Denny sniffs.

"You need a snot rag, dude?" I say.

The weird part is my mom's not getting any better. No matter how much I play Pied Piper and take the blame away from these people. No matter how much fault I sponge up, my mom doesn't believe I'm me anymore, that I'm Victor Mancini. So she won't unload her own big secret. So she's going to need some stomach tube thing.

"Sobriety is okay enough," Denny says, "but someday, I'd like to live a life based on doing good stuff instead of just not doing bad stuff. You know?"

What's even weirder, I tell him, is I'm figuring how I can turn my new popularity into a fast broom closet ram session with this tall nurse, maybe get her to throat my dog. A nurse thinks you're a caring nurturing guy who's patient with hopeless old people, and you're halfway to boning her.

See also: Caren, RN.

See also: Nanette, LPN.

See also: Jolene, LPN.

But no matter who I'm with, my head's inside this other girl. This Dr. Paige Something. Marshall.

So no matter who I'm boning, I have to think about big in­fected animals, big roadkill raccoons all swollen up with gas and getting hit by fast trucks on the highway on a blistering day in the sun. Either that or I trigger right away, that's how hot this Dr. Marshall is in my head.

It's funny how you never think about the women you've had. It's always the ones who get away that you can't forget.

"It's just that my internal addict is so strong," Denny says, "that I'm afraid to not be locked up. My life needs to be about more than just not jerking off."

Other women, I say, no matter who, you can imagine them getting rammed. You know, straddling the driver's seat in some car, her G-spot, the back of her urethral sponge, getting ham­mered on by your fat hot slider. Or you can see her bent over the edge of a hot tub getting plugged. You know, her, in her private life.

But with this Dr. Paige Marshall, she seems to be above get­ting boned.

Some kind of vultury birds are circling overhead. According to bird time, that makes it around two o'clock. A gust of wind throws the tails of Denny's waistcoat up over his shoulders, and I pull them back down.

"Sometimes," Denny says and sniffs, "it's like I want to be beaten and punished. It's okay if there isn't a God anymore, but I still want to respect something. I don't want to be the center of my own universe."

With Denny in the stocks all afternoon, I have to split all the firewood. By myself, I have to grind the corn. Salt the pork. Can­dle the eggs. The cream needs to be dipped. The hogs, slopped. You wouldn't think the eighteenth century would be so hectic. With me picking up all the slack for him, I tell Denny's hunched back, the least he could do is come visit my mom and pretend to be me. To hear her confession.

Denny sighs at the ground. From two hundred feet up, one of the vulture birds drops a nasty white dump on his back.

Denny says, "Dude, what I need is a mission."

I say, "So do this one good thing. Help out an old lady."

And Denny says, "How's your number four step coming along?" He says, "Dude, I have an itch on my side, can you help me out?"

And careful of the bird crap, I start scratching him.

Chapter 12

In the phone book, there's more and more red ink. More and more restaurants are crossed out in red felt-tipped pen. These are all places where I almost died. Italian. Mexican. Chinese places. For real, every night I have fewer options for where to eat out if I want to make any money. If I want to trick anybody into loving me.

The question is always: So what do you feel like choking on tonight?

There's French food. Mayan food. East Indian.

For where I live, in my mom's old house, picture a really dirty antique store. The kind where you have to walk sideways, the way you'd walk in Egyptian hieroglyphics, it's that kind of crowded. All the furniture carved out of wood, the long dining-room table, the chairs and chests and cabinets with faces carved on everything, the furniture's all oozed over with some thick syrup kind of varnish that turned black and crackled about a mil­lion years before Christ. Covering the bulgy sofas is that bullet­proof kind of tapesty you'd never want to sit on naked.

Every night after work, first there's the birthday cards to go through. The checks to total. This is spread out across the black acre of dining-room table, my base of operations. Here's the next day's deposit slip to fill out. Tonight, it's one lousy card. One crapmo card comes in the mail with a check for fifty bucks. That's still a thank-you note I have to write. There's still the grov­eling next generation of underdog letters to send out.

It's not that I'm an ingrate, but if all you can cut me is fifty bucks, next time just let me die. Okay? Or better yet, stand aside and let some rich person be the hero.

For sure, I can't write that in any thank-you note, but still.

For my mom's house, picture all this castle furniture crammed into a two-bedroom newlywed house. These sofas and paintings and clocks are all supposed to be her dowry from the Old Coun­try. From Italy. My mom came here for college and never went back after she had me.

She's not Italian in any way you'd notice. No garlic smell or big armpit hair. She came here to attend medical school. Frigging medical school. In Iowa. The truth is, immigrants tend to be more American than people born here.

The truth is, I'm more or less her green card.

Looking through the phone book, what I need to do is take my act to a classier audience. You have to go where the money is and bring it home. Don't be choking to death on chicken nuggets in some deep-fried joint.

Rich people eating French food want to be the hero as much as anybody else.

My point is, discriminate.

My advice to you is: identify your target market.

In the phone book, there's still fish houses to try. Mongolian grills.

The name on today's check is some woman who saved my life in a smorgasbord last April. One of those all-you-can-eat buffets. What was I thinking? Choking in cheap restaurants is for sure a false economy. It's all worked out, all the details, in the big book I keep. Here's everything from who saved me where and when, to how much have they spent so far. Today's donor is Brenda Munroe signed at the bottom of the birthday card, with love.

"I hope this little bit helps," she's written across the bottom of the check.

Brenda Munroe, Brenda Munroe. I try, but I don't get a face. Nothing. Nobody can expect you to remember every near-death experience. For sure, I should keep better notes, hair and eye color at least, but for real, look at me here. As it is, I'm already drowning in paperwork.

Last month's thank-you letter was all about my struggle to pay for I forget what.

It was rent I told people I needed, or dental work. It was to pay for milk or counseling. By the time I send out a couple hun­dred of the same letter, I never want to read it again.

It's a homegrown version of those overseas children's charities. These are the ones where for the price of a cup of coffee, you could save a child's life. Be a sponsor. The hook is you can't just save somebody's life one time. People are having to save me again and again. The same as real life, there is no happily ever after.