Avalanche Aphrodisiac: Ep 4
A new just-for-fun satire content piece every Week
Recap Chapter 1 - 3
There has been a profound paradigm shift in the life of our protagonist - after quitting his job and investing $24,000 in cryptocurrency he decides to leave his life in the Bay Area behind to go in search of a degen exile. But where? While his friend Simon spends the winter draining his manhood in European sex clubs, we follow said protagonist to Yonkers, New York, where he loiters around his family’s dysfunctional home for the Holidays.
To read the full Chapters 1 - 3 you can find the links at the bottom
Chapter 4
Simon called me on 30 December from Berlin. Exactly one month after I left Google, he got fired for gross negligence. Keyed up in a bar one night after work, he told his manager that he had urinated in one of the plant pots in the office the previous week when he stayed late to write code for a project. On my advice, he then sold his car and pumped everything he owned into crypto. He made a quick buck on a mysterious altcoin virtually overnight and, thanks to his German grandfather, relocated to Berlin on a European passport. He’s been renting “a chic apartment in a neighbourhood worth saying yes to,” ever since. My prediction about Simon had been only half-right; but he never did quit his job.
While Simon was snorting industrial quantities of cocaine in Berlin, I had a white Christmas of my own with my family in Yonkers; my younger brother Rowan barely left his room and spent most of the holiday smoking his vaporizer and watching Bojack Horseman while I sat glued to my laptop, obsessively monitoring my coins, overcome by waves of nausea every time they dipped in price, writhing in ecstasy when they started to climb again. My mother and father barely spoke to one another for the duration of the week I was there, and my mother’s Valium addiction seemed to have finally wrapped its slippery tentacles around her. During moments of sheer panic (there were many that week), I would sneak into her room and take one for myself, and for a brief moment, everything seemed manageable again. Back in my room I would resume an addiction of my own, carried away into the early hours of each morning by this phantasmagorical theater of dreams.
Deciding to keep up some appearances, I didn’t tell my parents that I had quit my job and was now living precariously on my last pay cheque from Google. I contemplated asking my father for money under the pretext that I needed a down payment for a new apartment. “My contract was about to expire,” I would tell him. Neither he nor my mother knew that I had accumulated any savings over the last couple of years, even less so that after they had paid my college tuition in full, I had thrown it all down the toilet to become a glorified, degenerate gambler. They were also still under the impression that San Francisco was more expensive than New York and that I couldn’t possibly save any money if I still lived there. My bullish father was born and bred on the east coast, and I had the feeling he resented me for moving out west a few years ago, and resented that same west coast because that’s where my mother is from. “San Francisco is for hippies,” my father told me, when I was first offered the job at Google. “Before you know it, you’ll be sitting on the floor with crossed legs trying desperately to empty your mind.” Perhaps if I told him I needed the money to relocate back to the east coast he might be more inclined to help.
On Christmas Eve my father disappeared for a few hours while my mother sat comatose on the armchair in front of the fire. I lay sprawled on the sofa next to her watching Home Alone. Halfway through the movie my brother came into the living room wearing baggy clothes with a pair of Doctor Martens in his hand. “I’m meeting some friends from Fordham in the city,” he said, but neither to my mother or me - more so to himself. “Where’s dad?” he then said, sitting on the sofa on the other side of the room, putting on his shoes. I shrugged my shoulders, looked at my phone. “I won’t be home for dinner,” he said. “At this rate, neither will your father,” my mother suddenly chimed in. My brother and I looked at one another for a moment before he got up and left.
Later that evening, my mother asked me to go out to the garden to get some wood for the fire. As I was walking back into the house, the basket of chopped wood between my arms, I heard my father’s car pulling up the drive in front of the house. The engine of his Porsche continued purring in the driveway before I went back inside, my slippers soaked from the snow. I put a few pieces of wood onto the dwindling fire as my mother flicked through the stations with the remote in her hand. “Dad’s car just pulled up,” I said, but it was met with silence, and instead she switched on a programme about the Pyramids in Egypt. I stoked the fire, removed my slippers and put them in front of the fireplace. A moment later my father stumbled in, reeking of pleasure. Without even acknowledging my mother, he looked at me and asked where my brother, Rowan, was. “He’s gone into the city, he won’t be home until later.” My father sighed before saying, “Someone could have told me, and I could have stayed at the office. I still had some work to finish off.” I looked down at my hands, and then at the television, which suddenly became louder – my mother had turned the volume up. I knew my father hadn’t been at his office in Manhattan, and so did my mother. Throughout my life he had had more affairs than a Frenchman, and I had to fight the instinctive urge not to say something to him, and to stand up for my mother who has been in a state of prolonged emotional agony; but equally I knew that if I did challenge him, I wouldn’t be able to ask him for money; it amounted to a kind of grotesque quid pro quo and I needed to pay him at least some respect, even if it was only fear in disguise.
“You need to come out here,” Simon said down the phone. “I have a spare room in my apartment, you’ll have your own balcony. One month’s rent here is almost six in the Bay.” He sounded jittery, like you do when you haven’t slept in days, when you surpass utter exhaustion and your body and mind reboot themselves, offering you another hour or two of delirious bliss. “Everything I have is in crypto,” I whispered, closing my bedroom door when I heard my father coming up the stairs. “I’ve been gearing myself up since the flight home to ask my dad for money, soon I won’t be able to afford to eat.” Simon had put me on loudspeaker, and was rummaging around in the background. “Then sell some of it and get a flight out here,” he shouted from a distance. It was true, I could sell some of it, but I had started to feel something building within me over the past month, something I had inherited from my father: greed.
I rang off from Simon a while later and went downstairs to talk to my father. I knocked on the door of his study and went in before he permitted my entry. “Your brother wants to order Italian,” he said as I stepped inside. “Tell him what you want and he’ll call the restaurant, I’ll pick it up when I’ve finished up here.”
“Oh, yea, sure, I’ll let him know.” I closed the door behind me. My palms were slick with sweat. “Dad, I wanted to run something by you,” I said. I sat down on the sofa and rubbed my palms against my pyjamas, although I had the feeling he would have preferred I hadn’t. I went on to tell him that I had been offered a new job here in New York, and needed some money to help me relocate from west to east. I told him that I had already found a new apartment in Brooklyn and needed some money until I got back on my feet. “San Fran has me tapped out,” I said. “How much do you need?”
In a display of delicious submission, he agreed to transfer me $10,000 there and then. I sat in the Chesterfield in the corner of the room as he logged into his bank account and sent me the money. “Done,” he said. Inconspicuously I took out my phone and checked my account balance: $10,789.82. I couldn’t figure out why the old dog hadn’t put up much of a fight, but my guess was it pleased him somehow that he thought I had given up on the west coast, just as he had given up on his west coast wife.
In disbelief I went up to my room while he and my brother drove to the Italian restaurant to pick up the food, and immediately booked a one-way flight to Berlin for the following day, New Year’s Eve. I sent Simon a screenshot of my flight details, to which he replied with a picture of two white powdery lines chopped up on an iPad with a caption that read: Ready and Waiting.
Sat in front of the television half an hour later, with trays of Italian food spread out on the coffee table in the centre of the room, my brother said, “I heard you’re moving back east?” I knew that when my father eventually found out that I had lied to him and never had any intention of moving back to New York for a fictional job, that it would forever stain our relationship; like bolognese on Tupperware. I was coming back east, only the east I was headed for was a little further than New York.
