by N.J. Webster
V Da V still looked like a varsity wrestler—although he’d been banned from competing his senior year after he shoplifted body sprays from Target and sold them behind the physics portable. I got in trouble for that one, too, but I was just caught in his whirlwind, as people tend to get.
He had tightly cropped black hair which he gelled to the hardness of a drill bit. Ruddy cheeks and a glimmer in his eye, like a randy Santa. To pick up women, he would demand they feel his forearms, and I have to admit, his forearms were as densely sturdy as a log of firewood.
V Da V was a piece of shit. But he was part of a better time. We stayed in touch with him for the same reason people keep ratty stuffed animals and dusty, outdated video game consoles in their basements. And what would happen if we just left him to his own devices, all alone, stuck in our depressing desert town with no friends or connections and all that pent up energy? We had a responsibility.
So coming home meant coming back to V Da V, whether I liked it or not.
The first night, he took me out drinking at the Red Robin. “I knew you’d be back, college boy,” V Da V said, his face flushed. “I knew you’d be back. We’re going to have the time of our fucking lives.”
As V Da V spoke, he knowingly tapped the brim of his cheap tan trucker hat. Upon the hat was written “I BELIEVE” in humongous red letters—a reference to V Da V’s enthusiasm for lizardmen and UFOs. I had bought it for him the prior Christmas.
I thought he wore the hat because he didn’t understand that it was a joke. I thought he actually liked it. Many years later, when V Da V had a beautiful Australian wife with a breezy, charismatic accent and four towheaded children as wild as the Outback, he told me he wore the hat to make me feel better about coming home.
***
In the parking lot of the Red Robin, V Da V got in an argument with a stranger. They hurled bourbon-scented insults, inches apart, spattering saliva and bits of appetizers. When I tried to pull V Da V away, he grabbed me by the throat, whirled us around to face his foe, and bellowed, “Is this what you want? You want to fucking go?” The gambit—attempting to kill his own friend—was enough to ward off the attacker.
A week later, V Da V volunteered to watch his aunt’s three dogs—two rabid Chihuahuas and a sneezing, bowlegged Pitbull. V Da V begged me to help him wrangle the animals. Fine, I didn’t mind, and the dogs weren’t so bad once you got to know them. The problem was that V Da V also decided to do a standing backflip to impress his neighbors. He ran to the top of a grassy mound, flexed his squat Neanderthal legs, flung into the air, and landed on his back. He shot up screaming, “Oh shitballs! My back!” He spent the rest of the weekend in bed; I spent the rest of the weekend with the dogs.
We went from trips to the liquor store to trips to the city, from terrible superhero movies to terrible fast food. V Da V even dragged me to the local strip club. My eyes adjusted slowly, as if they didn’t want to see. Upon the stage was a girl I used to date in high school. She was a dark figure, bright yet shadowed, glittering and peering into me. She knew me. She knew us. The place smelled like the hot bowels of a dirty laundry basket, and I insisted we leave. V Da V bought my drinks that night because he could see I was feeling down.
It was quickly becoming clear: Every minute with V Da V was a risk to my future, if not my life. The guy had not changed since high school. He was ineluctable—a cartoonish alcoholic vampire who had punctured me like a Coors Light can, pressed his fat lips upon my frigid wound, and was joyously chugging my life away. It was best to keep my distance.
But I never could. Each night he’d call me up and say, “Let’s kick it. I’ll do anything for any reason. And I’ll drive—you just point the way.” He’d zip us around in his beat-up sedan, which also hadn’t changed since high school. The sedan’s interior was scuffed and torn and busted. Round mildew stains spotted the ceiling’s upholstery. He loved that car; I was surprised at his nostalgia, at his refusal to give it up.
It was in that car that V Da V first hinted at his scheme. The ride was quiet and peaceful, the roads empty.
“Guess who I saw in the hospital,” V Da V said. Despite all logic and public health laws, V Da V had become a nurse while we were off at college. I reclined drunkenly in the passenger seat. I didn’t answer.
“Nicolas Cage. Remember his folks live around here?”
“Hm.”
“I was gunna ask for an autograph, but I snuck a look at his chart. Dude’s sick.”
“I don’t think you’re supposed to tell me that.”
“His blood is fucked!”
“Let’s just go home. I have my interview in the morning.”
“Oh yeah, your interview. You’re going to kill it, bro. They’d be lucky to have you. Come over after.”
“I don’t know. I’ll call you.”
“No, no, come over. I want to show you something.”
***
V Da V lived in the same rundown apartment that he lived in when he emancipated from his father. One bedroom, a living room/kitchen, and a bathroom. The furniture was better—more adult—than it had been in high school, I’ll give him that.
My interview had gone poorly because I didn’t have experience in the newspaper business, and yet they asked me questions as if I did. I was looking forward to V Da V’s insistence that we get drunk.
I let myself in. On top of the battered brown leather couch was a signed four-foot-tall photograph of Michael Jackson moonwalking. I hoped V Da V didn’t plan to hang it up; he was already plenty creepy.
“V?”
Michael was pained and afloat in the stage lights. Eyes closed, bottom lip inhaled, fedora tilted forward. He felt the beat so deeply that each rhythmic pulse struck straight to the King of Pop’s Heart of Pop. I was very taken by the photograph. By how purely he was moved.
“Don’t touch that!”
I flinched and V Da V ripped off a sheet of laughter. He was only wearing a towel.
“I’m just messing with you, bro. That’s my retirement. You remember Nana loved Michael Jackson?”
I didn’t. His grandmother had looked after him, after he got away from his dad.
“She left me that, said she bought it for five-hundred bucks. God bless her. I kept it in the closet, but then Michael died, right?”
He threw me a thin, worn envelope. Before I had it open, he said, “Had it appraised, at the mall, the memorabilia store. Even with the guy low-balling me, he said he’d pay a thousand. A thousand bucks! Twice the value, bro. Overnight. And that’s the low ball. Smoke?”
On the couch, he took a long inhale of the glassy blue pipe and leaned back, still slightly wet. He slunk a muscled arm around his poster and said, coughing, “My fucking retirement.”
Books and seats had battered my body soft. How was it that V Da V—who at that point had to consist of seventy-percent Red Bull and Jägermeister—so fit?
“Let’s go eat,” I said.
V Da V frowned. Stinking, cheap marijuana hung about the apartment. “I thought you were a college boy?”
“What?”
“I thought you were smart, bro.” His eyes were red from smoking—a heated red—the swirl of his junker’s cigarette lighter—the nugget of marijuana combusting in his pipe. “My retirement’s about to get a lot bigger.”
***
That night I received a text message from my grave-robber-adjacent pal, Vincent Da Vinci. Vulture Da Vinci. Zombie. Fungus. Consumer of the dead.
It was a selfie taken from a high angle in his living room. He beamed in sallow shadows. Below and around him was a modest shrine to Nicolas Cage—photographs, plates, posters. In an avalanche of single line texts, one after another, V Da V sent:
I might just keep that wifebeater from Raising Arizona!
It gets here next week
I’m keeping it!
I’m gunna wear that shit
Poor bastard isn’t going to last a month. What a fucking legend. I love Con Air.
Imagine bringing a chick back here hahaha
Earlier in the day, I went with V Da V to the memorabilia store, but only to talk him out of it. As he slammed a hamburger into his mouth and drove with one eye toward the freeway, I told him that his plan was ridiculous and macabre. He barely listened. He floated us from lane to lane, not using a signal, a Zen-like state where, rather than slow down when an obstacle presented itself, he simply slid the car over, taking the path of least resistance, of perpetual momentum, of water over uneven rock.
After his shopping spree, I lugged a “National Treasure: Book of Secrets” poster in a heavy cream frame to his car. Upon the poster, in barely legible Sharpie, was written: Thanks for the laughs, Love Nicolas Cage. V Da V carried a stack of signed headshots. The top one was of Cage’s wooden-handed character from “Moonstruck.”
I was a little blown away by how much V Da V paid for the junk, by how much people valued the memorabilia of an actor who, while an American icon, was also a joke. I went online—eBay, auction sites, Reddit. The prices V Da V paid weren’t that bad, but like any investment this was probably about margins, and if he wanted to actually make some money and be taken seriously, he’d do some research rather than trusting the prices at some random store in a suburban mall next to a Wetzel’s Pretzels.
V Da V wasn’t even negotiating. He just paid the sticker price; the saleswoman could barely keep the saliva in her sharp-toothed mouth. V Da V just did whatever popped into his head, instinctually, like that scheme with the body sprays.
It made me so angry that I didn’t say no when V Da V invited me over to eat magic mushrooms and Domino’s pizza. I crashed on his couch, incapacitated in the scrying circle of Cage collectibles, and when I closed my eyes, I saw a waking dream. But these were dreams the way a wolf is a dog. I saw flowing robes and gilded altars and bloody fists clutching roses by their thorned middles. The air was striped with lines of religious incense; it was dense with the humid smell of red wine on a woman’s tongue. Across the earth, zealots rioted in Cage’s name, spurned by the unholy spirit that infused the actor, spreading Cage’s carnage on gore-stained soils, on lands abandoned by the fearful unbelievers. And among the throngs was V Da V, the patron saint, Pope-hatted and agrin, the Second Coming.
***
“I’m pumped that you’re pumped,” V Da V said, driving and trying to look me in the eye. “But you gotta diversify your investments.”
I waggled my printed spreadsheets in his face; I explained the margins; I confirmed the route we would take to hit the most memorabilia stores before they close.
“You’re good,” he said, “you’re good, and you know your shit. But I’ve already dropped a couple grand… Let’s just—”
He looked at me, and again there was a miscommunication. I saw the rusty wheels of his mind turning and I thought I was finally harnessing his energy for debauchery into something positive. Years later, when I would go to his house and hear about his new cars and get patronizing offers to be set up with his wife’s cousin, he told me over one-hundred-dollar bourbon that he was trying to give me a win.
The sky was the color of pencil smeared by a bad eraser. I told V Da V to speed up if we were going to hit all five stores before they close. At the cluttered downtown showroom, we asked a salesman with tired eyes like Cage himself to ring up every piece of Nicolas Cage merchandise, insisting on a bulk discount, of course. He showed yellow teeth: “Big fans, huh fellas?”
“Huge,” I said.
I didn’t have much money, but what money I had, I spent. I was living with my parents anyway. What was the use of a few thousand dollars when over my head hung the sword of college debt, ever swinging, ever dropping, ineluctable? Eighty-thousand dollars for a few crowded parties and a fawning explanation of “Ulysses,” and all I got for my trouble was “ineluctable.”
Frigid winds had descended, but inside the car was big-city muggy. We were exhausted and sweating in winter coats, and the sedan’s air was broken so it couldn’t defog the windows. We were being simmered in a crock pot of memorabilia: a signed script from “Leaving Las Vegas,” a jagged hunk of brick from some location in “Pig,” a life-size photograph of that meme from “The Wicker Man” where Cage’s head is trapped in the mesh basket with a thousand bees. Upon it was written:
Not the bees!
-Nicolas Cage
I pushed us so hard and so fast that we made it to a sixth store, which had been on my backup list. I maxed out my credit card on a 3-D, signed, limited-edition poster of Cage’s character from “Spider-man: Into the Spiderverse.”
The car was crammed with Cage. V Da V wanted to go home; he had an early shift. But he’d dragged me out for more drinks than I could count. It was time he returned the favor. I ordered us rum and Cokes. Then two more rum and Cokes. I ordered shots, and V Da V watched in awe under the fluorescent blues of the dive bar, but never hesitated.
“Cheers,” he said. We clinked the cheap glass and before he drank he continued, “You done good, college boy.”
I grimaced and hissed the taste from my mouth. I slammed the glass on the bar top.
V Da V checked out a brunette standing by the defunct jukebox, then he looked at me and he knew. “What?”
I hadn’t brought it up. I wasn’t going to let someone like V Da V get under my skin.
“What?” he insisted.
“Don’t call me that.”
“Call you what?”
“You know.”
He began to protest but stopped. “Okay.” He ordered more shots.
We’d never talked about it. That I came back after four years with nothing. That I needed more credits to complete my sad little English degree, but I was so depressed over the whole affair, felt so deeply that I’d wasted my time, that I retreated home to Mom and Dad and V Da V.
Over V Da V’s shoulder, rain gathered on the bar’s advertisement-strewn window. “Great,” I said, “we’ll have to be careful when we get in the car. We’ll have to—”
“Fuck!”
The bar jerked to a halt.
V Da V was up, sturdy body ready, fists of rock. “My car!”
“V?”
He was already out the door and into the rain. I ran after him.
I stayed under the awning, watching V Da V fumble the keys from his pocket. Balls of water fell from the sky as hard and temperamental as lucky marbles. “Oh shit, man,” he said, “Oh shit, oh shit.”
“What are you—” I recalled the mildewed ripples of his car’s ceiling. “You idiot!”
“Get in, get in, get in!”
“You God damn idiot!”
A horn blared as we swerved into traffic. I had my hands on the ceiling, as if I could hold in the water pooling and pouring from a dozen spots in the upholstery around the sunroof. I was screaming. V Da V was screaming. Our scripts engorged and bloated, our Cage signatures melted into black teardrops upon the canvas.
With a squeal, we entered the underground parking lot beneath V Da V’s apartment. The ceiling’s upholstery was covered in gargantuan gray blisters, wet and oozing; the water was still coming down. We stumbled from the car and began piling soaked Cage merchandise on the filthy garage floor. On the “Con Air” poster, Cage’s alleviated grin was now disfigured and hideous—a performance only Cage could pull off.
“I’ve never met a dumber redneck piece of trash,” I said.
V Da V didn’t answer. He was trying to dry a photo with a sopping wet sweatshirt.
“What kind of moron just lives with a car that can’t go in the rain?”
V Da V tripped. A bundle of scripts scattered on the soaked pavement. He paused to pick them up, but instead headed for the brick from “Pig.”
“You are so pathetic. I knew I should have stayed away. And the really depressing part is, I actually let myself get excited about your sad little get rich quick scheme—I got fooled by all your enthusiastic bullshit once again. But I’m done with this. I felt sorry for you, when I first got back, but I’m done.”
There was rain on his face, but I think V Da V was crying.
I stuffed my hands in my pockets and walked toward the garage exit. Behind me was ten thousand dollars in soiled Nicolas Cage merchandise. The actor died two months later. I couldn’t help myself: I looked up how much money we would have made. I shouldn’t have looked.
“We’re done,” I called over my shoulder. “We’re done. I’m going to do something with my life.”
I exited the garage, certain that all the wrongs and unfairness were behind me. Cutting V Da V off was the right thing to do. The future was open, and it would be different, and it would be good.
***
But I was wrong on all counts. Every time I visit his tacky mini-mansion, V Da V proves that I was wrong. He has a man cave there—as big as my apartment. A waterlogged Con Air poster hangs above his billiard’s table. He says the same thing, cackling, heavy arm across my shoulders: “Kristie tried to make me get rid of it. Called it trash. I almost broke up with her, swear to God. We’re going to get divorced over this thing.”
I usually laugh, or try to laugh, and he always says, “Those were the days, huh?” And the disturbing part is—I know he means it. And that’s the difference between us.
______
N.J. Webster is a writer and TTRPG game designer. He has had fiction published in The Offing, Monkeybicycle, New World Writing Quarterly, Dishsoap Quarterly, and other cool spots. His games are published under Thistle Games. Please bother him on Twitter (@realnjwebster) and let him know if you want to roll some dice.
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