.

      

      PRAISE

       If You Lived Here You’d Already Be Home

      “You may think you’ve read enough stories about penniless gay clowns who can’t get over the loss of a dog, but—I assure you—you have not. John Jodzio is the best kind of modern fiction writer: a thematic traditionalist who feels totally new.”

      —Chuck Klosterman, author of Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs

      “John Jodzio’s wonderful collection, If You Lived Here You’d Already Be Home, is a set of colorful and seemingly fractured tales, each shining brilliantly alone, but also growing more vibrant as one story lays over another. Together they form an intricately stained glass window that looks out onto a whole new world.”

      —Hannah Tinti, author of The Good Thief

       Get In If You Want to Live

      “Get In If You Want to Live is lovely and captivating. Every page looks great.”

      —Fred Armisen, Saturday Night Live and Portlandia

      “John Jodzio is one of those weirdos that is fun to spend time with—not in real life, of course, but on the page—because his stories are laugh-out-loud funny and have a strange, uncanny, and memorable edge to them. And even if you don’t like to read, his book has cool pictures. It was totally worth the $200 I paid for it.”

      —Dan Chaon, author of Await Your Reply

      “Get In If You Want to Live is full of genuine laughs for the LOL generation. It’s fantastical whimsy meets potty-mouth, gutter-mind brilliance with some beautifully twisted artwork to accompany poignantly filthy stories.”

      —Kat George, Thought Catalog

      Copyright © 2016 John Jodzio

      All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission from the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

      This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

      Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Is Available

      Cover design by Matt Dorfman

      Interior design by Elyse Strongin. Neuwirth & Associates

      Soft Skull Press

      An Imprint of Counterpoint

      2560 Ninth Street, Suite 318

      Berkeley, CA 94710

       www.softskull.com

      Distributed by Publishers Group West

      10987654321

      e-book ISBN 978-1-61902-768-8

       For Kate and Theo

      TABLE OF CONTENTS

Great Alcoholic-Owned Bed and Breakfasts of the Eastern Seaboard

Knockout

Someday All of This Will Probably Be Yours

The Wedding Party

Duplex

      Lily and Annabelle

      Alliances

      Ackerman Is Selling His Sex Chair for Ten Bucks

      The Indoor Baby

      Fieldwork

      Inside Work

      The Piss Test Place

      Athens, Athens

      Cannonball

      Chet

      Winnipeg

      Our Mom-and-Pop Opium Den

       Acknowledgments

       Publications

       GREAT ALCOHOLIC-OWNED BED AND BREAKFASTS OF THE EASTERN SEABOARD

      Me and the boy are out back shooting holes in the rusted-out johnboat when I hear the wheels of a suitcase bump over the cobble of the front path. It’s still light out and I’m halfway through my bottle of Beam, which, if I’m pacing myself correctly, means it’s five or six o’clock.

      “Hop to it,” I tell the boy.

      The boy isn’t mine. He’s my dead wife Sandy’s, from her dead ex-husband, Jerold. He’s blond haired and fine boned. The house we live in is a weathered Victorian that Sandy and I bought to fix up into a bed and breakfast. I got about as far as painting the sign out front with a couple of intertwined roses and the word “Bed” before Sandy died. There was talk after the funeral that the boy would go to live with some of Jerold’s relatives in Ohio, but when it came down to it none of them would actually drive down here to pick him up.

      I watch the boy skip off. He’s eleven and he runs like he’s got a corncob up his ass. I try not to hold that against him. I don’t run like that and I do not look like him in the least, but he hasn’t ever called me anything other than Dad. I’ll tell him about his real father very soon, I suppose. I’ve thought the conversation all out. I want to do it when I am sober, which usually means right away in the morning. I’m planning on telling him over steak and eggs. I’ll sit him down at the kitchen table and tell him I’ve got something important to say. He’s smart, this boy, very inquisitive. I know how the conversation will go. He’ll start in with the questions before I’ve even started saying what needs to be said.

      “Is this the sex talk?” he’ll ask.

      “More or less,” I’ll say.

      I lean the rifle against the woodpile and walk around to the front of the house. There’s a woman standing there. She’s in her late thirties, wearing a baseball hat and sunglasses. I can’t see her eyes, but I can tell by the tilt of her head she’s glancing up at the gable, looking at how it’s leaning some, not ready to fall or anything, but nowhere near straight. The boy does exactly what I’ve taught him to do anytime someone shows up on our doorstep—he grabs her luggage and hauls it up the stairs before she can change her mind.

      “What brings you here, ma’am?” he asks.

      The boy is having trouble lifting her suitcase. He’s bouncing it up the stairs, so I grab onto the handle and help him out. I can understand why he’s struggling. It’s heavy as hell; it must weigh a hundred pounds.

      “Are there gold bars in here?” I ask the woman. “Or a dead body?”

      The woman gives me a wincing smile. She hardly has any legs under her. She got these stubby things, hardly worth a glance. Sandy, now that was a lady. Long legs and a mouth that could let out a deep and powerful moan.

      “I’m writing a travel guide,” she says.

      I don’t know what that has to do with a heavy suitcase, but I don’t press her. I’ve only got two rules to stay here. Number one, you pay what you owe, and number two, don’t shoot, stab, or poison me or the boy.

      “I’m staying at all of the B and Bs up and down the Eastern Seaboard,” she says. She takes another look up at the roof, right near that hole in the soffit where the raccoon lives.