Venus Drive by Sam Lipsyte Read Free Book Online

banquet that night.
    â€œVote us whatever the fuck you want,” I said.
    â€œOh, you little bitch,” said Steve-Ivan.
    We had to stack without even a Freeze-Please and Van Wort wouldn’t look at me.
    â€œWhat’s wrong with you?” I said.
    â€œI’m done with this,” said Van Wort.
    I took that to mean that he was going to do something, make himself the last of the brave. What he meant, though, was that he was truly done. Van Wort took a canoe out to the middle of the lake. We were doing free swim and we heard him call to us, watched him drink from a big plastic jug and just sort of bend over, roll off the bow into the lake. You’d figure drowning would be hard going to begin with, all that lung smash and lung stove and no air to dream of rivers anymore, but picture it with your guts burning off from a stolen jug of kitchen lye. Steve-Ivan dove in to save him but Van Wort was too fat. We watched them bob together in the middle of the lake. Then Steve-Ivan was bobbing up and down alone. He swam back weeping, or maybe it was the water.
    They got Van Wort’s body out with a special boat. They had him in a strap swinging off the gunwale. His swim trunks trailed out from his feet and you could see all the night wounds on him.
    â€œSelf-mutilation,” said Mr. Marv. “Interesting.”
    The news trucks drove up that afternoon.
    Van Wort’s father appeared, too. He was a skinny man in a sun hat. He stood on the shoreline shouting at no one in particular. I walked up to him.
    â€œI’m Bacon,” I said. “I was his friend.”
    â€œWere you his Judas, too?” said Mr. Van Wort. He busted me a tough one on the jaw. Then he took me to his bony chest.
    â€œI didn’t mean that,” he said. “I know you were his friend. Bobby wrote me about you.”
    I had long forgotten Van Wort was also a Bobby, if I ever knew.
    I wonder if his father saw me on the newscast that night.
    â€œFriend of the Victim,” they flashed across my heart.
    I was voted Most Humane at the camp banquet. Black Sean was Leadership Qualities. His mother cried. Steve-Ivan got up with a God’s Eye he claimed Van Wort had woven for him and Mr. Marv led us in a Moment of Silent Reflection.
    Van Wort, Mr. Marv told us, had touched all of our lives.
    He may have just been talking, like he did about the bone spurs, but he was also right. I put on a ton of weight in school that year, got jumped and beat in my town a lot. It felt good, like I was getting free of something, but I never let on that I was enjoying myself. Then I found a severe diet, sought welcome from a band of semi-evil people. We were all nearly beautiful and eager to destroy each other for it. I had the kind of time where you don’t notice the time going by, but it did.

Ergo, Ice Pick

    Someday, I shit you not, we are going to smash the state. We are going to smash it good. We’ve got time on our side. We are up in the hills with time on our side, and time’s pal, history, is pulling for us, too. Martin says it, and I believe it. What’s not to believe? What is to be done will be done.
    Up here, we are so far from our old homes. We are so far from where inside our old homes are mothers and fathers and TV’s to believe, shiny bars to hang towels from, bottles of things to wash our hair with and soften our shirts. We are far from the campus, too, where maybe I was out of my league, or maybe they were out of mine. Damn them, the ones on campus, and the ones in town. They walk around like everything is howdy-dory. They are blind to everything they cannot see. Soon as I heard about smashing the state, I was in. You don’t have to convince me the smell I’m smelling is the stench of the state. Look around, sniff it—the coffee, the roses, the rot, the aroma.
    Up here, we must beware. We are safer in the hills but we are not safe. The long arm of the law is bendy and long. All we can do is