Read the back of his new book Are You There, God? It’s Me. Kevin., and you’ll see that Charlotte-area writer Kevin Keck is having a quarter-life crisis.
Well, that is, he was when he penned the book, which is a memoir of events and escapades he experienced a few short years ago. The book, published by Bloomsbury USA and set to hit bookstores Feb. 18, includes tales of pot smoking, sex, mental breakdowns, OCD hang-ups, family and the search for God. Keck also writes pages and pages about Charlotte in the book; flip through Are You There, God? and you may recognize many of the locales and some of our city’s stranger citizens. The following text is a short — and rather Q.C.-centric — excerpt from Keck’s latest work:
(From “Chronicles,” a chapter in Are You There God? It’s Me. Kevin. By Kevin Keck.)
We’d been invited to the house of Lilith’s dental hygienist for New Year’s Eve. “They’re swingers,” Lilith told me when I initially resisted going; I wasn’t a big fan of parties with Lilith’s friends. She knew I felt I was missing something essential about life in regards to my ever-elusive group fantasy. She’d previously told me that she would do anything I wanted if I presented her with an engagement ring. I nearly asked her why she’d dropped this relationship clause, but instead I played it as cool as I possibly could, given that fulfillment of a lifelong dream was so close. Also, I was happy to have the ring subject dropped period. In the preceding months, Lilith had relentlessly been dropping hints that what she wanted more than anything else in this world for Christmas was an engagement ring. A lot of this pressure emanated from her mother, a Charlotte socialite who adhered to the quaint notion that a girl was destined to be an old maid if she wasn’t wed by the age of twenty-five. Lilith was teetering on the brink of spinsterhood, and thus if we were watching television and a commercial for a jeweler’s came on, she’d comment along the lines of “That’s a pretty ring — that’s the sort of ring I’d like.” Even if she was in another room when the advertisements commenced, she would step into the doorway for the duration just in case a commercial featuring engagement rings came on. Perhaps she thought she was being subtle, but it’s difficult to fail to notice that someone only provides commentary when a specific piece of jewelry flashes on the screen; it was a Pavlovian response to be marveled at, which I would have had I not been the target of her programming.
Besides, even if I had the desire to be married, I certainly didn’t have the money; I taught college part-time, and that’s enough to eek out an existence for me. I don’t see why I should work hard to own a home and drive a nice car, or the point of winning any sort of game, when we’re all just going to end up dead anyway. Why bother? Better to spend your time like Thoreau, working as little as possible and doing as much of what you like while you’re here. Such an attitude prevents one from accumulating the capital necessary to purchase precious metals, but it does offer the luxury of acquiring a gift card to Target, and as Lilith liked buying knickknacks for the apartment, I thought that a gift with the possibility for fulfilling a variety of desires was a splendid idea.
Lilith and I started out the door around nine on New Year’s Eve to walk to the party; winter is often nonexistent in North Carolina, and so the evening was only mildly chilly. As we turned the corner, I put my hand on Lilith’s ass; she was wearing a black cocktail dress that made her look especially fuckable. A voice from a passing car yelled, “Woohoo!” and then that car stopped just ahead of us. I recognized it: it was my brother’s.
He rolled down the passenger’s window and said, “What up, dude? I thought I’d missed you.”
I leaned down and put my head in the car. “We just got started. Some friends of Lilith’s are having a party.”
“Cool, I was hoping you had something planned.”
I turned my head to look at Lilith; she’d lit a cigarette and was giving me the wide-eyed stare of No, absolutely no way is he coming. I put my head back in the car. “I don’t know, dude. You may not be dressed properly.” My brother was sporting shorts, a tie-dyed T-shirt, sandals, and a thick hemp necklace. He’d been cultivating a beard for months, though perhaps cultivation is a misleading term; he was growing a wild, hairy beast on his face.
“What the fuck, man? It’s tradition that we spend New Year’s together.”
This was not exactly true. My brother and I had spent the previous New Year’s Eve together, but that was it. His habit was to declare anything that had occurred once a tradition if he wanted to do it again. This was not some weird revisionist history that he deployed as a way to imbue one with guilt and get his way; he was not as clever as our mother in that regard. He was sincere, and for this reason I looked back at Lilith and made an apologetic face while simultaneously fighting the urge to grab my brother’s keys from the ignition and hurl them into the bushes and take off running with Lilith. But she had heels on, and Brandon was, after all, my younger brother. I opened the car door for her and he drove us the few blocks to Karen and Harry’s.
Karen and Harry lived in a modest cottage in the Plaza Midwood neighborhood, just across the railroad tracks and down past the Penguin restaurant. We appeared to be the early arrivals, as the house did not give off the appearance of being in full swing. Harry, a fellow about the same age as me, with dark hair and a chiseled, gymnast look, answered the door. He was wearing roughly the same clothing as my brother.
“Lilith!” he exclaimed as he opened the door. He pulled her into a tight embrace and kissed her full on the lips. I thought this was a bit inappropriate, swinger or not, then he suddenly released Lilith and swept me into a deep bear hug, kissing both of my cheeks and saying, “And you must be Kevin! It’s so good to meet you — Karen and I have heard so much about you.” When he let me go, he was beaming with a warm, friendly smile, but there was something too friendly about it that made me uneasy. His smile quickly collapsed into puzzlement when I stepped aside and my brother, who had been loitering in the background on the front porch, moved to make his way in the house.
“And you are …?” Harry trailed off.
“Oh, I’m sorry. This is my brother, Brandon.” I offered no further explanation, and Harry stuck his head out the door and glanced both ways.
“Just the three of you?”
“Yep.” I looked around for Lilith; she had disappeared.
“Ah, okay. Well …” Harry stuck out his hand to my brother. “Nice to have you, Brandon. Come in and have a beer.”
My brother said, “Cool,” but I had distinctly detected in Harry’s tone that it was not cool at all. Not by a long shot.
Harry and Karen’s home seemed like one catalog photo after another: every item in every room was carefully chosen and placed. It did not feel like an actual home, but rather a model of what the home of a twenty-first-century, young, urban, professional couple should look like. When Harry opened the refrigerator, I noticed everything inside it seemed arranged: things lined up in an unnatural way. The beers were in rows; the cottage cheese, sour cream, and cream cheese were placed in order of descending size. A menagerie of anonymous Tupperware containers was also separated by size. The condiments in the refrigerator door: sized. At one time in my life such tidiness would have made me feel as though I had encountered my soul mates, but there was something fucked-up about neat-freak swingers.
I mentioned to Harry how nice his house was, but he dismissed the comment as though he’d heard it all before, saying only, “Yeah, it’s okay. Karen decorates. You guys want a bong hit?” He opened the freezer and took out three quart-size mason jars, then reached into the cupboard and removed an ornate bong standing about eighteen inches high. My uneasiness began to subside significantly.
“So what we got here,” Harry said as he opened the jars, “is AK-47, Trinity, and Northern Lights. What do you want to start with?” Start with?
Harry had just announced he had three varieties of high-grade weed — weed that had a name. When marijuana has a name, prepare for the complete annihilation of reason. I consider myself a cultured smoker of pot, but I don’t have the connections to rendezvous with the contraband Harry presented as though it were merely a series of frozen dinners. I was worried that I might not even remember the impending orgy.
Harry packed a sample of each variety for me and my brother, and as we worked our way through each numbing hit, I heard the laughter of women emanating from a doorway. Occasionally their tittering was punctuated by a deeper voice, and I said to Harry, “Who else is here?”
“Greg and Brittany. Lilith is probably downstairs with them and Karen.”
“Oh, so we’re not the first to arrive.”
“Nope, you’re last. I guess that makes you it.” Harry winked at me, then put the bong to his mouth as he filled it with smoke and inhaled. My brother smiled at me.
“Last? Isn’t anyone else coming?”
Harry exhaled as he spoke, making his voice sound strained. “No, it’s just the six of us — well” — he tilted his head toward my brother as he looked at me — “seven. We like to keep these things, you know, intimate.” He winked at me again, then began packing up the bong for another round; my legs and arms tingled. I felt that I needed to speak or I would forget how to talk, so I did my best to make cocktail chatter:
“So Lilith tells me that Karen’s a hygienist; what do you do?”
“I work at the bank. B of A.”
“Cool. What do you do there?”
“I market credit cards and high-interest loans to families and individuals who have a history of managing their debt while accumulating more revolving accounts. It’s a lucrative market for banking right now, because so many workers — particularly low-wage earners — are conscientious, you know? We market to pride. That’s a really fresh market. What do you do?”
“I teach.”
“Tough market. Teachers are a high credit risk — tough for them to work more than one job to cover the bills, you know?” He turned to my brother. “You?”
“I live at home.”
“Loyalty. Good market. Parents are good about picking up the tab. You have a credit card?”
“I use my dad’s.” My brother’s unflinching honesty about his dependent situation at the age of twenty-four embarrassed me, most likely because it had only too recently been that I was equally dependent on our parents’ good graces, and I was much older.
Harry handed the bong to me as he addressed my brother. “Think about getting your own. If your dad banks with us, we can tie your card into his account, and you’ll never have to worry about the bills with the bank–you two can work out some arrangement.” After passing my brother the bong, Harry said, “Well, let’s go downstairs. That’s where the real party is.” And then as an afterthought to my brother: “Remind me to give you my card before you leave to give to your dad; I’ll get you both a better interest rate.” My brother nodded with sincerity.
Kevin Keck will read from and sign his new book Feb. 15 at Park Road Books, 4139 Park Road. For more information, call 704-525-9239 or visit www.parkroadbooks.com.
This article appears in Jan 23-29, 2008.
