The summer my boyfriend spontaneously combusted was the same summer I worked going door-to-door handing out pamphlets for the American Nazi Party.
It’s also when I became a millionaire. Honestly, it was a lot.
I worked for the Nazis for four months and thirteen days (tramping the housing developments of Morris County all of which look like setpieces from nineties satires of fifties suburbia) and never had a single Nazi thought—for nor about. My mental phrasing was “soldier of fortune.” I wasn’t exactly a nihilist but took a freelancer’s pride in enlightened neutrality. My boyfriend Alfie was the opposite of a nihilist. He believed in everything equally. He got me the job.
It’s mostly not even real Nazis. The actual fascists are in thinly-veiled things called like the National Moral Front or the American Freedom Party or the Stronger Together Caucus. StillI straightened my hair and, when they asked about my nose, told them I was Greek. “Like where the Aryans come from,” I said.
(Alfie was in it for the aesthetics. He liked to wear black leather he could not pull off and put something in his hair that left stains on our ratty beige rescue armchair. He worshiped the 1950s as a sacrificed Golden Age as if they, and not the puke-neon nineties, were his distant youth, and had a pair of black horn-rimmed glasses with no lenses that he thought made him look like Buddy Holly but made him look like Barry Goldwater. We bonded by watching old movies. I was also in it for the aesthetics. I loved him like Christians love crosses. I’ve always considered suffering to be character-building.
And there were other reasons. He was the only one who could get the light in our closet-like apartment entryway to turn on. When anyone else flicked the switch, nothing. When Alfie flicked the switch—click! It pays to pay attention to little signs from the universe like this.)
You would be surprised how many Nazi hippies there are. Or maybe you wouldn’t, I don’t know. But there are a lot of them. And they like dogs, and craftsman bungalows, and pot, and bowling shirts, and rhododendrons. Also the garden gnomes wear armbands. These are just a few of my well-founded and accurate sociological observations.
Once the app sent me to 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue and the president answered the door himself in a bathrobe and fuzzy slippers colored red-white-and-blue. That one I made up to see if Alfie was listening, but he just nodded and said “What was the president doing in Pennsylvania?” He is not quite as much of a moron as that makes him out to be, but he is often blind to his moronitude because he models how he carries himself as a great intellectual. I once walked in on him in front of the mirror practicing rolling his eyes from a TikTok of Bill Buckley.
He did crosswords, and usually finished them. We’d sit around after dinner and I would post fake Amazon reviews while he reclined like a philosopher in a camel-colored recliner pocked with cigarette burns like buboes on a medieval peasant with the Black Death.
When I remember those evenings today I picture a crackling hearth, not that we had one.
“Such a time-saver!” I typed. “Tastes just like real cheese!” “Scam!” I wrote. “Item arrived broken into several pieces. When I messaged the seller, I was told to fuck off and suck eggs. One/five, would not buy again.” Post.
He read out clues to me, the ones he knew. “It’s a monkey,” he’d say. “Three letters.”
“I don’t know,” I said. “Monkeys have more letters than that.”
“It’s ‘sai.’ They had the same monkey last week.”
I went back to my review. “Poor traction on ice. Five/five.” A few minutes later: “A painting framed in a circle. Starts with a ‘T.’ Five letters.”
“Tondo,” I said.
“That’s right!” he said. “From ‘rotondo,’ meaning ‘round.’”
I looked at the grid. “Tondo” was already filled in. “Huh,” I said.
“What? I was trying to be nice.”
He was, was the thing. And you have to judge people by their intentions.
I got back to work. “I developed a bad rash on my neck after wearing this choker on a water slide.”
I valued the conversations I had with Alfie, and I also valued the conversations we didn’t have. (“What do you want to get out of life?” He doesn’t ask. “Why would you ask that?” I reply never. “I dunno,” he saysn’t.)
*
The client who gave me the box of real gold reichsmarkslooked like Hitler himself, in one of those 1970s B-movies where he’s been hiding out in a hole in the ground in Panama since VE-Day. His frizzy white beard dangled down to his Totenkopf belt buckle.
Waiting is a kind of suffering, so I jumped on the turnpike and promised I wouldn’t open the obviously-a-time-bomb until I got home. In the passenger seat, the box started to make a ticking sound, then a bit later on began hissing like a snake, and finally a tiny, tinny voice pleaded: “I’m a little man and I live in this little box! Let me out, let me out, and I’ll grant you one wish!” I knew I couldn’t make up anything better than that, so I pulled over on the turnpike shoulder and opened it up.
Alfie keeps, on a shelf in our medicine cabinet next to my allergy medication and the cough drops we bought so we a drug store’s bathroom, a decorative Shaker box which he uses to store all of the hair he ever cuts off, cranial or pubic. He is a strong believer that parts of one’s body hold power over their owner even when the physical connection is severed, and explains that this is the basis for all working voodoo dolls and what the Haitians call zombi powder, which Western popular media has made a joke. Alfie was obsessed with bodies and bodily functions. However, I looked this up, and am pretty sure it is a normal Nazi thing.
I gave him two months of my fingernails and toenails in a purple mesh sachet that formerly held a bar of scented soap. He had never said anything about toenails, but it seemed like the sort of thing he would appreciate. And he did.
He also has told me—has gifted me an antique book which has told me—that pubic hair is a mantic substance, capable of predicting the future like tea leaves and knucklebones. It never, the book says, falls into a simple line or spiral, but always forms dynamic and obscure shapes—sigils or runes which Alfie is able to read like tea leaves on the floor of the shower. The ones on the shower floor are mine, I know. Alfie does not have pubic hair. He shaves it all off with a device marketed to the audience of various podcasts claimed to be the ruin of discourse and deposits it directly into the box. He is a bit prissy, which is also, I think, somehow Nazi-ish. He does not say so, but I know he believes it makes his member appear larger.
It does not. What it does is make him look like a gay porn star. I told him this once. He thought it over, then asked me accusingly: “How do you know what a gay porn star looks like?”
“Women watch porn, too, you know.”
“But you’re not gay.”
Sometimes I don’t answer things because I hope he’ll get there himself. We stared at each other for a few seconds. Then he said, “A lot of the time you’re not as smart as you think you are.” He’s right. I’m not. Once I did trim it, in a little rectangle. He went down on me and it looked like a Hitler moustache.
All this is merely to say that I opened that box on the shoulder of the New Jersey Turnpike fully prepared to confront a heap of hundred-year-old-geezer-pubic-hair, white and waving in the breeze like a field of dandelions.
Just when you think you can’t be surprised, huh?
*
Luck does not have to follow the rules of probability. They say lightning never strikes twice, but Alfie had in fact been struck by lightning, twice, when he was seventeen and then again when he was nineteen, both times on the same hiking trail that he still returned to once a year, though each visit since has been an anticlimax. I suspect this played a role in his later spontaneous combustion, that the energy was all still coursing around in there somewhere.
Bad luck does not have to follow the rules of probability, and so neither does good luck, or whatever kind of luck this was. Ask a lottery winner for financial advice, they’ll tell you, “Play the lottery.” And, damn it, they’re right. I believe it. I do.
