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  This is a Genuine Barnacle Book

  A Barnacle Book | Rare Bird Books

  453 South Spring Street, Suite 302

  Los Angeles, CA 90013

  rarebirdbooks.com

  Copyright © 2016 by Brian Sweany

  All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever, including but not limited to print, audio, and electronic. For more information, address:

  A Barnacle Book | Rare Bird Books Subsidiary Rights Department,

  453 South Spring Street, Suite 302, Los Angeles, CA 90013.

  Set in Dante

  Book design by starling

  Illustration by Alexandra Infante

  ePub ISBN: 978-1-942600-62-6

  Publisher’s Cataloging-in-Publication data

  Names: Sweany, Brian, author.

  Title: Buy the ticket , take the ride : a novel / Brian Sweany.

  Description: First Trade Paperback Original Edition | A Barnacle Book | Los Angeles [California] , New York [New York] : Rare Bird Books, 2016.

  Identifiers: ISBN 978-1-942600-38-1

  Subjects: LCSH Family—Fiction. | Indianapolis (Ind.)—Fiction. | Bildungsroman. | Rock music—Fiction. | Relationships—Fiction. | Publishing—Fiction. | Biographical fiction. | Humorous fiction. | Satire. | BISAC FICTION/General.

  Classification: LCC PS3619.W42 B49 2016| DDC 813.6—dc23

  No sympathy for the devil; keep that in mind. Buy the ticket, take the ride…and if it occasionally gets a little heavier than what you had in mind, well…maybe chalk it off to forced conscious expansion: Tune in, freak out, get beaten.

  —Hunter S. Thompson, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas

  Contents

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter four

  Chapter five

  Chapter SIX

  Chapter seven

  Chapter eight

  Chapter nine

  Chapter ten

  Chapter eleven

  Chapter twelve

  Chapter thirteen

  Chapter fourteen

  Chapter fifteen

  Chapter sixteen

  Chapter seventeen

  Chapter eighteen

  Chapter nineteen

  Chapter twenty

  Chapter twenty-one

  Chapter twenty-two

  Chapter twenty-three

  Chapter twenty-four

  Chapter twenty-five

  Chapter twenty-six

  Chapter twenty-seven

  Chapter twenty-eight

  Chapter twenty-nine

  Chapter thirty

  Chapter thirty-two

  Chapter thirty-three

  Chapter thirty-four

  Chapter thirty-five

  Chapter thirty-six

  Chapter thirty-seven

  Chapter thirty-eight

  Chapter thirty-nine

  Chapter forty

  Chapter forty-one

  Chapter forty-two

  Chapter forty-three

  Chapter forty-four

  Chapter forty-five

  Chapter forty-six

  Chapter forty-seven

  Chapter forty-eight

  Chapter forty-nine

  Chapter fifty

  Chapter fifty-one

  Chapter fifty-two

  Chapter fifty-three

  Chapter fifty-four

  Chapter fifty-five

  Chapter fifty-six

  Chapter fifty-seven

  Chapter fifty-eight

  Chapter fifty-nine

  Chapter sixty

  Chapter sixty-one

  Chapter sixty-two

  Chapter sixty-three

  Chapter sixty-four

  Chapter sixty-five

  Chapter sixty-six

  Chapter sixty-seven

  Chapter sixty-eight

  Chapter sixty-nine

  Chapter seventy

  Chapter seventy-one

  Chapter seventy-two

  Chapter seventy-three

  Chapter seventy-four

  Chapter seventy-five

  Chapter seventy-six

  Chapter seventy-seven

  Chapter seventy-eight

  Chapter seventy-nine

  Chapter eighty

  Chapter eighty-one

  Chapter eighty-two

  Chapter eighty-three

  Chapter eighty-four

  Chapter eighty-five

  Chapter eighty-six

  Chapter eighty-seven

  Chapter eighty-eight

  Chapter eighty-nine

  Chapter ninety

  Chapter ninety-one

  Chapter ninety-two

  Chapter ninety-three

  Chapter ninety-four

  Chapter ninety-five

  Chapter ninety-six

  Chapter ninety-seven

  Chapter ninety-eight

  Chapter ninety-nine

  Chapter one hundred

  Chapter one hundred one

  Chapter one hundred two

  Chapter one hundred three

  Chapter one hundred four

  Chapter one hundred five

  Chapter one hundred six

  Chapter one hundred seven

  Chapter one hundred eight

  Chapter one hundred nine

  Chapter one hundred ten

  Part I

  1986-1989

  Chapter One

  My morning gets off to its usual start. I wake up. Masturbate. Eat some bacon and eggs. Drink a cup of creamed and sugared coffee. Have a frank discussion with my father about his testicles.

  “A vasectomy reversal? Are you kidding me?”

  “Oh come on, son. It’s not that big of a deal.” A bi-folded pamphlet sits on the table. Dad opens and reads the pamphlet aloud: “‘A small incision is made in the scrotal skin over the old vasectomy site. The two ends of the vas deferens are found and freed from the surrounding scar tissue.’”

  He offers me the pamphlet. Something resembling a beat up three-wood taunts me on page two. I shake my head. “No, thanks.”

  “That right there is the vas…” Dad runs his finger along the shaft of the three-wood. He taps once on the top of the club. “Then you have your epididymis and your testicle.” He points to the three-wood’s shaft one more time. “My vas is currently severed, and they’re going in and sewing it back together, more or less.”

  I cringe at the thought of Dad’s nutsack getting sliced open. Mom hovers off to the side of the kitchen. She sips on her coffee in between bites of toast, reluctant to enter the fray. I don’t let her off that easy.

  “You put him up to this?”

  “Henry, your father and I have been talking about this for years.”

  “Oh, really?” I cringe at the sound of my given name. I hate the name Henry. Hank is the only name to which I’ve answered for pretty much my entire fifteen years on this planet, having cast aside “Henry David” and my mother’s literary pretense—she’s never even fucking read Walden—at the precise moment I split her vagina with my freakishly oversized melon.

  Dad sips his coffee. “Yes, really. Besides, if anyone’s at risk, it’s your mother, not me.”

  “Okay then, Mom, why the sudden interest in suicide?”r />
  “Suicide?” Mom shrugs. She’s wearing her old cotton bathrobe and Dad’s slippers. She shuffles across the linoleum floor and sits next to me at the kitchen table. “They’ve made a lot of advances in prenatal care since I had you and your sister.”

  “They have?”

  “Sure.”

  “Jesus, Mom! Last time I checked, I was born in nineteen seventy-one, not eighteen seventy-one. You had all kinds of problems with me and Jeanine. And Grandma Louise, what did she have, eight miscarriages or something?”

  “My mother only had three miscarriages.”

  “Only three? That’s a relief. How’s that twin sister of yours doing by the way?” It’s a callous reference to the premature twin my mother never knew. I’m curious as to how Mom’s twin would have turned out. It’s hard to picture anyone else looking back at me with that round, cherub-like face and its fountain of teased, hair sprayed, and overly dyed blondish hair. Harder still to imagine another woman dumb enough to contemplate reentering a world measured in dirty diapers and ear infections at the age of forty-one.

  But Mom is unwavering.

  “Women with much worse track records than mine are having babies nowadays.”

  “Worse? Have you looked in the mirror lately?”

  “As a matter of fact, I have.”

  “When’s the last time you just went for a walk?”

  “Can’t recall.”

  “You can’t recall because you don’t walk. You don’t really take care of yourself.”

  “Oh, Hank, stop it!” Mom shakes her head, as if merely denying she’s sedentary and bookish might alter reality.

  “Stop what?” I reach over and grab her wrist. She’s wearing a gold watch Dad gave her for their fifteenth anniversary two years ago. I turn her wrist so she can see the face of the watch. “What time you got? Because I’m looking at someone’s biological clock, and it says about quarter ’til midnight!”

  “Quarter ’til midnight, my ass.” Grandpa George throws the morning newspaper on the table. Although our family has been in America for close to two hundred years, Grandpa looks fresh off the boat—a freckled, strawberry blond Irishman even at age eighty-one. His thick, Coke-bottle glasses magnify the size of his eyes to comical proportions. He’s more blind than far-sighted at this point in his life.

  Grandpa sips his coffee. “If that goddamn kid throws my paper in the bushes one more goddamn time…”

  “Thanks, Dad,” Mom says.

  “‘Thanks nothing,” Grandpa says. “Boy shouldn’t be talking to his mother like that.”

  We moved Grandpa into our first floor guest room last year. Dad said it was the right thing to do. Grandpa had lived alone since Grandma Eleanor died of cancer in ’81, but sometime after the beginning of Reagan’s second term, he started forgetting things. He’d go out to meet his friends for breakfast, walking the same route along Kentucky Avenue on the southwest side of Indianapolis that he’d been walking for fifty years, and he’d get lost. Kentucky Avenue was no longer the best place to get lost. The old neighborhood wasn’t safe anymore. His favorite neighborhood stores—Murphy’s Mart, Woolworth’s, and Linder’s Ice Cream—had all gone out of business and been replaced by Mega Liquor World, Instamatic Cash Checking, and Rent-to-Own Furniture and Appliance Store. The Laundromat that used to have quarter washes and the machine that dispensed free popcorn now had ten-dollar hookers and a machine that dispensed fifty-cent condoms, and the house across the street that used to leak puppies and shirtless toddlers now leaked meth addicts and shirtless adults.

  Within months, Dad’s selfless act started backfiring. Incontinence, feebleness, dementia—Grandpa George’s body and mind has been giving out on him, but we’re always there to patch him up. The other night, I caught Dad hovering over Grandpa’s bed when he slept. I asked him what he was doing. He told me he was praying for God to make his father whole again. Even though we keep starting over with a puzzle that’s missing another piece, Dad refuses to entertain the idea of a nursing home or assisted care living. Our house has started to reek of urine—the smell of mortality and a son’s well-intentioned but misguided love.

  A part of me cherishes Grandpa George living with us, and not just because he’s a convenient scapegoat when Mom and Dad discover half-empty bottles in the liquor cabinet. Grandpa was my best friend for the first ten years of my life, and we had our rituals. Every Saturday morning when I was a kid, we’d walk to Mr. Dan’s Diner for breakfast. We’d sit with Grandpa’s World War II buddies—guys with inexplicable nicknames like Beef, Old Crow, Buddha, and Skeckel—and we’d order biscuits and gravy with coffee. The gravy at Mr. Dan’s had too much pepper for most people, but that was the way Grandpa and I liked it. After our breakfast, we’d hop on a bus to downtown. Our schedule was pretty much the same every Saturday. We walked through the Children’s Museum and ate lunch at Shapiro’s, the old Jewish deli in downtown Indianapolis—Grandpa George’s favorite restaurant. After lunch, we stopped in at St. John’s to kneel down and say some Hail Mary’s, and then Grandpa would buy me a model airplane at L. S. Ayres department store.

  At the end of the day, Grandpa and I would get on a bus and then hop off a couple miles short of his house. This gave us time to pick boysenberries from the bushes growing alongside the railroad tracks on Kentucky Avenue for Grandma Eleanor’s pies. The crickets chirping and that creosote smell of railroad ties would always make me think of summer. One day Grandpa told me the boysenberry bushes had come from the seeds left by passenger trains “dumping out their crappers.” I stopped picking boysenberries after that.

  But back to the kitchen and my father’s testicles.

  Grandpa George sets his coffee cup down on the table. “Now you listen here, Johnny, uh, Hank. What your mom and dad do behind closed doors is their own business.”

  “Johnny-uh-Hank” has been Grandpa’s unintentional nickname for me my whole life, as he never quite remembers that I’m his grandson instead of his son until halfway into my name.

  “Well, Grandpa, I assumed Dad made it my business when he shoved his vas deferens in my face.”

  “Take it easy, son,” Dad says, smiling. Smiling! And it isn’t just any smile. It’s one of those irrepressible John Fitzpatrick smiles that lights up a room while at the same time diffusing any situation. Dad tilts his head down, still smiling. He arches his dark, I-know-better-than-you eyebrows and points his pronounced Fitzpatrick nose at me.

  “I’m going in for the procedure on Monday morning, and your Mom and I are taking this one day at a time. I only have a fifty-fifty shot at even regaining my fertility.”

  He says fertility with an unmistakable reverence in his voice, as if his sperm is akin to the holiest of holy oils as opposed to what I dispense daily like party confetti. Chrism, jism—what’s the fucking difference?

  “Whatever, Pops. They’re your balls.”

  “Henry David Fitzpatrick!”

  She nails me across the back of my bedhead with her open palm. It’s more annoying than punitive, but it gets the job done. “Dammit, Mom!”

  She smacks me again. “Don’t think you’re too old for me to wash your mouth out with soap,” Mom says.

  Dad shoves two pieces of bacon into his mouth, smothering his laughter. Grandpa left the room unnoticed, shuffling out for his morning walk around the neighborhood with his sassafras cane.

  “Well, if we’re talking about another kid,” I say, “can we have the dog conversation again?”

  My mother hates animals. In my first fifteen years of life, various people—no fewer than three babysitters, Aunt Claudia, even a couple girlfriends—conspired to get me a dog. And each time, Mom was steadfast in her opposition.

  “Hank, as long as you live under this roof…”

  “I know, I know. Fish are the only pets I’ll ever get.”

  Dad washes down his bacon with a swallow of coffee. He
looks out the kitchen window at our backyard. Our lawn is bordered on the left by a willow tree stump, and on the right by a purple martin house. The ankle-high bluegrass waves in the morning breeze, its silver-green tapering off at the edge of the pond behind our house. “That lawn isn’t going to cut itself,” he says.

  I grumble as I walk outside. I raise the garage door, step out onto the driveway. The morning dew on the grass mocks me with its promise of matted clumps clogging the lawnmower and two hours of frustration and engine-masked profanity. The mower greets me with predictable ambivalence. A dozen futile pulls on the starter send me back into the house.

  I don’t know when Dad ceded lawn duties over to me. The transition was imperceptible. Yesterday, I was a little kid sitting in the family room wearing my Miami Dolphins helmet and cursing the New York Jets—this was back in the late seventies when Shula was God in my world, long before the Colts came to town—while Dad was outside coating himself in layers of grass, fertilizer, and gasoline. Today, I’m a teenager, no longer a Dolphins fan but still not enough of a Colts fan to care, bursting in on Mom and Dad coating themselves in pre-sex sweat.

  I wish I could say this is the first time I’ve walked in on them. Hell, I wish I could say this is the first time I’ve walked in on them this week.

  “Seriously, you two? I’m outside for five minutes, and you’re already dry-humping on the couch?” The inherent repulsiveness of parental copulation sends an acidic bacon and coffee burp up from my stomach.

  “What’s the problem, son?” Dad stands up, erection in tow, trying to cover himself. His robe leaves little to the imagination, so he turns sideways with his back to me.

  “Well, other than my disintegrating psyche, the stupid lawnmower won’t start.”

  “You prime her?” Dad asks.

  “A bunch of times.”

  “You probably flooded the engine. Is the sparkplug connected?”

  “Yeah, Dad.”

  “She have plenty of gas in her?”

  I shake my head. “You do realize I’m not retarded, right?”

  “Understood.” Dad adjusts his robe over his still noticeable bulge. Mom gives his butt a squeeze as he walks past, pouring salt into my psychological wounds. “Let’s have a look, then.”

  There are few more timeless traditions than men yelling at inanimate objects. We stand in the driveway pleading with the four-wheeled, two-cycle engine to obey our commands. Dad can’t get the mower started either, but he loves the old machine. Grandpa George bought it when Dad was in high school. It’s one of those yellow metal Lawn-Boys from the mid-sixties that manages to hurl everything it finds—sticks, rocks, dog poop, bird carcasses—back in your face. I don’t like the mower so much.