was being facetious.

“War strengthens character,” he continued. “It shows us what we are made of. It has advanced science more than any other discipline. Without wars, we would still be in the stone age. Men would not know how to be men without testing their manhood in battle, and women would not know how to love them.”

The captain of the opposing team, a tall boy with red hair and a protuberant Adam’s apple, whom V.C. immediately pegged as a Bible thumper, was outraged. “What of our age-old moral texts, the Holy Bible, the Pentateuch, the Koran, the Upanishads?” he demanded. “All prohibit killing as a cardinal sin. So you just dismiss them with your bogus definition of morality? That is a total red herring.”

“Herrings stink and so does your logic.” Volt said dismissively. “Those ‘moral texts,’ as you call them, are the superstitious speculations of ancient cultures that were ignorant of science and psychology.”

Though Volt clearly won the debate, the judges awarded the contest to the other team. It was one of the few defeats in his young life, and V.C. was enraged at the injustice of it. So much so that he would mention it to his friend Stephenson Jeffers thirty years later. “Bad luck!” Jeffers said dismissively. Volt upbraided him. “You know, Jeffers, ‘luck’ is secular superstition, along with ‘fate,’ ‘destiny,’ ‘fortune,’ and all the other deceits of the gullible. I don’t believe in it anymore than I believe in God.”

#

So why not take up residence in an abandoned house? There are hundreds of them now in the valley, which might be dubbed “The Valley of Failure.” Houses are subject to intrusion by thieves, itinerants, and deputy sheriffs with eviction notices. Tucked away here in a derelict olive grove, I feel secure. I harvest fat black olives and cure them, sit out under the stars and contemplate my life…or lack of one.

Felony Fred and I used to salvage copper wire from abandoned houses and sell it for scrap; made enough one year to keep me eating. Never did know what crime Fred committed to land him in prison; he didn’t talk about it. Hardly talked at all. We would bust Sheetrock walls open with a sledge hammer and snake the wiring out from inside. Totally fucked places up.

I knew it was wrong to trash houses that belonged to someone else—even megabanks. I’m not a moral imbecile. But I had my reasons. I needed to eat. Look at it this way: you own a subdivision which you’ve turned people out of, foreclosed on them because they are underwater on subprime mortgages that were dicey to begin with, and for the-devil-knows-what reason you refuse to adjust owners’ payments so they can stay in their homes, won’t even consider renting to them—or anyone else—but let the houses sit empty; you don’t maintain or resell or even guard them, just let them decompose in the desert sun like monuments to lizardish despair (or Ozymandias)…maybe, just maybe, you deserve to have them trashed.

“This one’s gonna be a sonuvabitch, Freddy. We got to bust through Sheetrock and snake wiring out of the studs they ran it through. One of us will to have to climb up into the attic.”

Freddy just looked at me.

“There’s bound to be scorpions and black widows up there.”

Freddy looked pointedly down at his bowling ball belly as if to say, “You fucking kidding me!”

“Okay, I’ll do her. But you handle the sledge.”

No need to coax Freddy there. He went at those walls like he held a personal grudge against them, like whatever it was had fucked up his life lived in those walls. It was the pounding and Freddy’s roars that got us busted—cops pouring in from every direction, sirens blaring, a helicopter circling overhead like we were empty-house terrorists. I told the cops we were within our legal rights to salvage material from abandoned houses. They laughed and charged us with malicious mischief, grand larceny, trespass, and resisting arrest. I spent a year at Vacaville, but that’s a story I don’t care to tell. What can you say about prison? A long nightmare in lockdown loneliness and fear, bullying and boredom. Spells every other day since they refused me my meds. Actually, the spells helped me get through it, since they filled me with compassion for my fellow prisoners, even the nastiest Aryan Brotherhood skinheads and Mexican mafiosos. Besides, my spells terrified them, so even the psychos avoided me like I was a leper. Still, I gave them my grub in the mess hall, said I wasn’t hungry, sat down with them and told stories. At first they chased me off. “Don’t eat his food, homey. I seen him spit in it.” Eventually, they accepted me, would call to me across the mess hall, “Come tell us a story, Scavenger.” We are all suckers for a good story. Mine were mostly borrowed from the great novels.

I reread every book I’d not properly read in school and a couple hundred more. I was on Dickens’ Bleak House when they let me out. End of my salvaging days, beginning of dumpster diving. Like I say, I was already far into the phase of disbelieving that good luck follows bad. No, sir. Bad luck breeds bad luck and good luck breeds good. Both are existential traps. When I get down enough about it all, I sit at my laptop and peck at the keys.

V.C. Hoffstatter is having an atypically bad day. Wan Thiu has outdone him on the biology final: the results posted on Dr. Shannon’s office door for all to see. V.C. Hoffstatter in second place! He stands at the door muttering to himself. “It won’t do, just won’t.” When a trio of chatting girls walks by with books clutched to chests in those pre-iPhone days, he swivels around to confront them. “What are you gawking at? I will never place second again,” he insists.

The professor emerges from his office just then with a startled smile. “Second in what?”

“Anything,” Volt barks back.

“That’s a mighty tall order.”

“For the second-rate maybe.”

The professor tilts his head back as if trying to decide whether he should take offense. He decides not to.

My mother was offended when I told her I wasn’t mentally ill…or ill at all. My brain was only a bit different from other people’s. “So is mine,” she cried. “Do you think I want to be like this? Do you think I have any choice?”

“I just…I don’t believe either one of us is crazy,” I said.

“Believe what you like, Tommy. It runs in the family, like it or not.” Her eyes puffed up when she got agitated, orange hair a limp mop over her head. “Something is wrong in my mind. I am the first to admit it,” she said. “Still, we’re not the same, you and me, even though I am your mother. Mine is a vitamin deficiency, not mental illness. Yours…” she hesitated. “Still, it’s my own fault that you are ill.”

“Dr. Napier says it isn’t an illness. It’s a condition.”

Mom shrugged. “It’s brain sickness nonetheless.”

Other spells followed. Not daily, thank goodness, not even weekly. My condition was mostly controlled by meds. Still, they came at inconvenient times. I would be cramming for a history exam, stuffing information about the Civil War into my head, and suddenly a fog would descend over the mental battlefield like the fog of war in The Red Badge of Courage. I would hear far-off gunshots and a rumbling of drums or canons, and was filled with dread, wanting to flee the battlefield like that coward Henry Fleming. But there is no escaping a battle raging in your own brain.

I take a bullet, sense myself going down—see myself falling from across the room, eyes turning up in my head. Wake up in bed. Pop is trying to hold me down, though I need desperately to get up and pee. I can’t make him understand. My words pop before leaving my mouth. They are cartoon words: I watch them expand out of my mouth in elongated bubbles. I can hardly keep my eyes open. A hot wetness flows over my belly and down my legs. Pop leaps away. “You pissed my hand, for crissake. Jes’christ, Tommy, you wet the gawdamned bed. Can’t you go to the toilet normal if you got to piss?” Pop retreats from the room, shaking his head in disgust and muttering, “Never thought we’d have a damn retard in the family.”

“It’s part of his mental ailment, Hector,” Mom calls after him. “The boy can’t help it.”

“Disgusting,” Brother Zack pipes in.

Mom cleans me up. Vaguely, I remember that I have a history test tomorrow…or lit test. Or maybe that was last week. I don’t remember a thing I am supposed to know, can’t even remember if I’ve studied.

Still, my spells don’t much impact my grades. I am accepted by the first three colleges I apply to. I ace the personal essay. I’m proud of my writing ability. About all I have to be proud of. I can’t even do the rope climb in gym class—me or Tubby Martin. Tubs gets maybe two handholds up the rope then comes crashing down on his fat ass. I get half way up, the ceiling still miles off, using my arms to lift all of my weight since I can’t figure out how to grip the rope with my feet, which hang limply down. All the guys hooting. “Get your legs into it, Tommy. Tear it up.” Finally, I come sizzling back down the rope, burning hell out of my hands.

But I only have two spells at school, one in a restroom so nobody knows about it. The other more public. Plus the time I am out on a date with Carmella Ortiz, hottest girl in my class. “How did you score such a hot chick, dipstick?” Brother Zack asks me. “You getting any?” I shrug and say she likes my writing. In our creative writing class, Carmella leans her head back and closes her eyes when I workshop a story. I read solely to her. If she looks dreamily at me when I’ve finished, I know I’ve hit a homer. It’s Carmella who suggests we go out. My first date and my last until college.

It’s like Carmella has it all planned, like in one of my stories. She slides a hand up my leg in the movie theater, and I nearly shoot my wad right then, but can’t bring myself to touch more than the top of her stockings, slick and cool under her skirt. Afterwards, in Pop’s Chevy, she pulls out a doobie. Smoking it, I drift off into an organ-music fog, the smoke smells like blackberries and gets tangled in her hair, her lips nibble mine, she puts my hand on her bare tit, then slides down in the seat and gives me a blow job. It feels like she is pulling my whole body into her mouth. My head swells toward bursting, I hear the mosquito whine of tiny angel’s wings in my ears, pins and needles work up my arms…I know what’s coming. Goddamn it to hell! I try to shove her head away and claw for the door handle. Too late! I hear her scream. When I wake up in that aftermath daze, Carmella is gone. I’ve wet my pants. Or maybe it’s cum. My mouth is bitten up. Later, I wonder whether it was tension or excitement that set me off. After all, Carmella is a woman, while I am still a boy. She must have gone screeching down the street. She never acknowledges me again. But at least she doesn’t tell anyone.

#

Everyone knows Tolstoy’s famous maxim that begins Anna Karenina: “All happy families are alike, but each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” I propose a variation: All successful people are alike, but all failed people are failures in their own way. It is ironic that successful people insist they are authors of their own fate, when in truth their lives follow the same clichéd plot line written by a ghost writer lacking imagination. It is us fuck-ups who author our own biographies. Each of us fails in our own peculiar way.

Out here, I spend my time keeping body and soul together like an Amazonian native. But who doesn’t, really? Some claim to be civilization’s princelings, living by a higher calling, but they are fooling themselves. Life is grubby no matter how you live it. We all begin and end in the same place.

So why live in an abandoned grove on the outskirts of town rather than up in the foothills far from cops and marauders and gun nuts? Mainly, to be close enough to town to harvest its leavings. Besides, where would I get water in the dry chaparral? I wouldn’t have electricity or olives or human company when I want it. Here, I wander the roads when I’m lonely, or sit near the old gal’s house listening to her TV, or with my back against the wall at the 7-Eleven, schmoozing with Joey Junior and Whispering Jane. I don’t much fear being discovered since the old gal never ventures into her grove. The only intruders are Mexican laborers who clear a fire break around the periphery each spring. And gun nuts. I’ve become friendly with these camouflaged loonies, who stop by to inquire whether I have seen any Feds lurking about. They know I mistrust authority as much as they do. All except for a rogue I encountered one night while fetching water. He stepped out from behind a tree and scared the bejesus out of me. “Who the fuck are you?” he barked. I meant to ask him the same question. In the moonlight, I made out a huge gun leveled at my chest that looked like a gleaming kid’s toy, a futuristic laser blazer.

“Me? I’m nobody. My biography would be titled The Story of Nobody.”

He tilted his head like a dog will. “You fucking with me?”

“I may be crazy but I’m not stupid. You’re pointing a gun at me.”

He nodded. I wasn’t afraid. Maybe once you realize your life is worthless there’s nothing to fear anymore. I asked him what kind of gun it was. He became animated then, worked the bolt. “Eighty-round clip. Fires eight-round bursts. Deadly as an AK-47.” I told him I used to go deer hunting. He made a dismissive huffing noise and disappeared into the night.

Occasional wanderers enter the grove seeking shelter—more and more of them young these days. I feed them and let them bed down outside my hut. No bother. The thing about us offcasts, we understand the world belongs to us all; no one can lease the night sky. We share our bottles, knowing what goes around comes around. We share community, which, as far as I can tell, has ceased to exist among the landholders and cellphoners.

Then there’s Cleopatra, who I hope was of legal age the first time she passed through. “Do you want to fuck me?” she asked after we ate dinner of rabbit stew with potatoes and carrots I’d grown myself. It was like she wanted to pay her tab. “That’s not necessary,” I said. “I enjoy your company.”

“You might enjoy it all the more.”

Cleo passes through every six months or so, talking in a rush about what has transpired in the interval: a gal she beat up ‘cause she stole her boy Billy, only to learn she was Billy’s sister, how she got caught shoplifting again, but bit the security guard and ran away—that girl could flat run!—how she half froze to death in a gully in Death Valley and was rescued by a park ranger, how she accidentally set that fire in Aspen, Colorado that burned twenty-thousand acres and twelve homes…real sorry about that. The girl got around. She’s like an HBO series: Cleopatra on the Skids. But these are stories that must wait for another time. I have work to do.

Volt’s mother wanted him to go to a private school, but his father, J.D., insisted he attend public schools. “You have to know the common man if you wish to be uncommon. It’s served me well enough. Most corporate executives know nothing of your average Joe. How can you make products for people you know nothing about?” Even at age six, V.C. thought this a lot of hooey, but he went along with the program.

His single friend in high school—before the Hoffstatters moved to New York—was a math whiz and state champ in the middle distances, with a foreign-sounding name. Volt called him Aristotle and befriended him for the same reason Aristotle befriended him: both saw themselves as head and shoulders above their classmates.

Aristotle’s mother slogged about the house in her nightgown all day, sat glassy-eyed in front of the TV. “What’s with your mom?” Volt asked his pal. “She creeps me out.” Aristotle shrugged. “She’s depressed, okay. If you lived with my loser old man you’d be depressed, too.”

To Volt’s mind, it was unpromising to have loser parents; the apple never falls far from the tree and all. Already a staunch social Darwinist (Ayn Rand was his favorite writer), V.C. believed bad genes, passed along over generations, cause criminality, imbecility, mental illness, diabetes, epilepsy and other loser ailments. Behold moronic parents tugging their screaming, moronic brats into Walmart and loading the cart with sugarcarbs. Parents lost, children lost.

Aristotle was the rare exception. Occasional mutations in loser gene pools no doubt cause exceptions. But his kid brother was a loner freak who talked to himself while scribbling nonsense in his room, its walls plastered with posters of wigged-out Sixties rock stars. He was prone to ugly and unnerving convulsions. The kid was proof positive that the family’s genome was infected with low-quality DNA. V.C. never wanted to remain in that house long for fear the kid would have one of his fits.

Besides being depressed, Aristotle’s mother was a cougar. Once, while Volt waited in the garage for Aristotle to return from test driving the Vette they had rebuilt together, Mom appeared in a see-through negligee and approached him with a finger to her lips, her eyes aglow and nipples erect beneath sheer fabric. Without preamble, she dropped to her knees and unzipped his fly. Volt recoiled. She sneered up at him. “What’s the matter? Are you queer?” He pushed her head down and let her blow him.

That his friend came from such a background and won a full scholarship to MIT was baffling. But, as J.D. often said, everything isn’t subject to common sense.