Canned
by Thomas Heisler
My brother Preston, who is nothing much except that he won the Rose Bowl two years ago and is now the San Francisco 49ers’ starting tight-end, is the one being married. This is supposed to be a really happy occasion, and for most people in the audience it probably is, but for me it’s something else. My face is broken out, which happens anytime I’m under strain, which is often - the majority of the acne collecting around my chin, but some also on my upper lip - and my tuxedo fits me in such a way to accentuate those aspects of my body that should be hidden under deep layers of deceptive fashion. The pant cuffs are at the tops of my ankles and my jacket’s too big and my cummerbund’s on so tight that my shirt bulges over it like a little sack of fat, just hanging from my gruesomely skinny body. At six-foot-two, 150-odd pounds, I look like I’ve been behind barbed wire somewhere equatorial, chewing on sticks. I tried the tux on at the store a week ago and it seemed to fit me fine, but today’s a different story. They’ve got those tricky mirrors at clothing places that make you look better than you are that might explain it, but if you ask me, I’d say it has something to do with astrology.
Wonderboy, as I affectionately refer to him, of course, looks gorgeous. His tux fits perfectly and he looks so fucking gorgeous he could be on the cover of Esquire, Gentleman’s Quarterly, or even Cigar Aficionado. He’s marrying his high school sweetheart, Dawn Sinclair, who has actually been on a cover of a magazine, the November, 1997 issue of Elle, which I used to have under my bed. My mom must have found it and thrown it away because it’s not there anymore. But Dawn’s been in other fashion mags and I keep them hidden better. Whenever I make imagined love to her, I hear her saying ‘My God, it’s so much bigger than Preston’s’ or ‘Give it to me, all of it, everything you’ve got’ or something generically pornographic like that as she shimmies her way out of her thong underwear, gets on all fours, and grabs onto the iron-runged headboard. I tease her with just the tip of my penis, which is maybe a quarter of a centimeter longer than Preston’s – this, at least, was true ten years ago, the last time we compared our cocks, and may not be true today - until I have her howling for the whole "massive piece of meat." But then, after I do my business in some embarrassingly short time, I hear her saying in that confident, rich-girl voice, something like, ‘You disgust me, you sickening cockroach. That was the worst lay I’ve ever been subjected to.’
This place is called The Church of the Holy Comforter, which I can’t say without picturing a gold, silk duvet from Bed, Bath, and Beyond that envelops insomniacs in infant sleep. It’s located in Kenilworth, a rich suburb on the North Shore of Chicago that’s just south of Winnetka, the rich suburb where I live with my parents. It’s the Sinclair’s church. Our family belongs to Christ Church in Winnetka, although I personally am not an active member. I have chosen a path that doesn’t involve playing Parcheesi in a church basement on Wednesday nights, drinking fruit punch and practicing unhurtful speech. Maybe that’s my problem, my lack of belief in God and support groups, but I don’t think so. Anyway, back to the Holy Comforter. It had torn a page right out of Martha Stewart Living, substituting bloody crucifixes and other unsightly and outdated bric-a-brac for lush velvet and rich mahogany and sumptuous silk. God is nice here. He’s listed in the phone book and wants you to call Him by His first name. When I get a God for myself, He’ll be a mean mother-fucker who’ll do my dirty work, namely, smiting and visiting general calamity upon Preston and rearranging the World Order so that Dawn will kneel for me.
There are a couple hundred people in the audience. Their eyes feel like fresh cuts on my skin. I’m standing with the rest of the wedding party at the front of the church in the elevated area around the altar, and feel like I’ve been offered up as a sacrifice. I’m a sheep. A goat. A cow. Don’t be fooled by the puberty acne. Now get it over with and eat me already! That’s the thing. The waiting around for It to happen. For the final humiliation. The one that will kill me. It’s the waiting that’s worse than death.
I try to tug my pants down with the thumb and forefinger of my right hand, but they’re on too tightly. Just before the ceremony began, my mom adjusted my bow tie, dug under my cummerbund and tightened my pants by ratcheting those clasps, and then tightened the cummerbund itself. I told her that it was uncomfortable, but she insisted that I looked better that way. "In fact," she said, "I’ve never seen you look so handsome." My mom’s always lying to me like this, like I’m eight years old, and a word from her will make everything peachy. I rub the side of my face with my oily finger and feed the individual pustules their greasy supper. It feels good to abandon yourself to masochism. It’s one of my few pastimes. This and communion with Dawn’s glossy photographs.
At my right is Jim Rogers, the best man. He went to high school with Preston, and me too, though he doesn’t talk to me except when he’s being insulting. He called me Tampax in high school because of my particular body-type, and the name, with their set, stuck. He went on to play tennis at Stanford, and, as I look at him would say that he looks like a guy who played tennis at Stanford: all brown and country-clubbish and happy with himself. He lives in Silicon Valley and works for an internet start-up company and is getting rich and will happily tell you about it. On my other side is Chuck Hanson, another friend of Preston’s from high school. He went to UNC and is now in law school in New York somewhere. He wears his hair slicked back, like a divorce lawyer in-training, and squints one eye when he talks to important people, as if to prove how shrewd he is. He was the one who pulled my shorts down by the back steps of school where everyone ate their lunches in the springtime, knowing, through Preston, that I didn’t wear underwear, and gave me a loud smack on my bare ass that resounded in the hallways for months afterward. Next to Chuck is Todd Makon, Preston’s quarterback at UCLA, who he calls Mako, like the vicious Mako shark, which I think is not only clever but also darned cute. Mako’s a second stringer for New Orleans, which means that he and Preston have a lot to talk about. That is to say, football, football, football, yippee! Fascinating fucking people. Preston, who’s supposedly faithful to Dawn, lives the sexual life of the professional athlete vicariously through Mako, who’s got a story for every state, as he says, a lay on every layover. He says he wants to get a map of the U.S. and push-pins to record his exploits. Maybe color code the pins to indicate type-of-sex, i.e. group, fetish, interracial, etc. Across the aisle are Dawn’s bridesmaids. I haven’t been introduced to them, and probably won’t be. They look like quintuplets. Generically pretty, fake blond hair, possibly with implants. Typical California fare. Hah! Maggot that I am, I’d blush if one of them so much as looked at me. I’d probably wet myself if one smiled.
Forget about them. Back to Preston. Wonderboy was an all-American football player in high school, setting multitudinous school and state records, rah, rah! And, incongruously, that is to say, uncharacteristic of football players, he got good grades. My parents’ friends, particularly the women, who entertained the notion of adultery in his presence - and these were good, Episcopalian women, mind you - cheered, "Scholar-athlete!" as they crossed and recrossed their legs, and applied, lasciviously their lipstick. Preston, my friend, my buddy, got a football scholarship to UCLA, and his senior year, the Bruins won the big one, the Rose Bowl, the fucking parade and all! How did they win it, you ask? How indeed. Preston, growing into the name of Wonderboy, caught a touchdown pass in the final seconds. The commentators, who were they? Jim Nance and Lou Holtz? I can’t remember, they all say the same thing anyway, let’s say, Jim, for convenience sake, said it was one of the great catches in Rose Bowl history. And Lou, his color guy, said, darned tootin’ right! or something like that. My brother’s a fucking hero. The nation may bend over and kiss his tight ass. And it did! Then, draft day, blah, blah, blah, second round, the San Francisco 49ers choose, out of UCLA, Preston Davenport, blah, blah, blah, money, house atop some hill with a view of the Golden Gate Bridge, with his model (literally) girlfriend, Dawn, massaging him after the big game, telling him how well he did out there catching the ball, running with the ball, scoring the touchdown, making everybody cheer.
I know for a fact that my mom forced Preston to invite me to be in the wedding. I know this because it’s just something my mom does, tries to keep the family tight knit, and more to the point, because I know what Preston thinks of me. Which is not much. We haven’t been friends since we were kids when we used to climb trees in the park across the street and trade baseball cards – I would trade my gems for lesser cards to make him happy - and get into trouble tormenting the old woman three houses down, Mrs. Cranlin, and fling the small, dead fish – alewives, they’re called – at each other when they washed up on the shore of Lake Michigan in early June, and do all that crap that normal kids do. Then, when he started getting hair on his balls, before I did myself - I’m two years younger than him – all brotherly-love was a memory he wanted kept buried in a shoebox in the backyard. He was on his way up, and he would not be held back by an ordinary brother. I tried to hold on as he entered high school, making his mark on the football team as a freshman, attracting skinny girls with tan skin and perfect teeth, going to parties, drinking beer, I would’ve done anything to be included in his fun, and tried with all my insubstantial might to cling, like some dirty convict begging for mercy, until he beat me back, damnit. Beat me over the fucking skull, until I fell over, worn out, helped to my feet, eventually, only by massive quantities of marijuana. I was a pothead, stoner, and hung out with "loser pothead friends," as Preston said, and spent my money on blank tapes for Grateful Dead and Phish bootlegs and on dope, and sat around my house listening to bad quality recordings, smoking bowls, and/or watching Dawn through the crack in the door in her short skirt and tight top, straddling Preston on the TV room couch, imagining scenarios in which I would humiliate Preston in front of her, proving myself the better man, that would end with her dumping him and following me to my room to look at my extensive tape collection. One time, he caught me peeking, and called me a "sick, perverted, jerkoff, loser pothead," and slammed the partially open door on my face, then later, after Dawn had gone home, pushed me against the wall and said, "stay out of my fucking life, okay?"
When he invited me to be in his wedding, he said, "So, do you want to be in my gawdamn wedding or not?" The most important thing, I thought, as I hunched over in the chair in which I was sitting, was to end our conversation as quickly as possible, so I said, "I don’t know, yeah, I guess." He said, "Don’t be so fucking enthusiastic." And hung up. Later, I asked my mom why she forced him to extend this gracious invitation. "What?" She said, "I had nothing to do with it, honey. Preston does want you to be in it. It was his decision. You’re his one and only brother and he loves you very, very much."
My parents are sitting in the front pew, just across the aisle from the Sinclairs. My mom’s dabbing the bottoms of her eyes that are running with tears pregnant with memories from birth to Now, the squealing piglet that popped out of her womb and its evolution, every stride dear to her, into this great warrior of the gridiron and upholder of the sacred institution of marriage. His egotism, his carnivorousness, his abusiveness washed away in the purple tint of the light shining through the stained glass window, or maybe never known to her at all, with her mothers’ selective vision. My father’s arms are crossed and his posture is unnaturally erect, like some statue of a politician, looming large over the frightened young ones on their field trip to Capital Hill. I, on the other hand, sit hunched over, as if someone, most likely Preston, had just, walking by me, decided without provocation to hit me in the stomach. My dad’s a big, strong, tough mother-fucker like Preston, but has a face more square and less attractive than Preston’s, whose appearance is closer to my mom’s, a very pretty woman in a Sigourney Weaver sort of way. I don’t resemble my mom any more than I do my dad except in that I used to cry a lot. I don’t anymore. My dad’s brother, Uncle Jack, who is a psychiatrist with his own practice in Boston, spent a weekend with us last year, and told my mom that I seemed to be lacking "affect," which means I think that I don’t have much emotion, and am generally a dull kind of guy. He sat down and very earnestly talked to me in the library of our house, using words like neurosis, disassociation, and psychosomatic, and recommended that I seek professional assistance. I chose not to. Last night at the rehearsal dinner, he was inspecting me, like he was trying to make a diagnosis and magically cure by the power of understanding. He thinks he can save the world. To me, this seems dangerously close to a God complex, if I may be so bold, which is why I don’t trust people in the mental health profession. Not to mention the fact that he recently remarried, and the woman he chose is fifteen years younger than him and looks like Vanna White, only, if you can imagine it, trashier. His first wife, Aunt Carol, was a gem. How can you trust a person who tosses away a woman like Carol for a piece of ass to lead you through this vale of tears strong of mind?
I stare at my dad. I know that I shouldn’t. Because in his face, in the way he looks at me, I see what a failure I am. But I do it anyway, like you’d glance at a noticeably insane man on the El who appears to want to do you violence. I guess you’re curious if it actually is so. Could it be possible that he in fact wants to murder you? You do it also to safeguard yourself against attack, should he make one. You must keep a wary eye on the predator when you are its prey, and keep your adrenaline level up in case you need to activate your flight response. In my case, you add to this primitive stew, masochism, a more modern, human ingredient – I ‘m no expert, but I doubt self-destructive tendencies exist in the wild – and you have a strange, unstable stare that at once fears and desires what it fears, to which a well-adjusted man like my father will not respond with understanding, to say the least. Finally he looks at me, and I see everything: the possession charge written up in the police blotter page of our local newspaper; the barely passing grades in high school, in spite of high standardized scores betraying, as a school counselor told my family and me, an extreme example of a person not working up to his potential; my disappearance for a month the summer after my junior year in which I followed the Phish tour, causing my mom, as my father said, to nearly lose her mind; my low grades at the University of Kansas and complete evaporation of interest in anything, including friends; and finally, my eventual failure to achieve passing grades during the first semester of sophomore year, resulting in my expulsion and my inglorious return to their home a few weeks before Preston’s Rose Bowl, meaning I came home as a failure in my own right, and a miserable, worthless failure as compared to my great older brother who, as I was settling back into my old bedroom, wanking off to pictures of his girlfriend, was winning Immortality.
The night I got home, my dad said, over meatloaf, "You’ve got to learn about gawdamn consequences. Nothing’s free anymore, Will." His big square face looked like the head of a hammer about to crush me. I knew when he meant something so I got a job bagging groceries at Lakeside Foods in uptown Winnetka two weeks later. I’d been working there up until about a month ago, when I was fired for being late too often. I haven’t gotten another job yet and my dad’s rage is overflowing like a stopped-up toilet. He rages over fusillli casserole or crab cakes or salade Nicoise, wielding his fork - dripping with raspberry vinaigrette or Bolognese sauce - like he means to plunge it into my eye. Things are bad.
The priest instructs Dawn and Preston to face each other; Preston turns away from me, Dawn toward me. My breathing accelerates. Her lips are full and pouting and in my sleep, I feel their warm softness against my cheek as I, dreaming, lay in bed looking at the ceiling with my hands behind my head, thanking God for His heavenly abundance. Now, I tell God to fuck off for all of His injustices. I love Dawn. Preston does not. I know this. He is incapable of loving anyone but himself. Yet, here she stands, looking at him as if impatient for the connubial bed, while Preston replays his Rose Bowl catch in his megalomaniacal mind. I grab the candelabra off the altar and plunge it into his back, and she understands why, and unbuttons her gown, and lets it fall from her body, presenting herself, a Born-Again-Virgin, in all her tan-lined majesty to me. My God, I’ve got a boner. I slide my hand into my pocket and try to work my daydream-believing cock into the elastic of my boxer-shorts. I knock Jim’s elbow and he looks down and sees what I’m doing and shakes his head and sneers. He’ll definitely have something to say about this later. Something perfectly humiliating.
I close my eyes hoping to make everything disappear. There are, however, colors and shapes everywhere. I replay an incident that’s been trying to get out, like a word on the tip of your tongue, since it happened three nights ago. The four of us, mom, dad, Preston, and me had dinner at home on Thursday, roasted guinea hen. Dad was too happy about Preston to bother waving his fork at me, so dinner wasn’t unbearable. Afterwards, they continued talking, as I washed the dishes then snuck into the TV room. I was watching Wheel of Fortune, the last part where the contestant plays for the big prize (I didn’t know the Celebrity answer based on the letters she got - she did, it was Nicholas Cage), when Preston walked in and sat down on the coffee table between me and the TV. He looked at me for a while before he spoke: "Listen, Will," he said, leaning toward me. "I just had a few things I wanted to say before this weekend." He made a fist with one hand, wrapped the other hand around it and rested his chin on top of his hands before continuing, "I know that you’ve had your problems these last few years, I don’t exactly know what they are, I don’t know if it’s the dope or what, whatever, they’re not my problems. Point is, I want, no, in fact, I need you to put them on hold for the weekend, alright?" He smiled, but somehow it was worse than his serious expression. "None of your famous outbursts." He said, referring to the way I sometimes just blurt something out if the spirit moves me, I’ll yell, for example, horseshoe! or onomatopoeia! or car goes vroom!, if I feel like it. "Just try," he went on, "to act like a normal fucking person, okay? I don’t want to see you drooling every time you get near Dawn, alright? I know she’s a pretty girl, but you’re just going to have to learn to get a hold of yourself. Can you do all this for me?" Asking this, he grabbed my arm and squeezed it until it hurt, looking in my eyes like he wanted to do much worse. "This is important to me," he said, "and I don’t want you fucking it up." He dug his fingers into my arm until my muscle numbed, and I felt tears in my eyes. "Nod if you understand me, Will." I can’t remember if I nodded or not.
I open my eyes. I’m somewhere above me. Dr. Uncle Jack told me that this is called "disassociation" and had a very reasonable, scientific explanation for why it occurs. I believe in a more mystical explanation, myself, although I can’t say exactly what. It reminds me of Scrooge, and his ghost watching his corporeal self in action. I’m sitting in the rafters of the church, watching the drama unwind. Maybe this is the furthest I’ve ever been disassociated from myself. From here, I can’t tell if my mom’s crying for Preston or for me, her grown-up or her baby. I feel sorry for her. She can’t keep carrying me around like I’m four years old. Tomorrow, I’m going to apologize, I swear. My dad looks so puffed up with pride, I almost laugh. Preston’s everything he ever wanted out of a kid, everything he himself wasn’t. Dad was a good football player, not a great one, and in spite of his own business success, needed someone to retroactively compensate for this shortcoming. What a life, to live through your son and his glory. Poor old fart and his football mania and his high blood pressure and violent fork. Preston and Dawn have just been instructed to kiss and are kissing, and it could be framed and hung right there, it’s so fucking perfect. Jesus be damned. Move over, and make room for them. They’re better looking than you anyway. Beards are out. Preston, Preston, Preston, you mother-fucker, I’m not going to embarrass you this weekend. I’m going to be the perfect brother. You know why? Because then, once everything’s perfect, and you and Dawn are off on your tropical vacation, you’ll be staring down the barrel of this gun: What now? You mother-fucker, no, you poor asshole, maybe I feel sorry for you. What now? What next? Where to go from here? And I look at myself, on the other hand, the other side of the globe, the goddamn tuxedo, the acne outbreak, the body, the dope, the unreciprocated love, the phobias, all that on the skin too, and see a load, yes, granted a big baggy messy load, but a load of unused fucking potential. I’ve got a full tank of gas and nowhere to go. What could be better?
Thomas Heisler is a 37 year old writer from
Chicago. He lives with his family and Siberian Husky, Raskolnikov, or
"Kolny," and plans to return to graduate school in the near future.
"Canned" is his first published work of fiction.
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