Goodman Tells the Truth

A Man on a Mission in his Mother’s Basement

This is an excerpt from the first chapter of a book I wrote in 2021. I like it, but nobody else does. Yet . . .

Chapter 1

“Are you going to look for a job today?” My mother is in the kitchen.

My mother lives in the kitchen, hasn’t gone so far as her own front door since the Bush administration. She stayed right where my father left her back in 2004.

She’s the sort of mother that never takes her apron off. She’s the sort of mother that always smells like bacon grease or Sunshine dish soap. She’s the sort of mother who sends her son to shop at the nearest Walmart, because no matter how many cargo ships get stuck in the Suez Canal, the nearest Walmart never runs out of bacon and Sunshine. Plus, they use Bangladeshi slave labor to stitch their clothes together, and they pass the savings on to my mother in the form of everyday low prices.

She calls supporting slavery ‘being pragmatic’.

My mother lives in her kitchen, and I live in my mother’s basement. It’s a finished basement — let’s get that straight. I’m not chained to a hot water tank in some medieval furnace room. I sleep in a bed that once belonged to my younger brother Bart. I still use the Black Sabbath bedsheets he picked out when he was thirteen years old. Every morning I wake up tangled with The Prince of Darkness, and I don’t even like Iron Man or War Pigs. I’ll listen to Neon Knights, if I have to.

So my Mom says: “Are you going to look for a job today?”

“I have a job Maawwmm,” I say. I drag out the word Mom like that because I’m very mature for my age.

I’m a twenty-seven-year-old man.

“Oh that’s right, how could I forget: you talk to yourself in the basement.” My mother has no idea what a podcast is. I told her it’s like a radio show, only it goes on the internet. She translated that into ‘So you have a radio show that nobody listens to.’ You’d think she was a thousand years old, but really she’s going to be sixty at the end of next year.

That’s how my mother says her age. She doesn’t say ‘I’m fifty-eight,’ she says: ‘I’ll be sixty at the end of next year.’

I’m trying not to explode. I’m holding onto the kitchen sink and looking down into the garbage disposal and taking three deep breaths just like the Dalai Lama tells me to. It’s no good arguing with an old woman in an old kitchen; an old woman who’s wearing a frayed old apron with old faded ugly ducks on it. I could tell her that I have over a thousand followers, but then she’d just tell me she can’t stand that word: ‘followers.’

“Marilyn Manson had followers,” she says. “Marilyn Manson probably videotaped himself in his basement too. Is that who you want to be? A murderer like Marilyn Manson? At least he didn’t live with his mother.”

Three deep breaths. Don’t engage. Don’t even bother telling her she means Charles Manson, the sixties cult leader, and not Marilyn Manson, the antichrist popstar. Play dumb, give her a kiss on the forehead that she definitely doesn’t want, and step out the front door into the real world and the rain.

“Don’t you go kissing me in my own kitchen! You can come back and kiss me when you walk through that door after a long day’s work at a proper job! I mean it! You hear me David Goodman? As God as my witness . . .”

God is going to have to be her only witness because I’ve made it to the front seat of my Chevrolet Aveo. It’s an atrocious car that the Chevrolet Division of the General Motors Company doesn’t make anymore, the sort of car you buy because it’s ‘economical’ — which is Spanish for awful. My 2006 cherry red Chevrolet Aveo is particularly economical because most of the time it simply refuses to move at all. It’s a real nickel saver — great for motivating me to take my ten thousand steps a day. The driver’s seat of my Chevrolet Aveo is the only place I ever talk to God anymore.

“Please please please start. Please God let this piece of garbage start. Please just give me one day with no problems. Please just let me drive to The Wall Café and back and I’ll never ask you for anything ever again. I’ll just sit back and take my lumps and let you run the universe as you please. Come on baby! Here we go!”

My Chevrolet Aveo doesn’t even cough. The only sound is the impotent click of the ignition key. It would be nice if my car pretended to try — a sputter just for me — but it doesn’t feel like pretending today. I try God one more time.

“Really? You can’t give me this one? Not one simple, itsy-bitsy spark for a fella who’s down on his luck and just wants to drive to see his friend and have a coffee? Is that too much to ask? Hello!?”

I should go back inside and get an umbrella. It’s starting to rain, and The Wall Café is more than a mile away. But right now being wet sounds easier than another run in with my mother. I’m wearing a raincoat. I’m sure I’ll be fine.

I am not fine. I am standing on the welcome mat of The Wall Café soaked straight through to my extra-large Hawaiian Pineapple underwear. I can feel my moistened waistband squishing with every step. My shoes make terrible sucking squeaks, warning all the dry, sensible café goers who came with cars and umbrellas that a soggy, pitiable fool is in their midst.

Delilah is sitting in our favorite old fashioned red vinyl booth, staring at her phone as she waits for me. She’s already seen me come in, but she likes to pretend to be surprised. Mildly flummoxed is her best look. It works even better now because she gets to hide her adult braces behind a disposable face mask.

I sit down and all of my wet sits down with me.

[. . . I’ve taken out a chunk to get you to the end of the chapter . . .]

Everybody in The Wall Café is too cool for The Wall Café. They are all struggling to maintain the perfect mixture of chic and disaffected. They are all wearing designer masks that match their t-shirts and say things like ‘Distance yourself . . . FROM HATE’. Delilah always picks this red vinyl booth because it gives us a good view of all the influencer wannabes.

She would never admit this, but Delilah secretly aches to be one of these idiots. That’s the real reason why we’re here, just on the off chance that somebody might discover her and make her famous. According to her fantasy, it’s only after she’s signed an exclusive contract with Cover Girl that her fictional talent agency finds out she’s stuck with ugly adult braces for the next eighteen months.

But we are never going to be a social media stars, because Delilah and I have one thing that separates us from all the American idols posting pictures of themselves on The Wall Cafe’s digital Instagram wall.

Fat. We have fat; excess meat all over our ordinary bones; esters of fatty acids stretching fabrics and taxing belt buckles; potent and prominent symbols of overindulgence that we must carry everywhere we go. A most inconvenient rotundity. All anybody sees are our paunches and potbellies and overworked ankles.

That’s another reason why I don’t order chocolate chip waffles. That’s another reason why Delilah talks about her hair all the time.

“I think that girl heard me say she looks like Billie Eilish. She keeps looking this way,” Delilah says.

“Of course she is looking this way,” I say. “Look at me: I’m soaking wet. There’s a lake underneath our table. My hair looks like a baby squirrel died in it. I smell like a dog somebody left outside overnight.”

“She can’t smell you from there,” Delilah says. How uplifting.

“She probably got wind of all the dead worms under my shoes when I walked by,” I say.

“You always think people are staring at you,” Delilah says. “But let me tell you something, and you need to hear this: Nobody cares.” I’m waiting for Delilah to continue, but that’s all she’s got.

“Doesn’t that make you feel better?”

“That nobody cares about me?”

“Exactly,” Delilah says. “That’s your problem David, you’re too self-centered. I’m not trying to be mean, I’m just saying. Even if you did smell like wet worms or dead baby squirrels or whatever, Billie Eilish over there hasn’t stopped fixing hair in her phone long enough to notice you. You need to stop worrying about what other people think. Maybe that’s why you’ve gotten so obsessed with conspiracy theories.”

“Conspiracy theories?” I say. Now she’s just trying to hurt me. We’ve been over this. “You know that’s a made up word.”

“It’s two words,” Delilah says.

“Are you trying to pick a fight?” Maybe she is. Maybe her hair is different, and I didn’t notice. Maybe she’s about to start her period. Maybe she’s having a bad day and wants to hide it by making it seem like I’m the one having a bad day. Maybe she’s hungry and that chocolate chip waffle is taking forever. Maybe she’s a woman and every woman on the face of the earth is absolutely awful. Maybe I should just leave, and we can try having coffee and being friends tomorrow.

No. Let’s fight.

“They made up the phrase conspiracy theory just to make anybody who tries to expose their corruption look crazy.” I’m speaking as calmly as I possibly can. I’m taking big ol’ Dalai Lama breaths. I’m not raising my voice. Once somebody calls you crazy it’s almost impossible to make yourself seem like a stable, well-balanced person.

“You see right there. Who is they David Goodman?” Why is Delilah Henderson using my full name? It’s like she’s trying to mother her way to a win. Mothers love dragging your full name out when something has set them berserk. I’m not falling for it. When you’re right don’t let anybody throw you off the horse.

“The government tracking every American cell phone was a conspiracy theory until Edward Snowden came along. Richard Nixon orchestrating the Watergate break-in was a conspiracy theory until Bob Woodward came along.”

“So you’re just like Edward Snowden and Bob Woodward, is that what you’re saying?”

This is a standoff. We’re either going to say we’re sorry and avoid these topics for the rest of the afternoon, or we’re going to hurt each other. I look straight into Delilah’s eyes and decide the future for both of us.

“I hate your hair,” I say. It isn’t even true. The truth is I couldn’t care less about Delilah’s hair. She could shave it all off and after a week I wouldn’t even notice her shiny bald head anymore. “Stop trying to be somebody else. Just let your hair look the way it’s naturally supposed to look. You think I’m self-centered, but you can’t even see past your own follicles.”

I thought she would take the bait and start picking me apart — which is pretty easy to do because I’m overweight . . . and soaking wet . . . and technically unemployed . . . and live in my mother’s basement . . . and don’t have a girlfriend . . . and haven’t had a girlfriend for almost six years . . . and I never went to college . . . and I have no actual physical proof that I’m as smart as I say I am.

Turns out I’m such an easy target that I’m not even worth shooting at. Delilah just throws her phone in her purse and asks the waitress on roller-skates for the cheque even though her waffle hasn’t come yet.

I’m looking at my phone and pretending to be unperturbed, even though I know I’m going to spend the rest of the day feeling like a first-rate asshat. Then I’ll have to call her in two days and say sorry and tell her there’s absolutely nothing wrong with her hair. ‘It’s me and my big mouth that’s the problem,’ I’ll say. Then I’ll buy her a chocolate chip waffle and we’ll talk about whether or not the girl at the next table looks like Selena Gomez.

That’s my future. No crystal ball necessary.

I watch Delilah storm out. I listen to her mutter “Jackass” just loud enough so that nobody feels bad for the guy who came in from the rain and is now sitting alone in his own puddle. She’s standing on the sidewalk, making a point of not looking back at me, waiting for an Uber to take her away. I should just go out there and apologize right now and skip two days of dramatics.

I would have too, if I hadn’t looked at my phone first.

I’ve got this app called Buzzsprout. It tells me how many people download my podcast every week. The numbers are always the same — 95, 101, 96 — but I still look at it about three-hundred times a day. Two months ago one of my podcasts got over two-thousand downloads and I had a big stupid grin on my face for the rest of the week.

When I checked Buzzsprout a second ago I could swear I saw twenty-thousand. That can’t be right can it? How the hell did twenty-thousand people suddenly find me? I don’t even remember what I talked about on my last podcast.

I’m checking it again . . .

It isn’t twenty-thousand.

It’s two-hundred-thousand.