Me and My Manny

by M. A. MacAfee

  “It’s me all right. And I wished we’d been on horseback. Those clunky cowboy boots killed my feet.”

  Last Sunday, I along with Wolf had participated in Seattle’s Grand Parade, one of the many pageants that kick off the yearly summertime event Seafair. Insofar as life with a manny was still uncharted territory, I had figured that the July parade would be another opportunity for me to show Wolf to the public and get people’s reaction. Since we’d be traveling the parade route as a pair, with me in the lead of course, I needed to come up with costumes that were both colorful and coordinated.

  I dressed Wolf in one of Harry’s old plaid shirts that, however ill-fitting, went well with his bell-bottoms then I drove downtown to a western-wear shop and bought him a Mexican sombrero that engulfed his head like a flying saucer. For myself, I chose a “ten-gallon” cowboy hat. I couldn’t get Wolf’s painted-on deck shoes into pointy cowboy boots, so I settled on a set of spurs.

  Further, I favored a hank of rope to the holstered six-shooter, a rope that twirled nicely into a lasso secured around Wolf’s waist. As the final touch, I strapped a bandolier full of fake bullets across his chest and tied a red bandanna over his lower face.

  Likewise in western duds, with a glinty sheriff’s badge pinned to my chest, I used the lasso to pull the masked outlaw on his wheels through the streets of Seattle. That’s when the cheering crowds gave me another possibly lucrative idea. I could promote mannys to man floats in parades.

  Not being one to procrastinate, I never put off till tomorrow what I can screw up today, I had taken the opportunity to pitch my manny to a Seattle Times reporter. During the brief interview, he said the several pictures he’d snapped of us would appear on the front page of next Sunday’s paper. Though I eagerly awaited the publication, I regretted that Harry got the Times before I had a chance to.

  “I can’t believe that you and that dope on a rope actually marched in a kickoff parade. How would you like it if I went and had some inflatable copy made of you?”

  “I’d be flattered.”

  Actually an inflatable likeness of me—something I viewed as a gigantic balloon floating high above the streets of New York in Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade—did not sit well with me. But I dropped the subject, lest I find myself bringing the ever-behind-the-times Harry up to speed on those high-tech, robotic sex dolls with motorized orifices.

  “Would you really take it as a compliment if I spent long hours talking to her, passing her around to my friends, even taking her to special events?”

  Harry’s comments indicated that he’d already heard of my manny-mate business, probably through the nosy neighbors. Whitehall was Gasbag Central.

  “I don’t pass Wolf around; I rent him out. And I’ve yet to receive a customer complaint.”

  Harry thumbed his chest. “What’s that got to do with you making a spectacle of me?”

  “Spectacle of you?” Finally it sank in. The way Harry saw it, Wolf existed more to belittle him than extol him, and he took it as a personal affront. “It just so happens that my so-called spectacle was a brilliant marketing strategy. One that in a matter of hours captured loads of potential customers.”

  “Customers for what?”

  “For my escort service, as if you didn’t know.” I thought the phrase “escort service” was less provocative than The Manny Ranch. “The job market’s an economic war zone. So I figured I’d take a crack at being my own boss by renting out manny-mates right here from home.” I motioned toward my desk in the alcove off the kitchen. “Once the cash starts flowing in, we can write off a portion of the apartment as an expense.”

  “Does Lisa know about your plan to run a call-boy service from here?”

  Call-boy! The pejorative term rankled me. “Lisa was my second customer.” That extortionist. “She wanted to sample the manny on a trial basis. She’d rather Siegfried and Roy, but they’d be a distraction to all the tenants forever traipsing in and out of her office. But as I told Ruthie, unlike a dog that can’t be trusted not to tear things up when alone for even a short while, a manny can be left out to gather dust or mothballed in a trunk.”

  Harry shifted toward Wolf, who, sitting on an arrow back chair with his hands resting upward on his knees, looked oddly absorbed in our debate.

  “Ruthie rented him too?”

  “Uh-huh. To help her reflect on her marital problems.”

  Harry looked bewildered. “He’s a marriage counselor?”

  “He’s whoever you want him to be.”

  “Yeah,” Harry said, sounding pensive, “he’s just about everyone except the insensitive guy who leaves you stranded in some dingy seaside motel.”

  I had the vague impression that Harry was alluding to something that happened a while ago, on the night before he shipped out. The very vagueness of that night caused me to let it slip away like a dream.

  “Not him,” I said, glancing at Wolf’s merry face. “He knows his priorities. As well as his limitations, right, hotshot?”

  Harry again studied the newspaper picture of me and my wooden amigo mugging for the camera. “You never took me to a Seafair event.”

  “I don’t have to; you can take yourself.”

  Harry then leaned closer to the table and tapped the colored photo of me and Wolf in the newspaper. “So you’re telling me that the attention you lavish on your bunkmate is all part of a business venture.”

  Though disliking the term bunkmate, I stayed with the theme. “Passion, Harry. You’ve got to love what you do. Playing with a manny is way more fun that slaving for penny ante wages and bashing my head against the glass ceiling.” While speaking, I got the impression that Wolf from his seat was egging me on with a two-thumbs-up. Way to go, girlfriend! “Yes siree, Harry, financial independence. I’m out to snag me a pink parachute, and I aim to pack it myself.”

  Reminiscing about the Sea

  One night later that week, I awoke to find Harry propped up on his pillow gazing out the window at the starry sky.

  “What’s the matter?” I asked.

  “Nothing. A little concerned, that’s all.”

  I punched my pillow and sat upright against it. “Concerned about what?”

  “You and the way you’ll take on, if I’m deployed.”

  “You’re being deployed? When? And to where?”

  “I’m not. It’s only the usual scuttlebutt. You’ll just have to hack it if so.”

  “I can…I do. I’ve learned to cope.”

  He lowered his head, turning it once in silent disagreement. “Remember the night I headed back for my last tour of duty?”

  “The night I took you down to the Sound?” Having forgotten much about that night, I kept my mouth shut and let him fill me in.

  “I was supposed to spend those hours aboard ship,” he began. “Instead we did the town. Hopping from one waterfront bar after the other. You met a lot of old salts who told you a lot of tall tales. Boy did they ever shiver your timbers.”

  “Shiver I did. Especially after that contest to see who could eat the most steamed clams.”

  “That’s probably what made you sick. That and the half a dozen navy grogs you ordered to wash them down.”

  I looked at Harry silhouetted against the stars. “I liked the little paper umbrellas.”

  “Grogs don’t come with umbrellas. You got those from a pair of Molotov cocktails disguised as valley virgins.”

  “No wonder I was too drunk to drive back home.”

  “That’s why we stayed in a motel,” he said. “After you threw up and passed out, I checked to see if you were still breathing. By then it was dawn.”

  I had the faint impression of him on the bedside phone, calling a cab and leaving with a duffle bag slung over his back.

  “I didn’t mean to ditch you like that,” he went on.

  “Ditch me? If you hadn’t shoved off, you’d be facing a court-martial for jumping ship.”

  “I ditched you and split. Ever since, you’ve been clinging to
that manny like a life raft.” He gestured toward Wolf on the bedroom chair with the mandatory sheet over his head. “It’s like my leaving triggered something. Like you thought I was never coming back.”

  “So I woke up with another sailor… make that a wooden sailor.” Embarrassed that he still focused on my attachment to the manny, I tried to make light of his comment. “Full-scale warfare tends to freak me out.”

  “All the more so after those old salts started telling you hair-raising stories. Those things can’t happen, Judy. No mutinous crews, no pirate invasions, none of it, no how on your modern high-tech destroyers.”

  As he spoke, I recalled a shabby waterfront bar where rumpled old men in pea coats and watch caps sat in the shadows, regaling me with legends about ships under the spell of evil forces, something they described in terms of possession.

  “I doubt the supernatural gives a damn about state-of-the-art equipment.”

  “C’mon, Judy. There’s no such thing as a bad luck ship.”

  Harry’s sudden denial of nautical superstitions gave me pause. He often outshined the best of the old salts in relating tales about spectral ships, creaking and groaning from a veil of thick fog. His negation on the heels of rumors about deployment made me wonder if he was hedging.

  “Tell that to the captain of the Titanic, the so-called unsinkable that sank.”

  Harry raised his hand. “Don’t start.”

  “The Titanic was on her maiden voyage. Tradition holds that you got a bad luck ship if it encounters a mishap at its outset—its launching or its maiden voyage. The Titanic never had a chance. If it hadn’t hit an iceberg, it would have met with some other disaster. Just like the other tragedies that happened involving jinxed ships.”

  “It’s not that bad things haven’t happened on the high seas,” Harry said. “Sailors go berserk and jump overboard for no apparent reason. However—”

  “Captains, too,” I interrupted. “Captains also have been known to go mad and commit murder.”

  “However,” he continued, “most of it can be blamed on the anxiety guys experience when cooped up for long periods of time.”

  In silence, as I for a moment permitted Harry to think he’d solved one of the great mysteries of the deep, I pondered another uncanny event I heard of from the old salts.

  “Okay, smarty-pants. How do you explain that when possessed ships were destroyed they fought to stay afloat? Set on fire or taken apart, the very timbers of bad ships made bloodcurdling screams of protest before going under.”

  At last Harry said, “I’m not going to account for it. Instead, I am going to warn you that if I hear one more word about possessed ships, bloodcurdling screams of protest just might start coming out of you.”

  “Well of all the—” I flipped onto my side and burrowed into my pillow. “If that’s the way you feel, goodnight.”

  For several minutes I lay in the dim room, my eyes on the manny slumped under a sheet as Harry insisted. I really wasn’t angry. I was pleased. I felt prosperous because now I had two husbands, in a way.

  Taking Over Harry

  One afternoon, Harry spent a long time on the living room sofa just peering at the manny reposed on the leather recliner.

  “That thing freaks me out. It makes me feel like it’s trying to take me over.”

  I suppressed a laugh. “Just because Wolf sort of resembles you, doesn’t mean he wants to become you.”

  “How would you know what he does or doesn’t want? He’s my double, my doppelganger. Don’t you know it’s bad luck to meet up with your doppelganger? It’s supposed to mean your death is imminent.”

  “Oh, that’s just so much folklore.” Harry’s earlier denials about possessed ships aside, he was as gullible as ever. “You’re not going to die just because I got a dummy.”

  “He’s more than a dummy, you said so yourself. I’m telling you,” Harry added with a hint of dread in his voice. “Wolf is out to consume me. He’s already started. He gets all the things I ever wanted, a new recliner, a great set of wheels, and special attention from the girls.”

  “I never knew you wanted those things.”

  “He succeeds where I fail,” Harry went on. “In the end, he’ll dispose of me.” His voice took on an ominous tone. “That thing intends to suck the life out of me. You’ll see.” He shook his index finger. “Once I start to change, it’ll be too late.”

  The way I saw it, Harry had been speaking figuratively. Annoyed that Wolf took up too much of my time, he resorted to hyperbole to make a point. Still, his assertions worried me. I thought about Wolf becoming real; but I hadn’t allowed that Harry would become unreal in the process. Pinocchio just went from a puppet to a person, reasonable since he was an original with no double, no doppelganger, no lookalike of any sort.

  That Harry would feel threatened by his wooden replica was something I could not have anticipated. Nor could I have foreseen my growing attachment to Wolf despite the marital strife he might cause.

  “You want me to get rid of him?” I said in challenge.

  “Wouldn’t hurt,” Harry said.

  “It just might, if I’m not careful how I dispose of him.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “Since you seem to believe that what happens to the dummy will happen to you, you could burst into flames, if I burned him in the barbeque pit on the balcony. Or you could break apart, if I hacked him up with an ax. You might even die of a wretched disease, if I dumped him in the trash bin out back.”

  “Enough. We’ll take this up later,” Harry said, heading for the shower.

  Truth be known, I had noticed small changes in Harry. He had become less talkative, his speech more clipped, at times trailing off. He took to sitting around in rigid almost catatonic postures. His skin had taken on a sallow cast, his face often appeared set, his eyes fixed.

  Equally disconcerting were the differences I’d noticed in Wolf. In the bright morning light, he looked fresh and well rested; his brown eyes sparkled, and an unnatural glow appeared on his cheeks. As the day wore on, he seemed to slump as if weary, and by nightfall, his eyelids drooped and his puckered lips appeared to lose their pucker.

  Now that Wolf and I were alone and giving Harry the benefit of the doubt that something sneaky had been going on, I pressed my ear against Wolf’s chest in search of a heartbeat. Nothing. I then held a mirror to his lips to pick up a breath. Again nothing. Then I thumbed through some old encyclopedias I still had on hand.

  Soon after, I looked up from my reading. “Okay,” I said, sitting on the arm of the Laz-E-Boy where Wolf lay stretched out with his feet up. “You ever hear of Carlo Collodi, who wrote Pinocchio?” I waited a moment. “I guess eighteen-eighty was before your time. How about Walt Disney?” Again I waited. “Yeah, the nineteen-forty movie was before your time too.”

  I took in a deep breath and looked straight into the flecked brown glass of Wolf’s half-opened eyes. “I’d like to see you wriggle out of this one. You ever have any dealings with a certain Emilio Greco? Around nineteen fifty-six, the Italian sculptor completed a semi-abstract monument of—you guessed it—Pinocchio.”

  Silence, still.

  Convinced that Harry’s demise was not imminent, I dismissed his spiel about his doppelganger and went back to my daily routine. Sometime later that week, it became clear that Harry remained firm in his abhorrence of Wolf.

  Having returned from shopping for a stick of beeswax to lubricate Wolf’s joints, I stepped into the kitchen and nearly dropped my bag. Wolfgang sat at the kitchen table, dressed in a silky yellow kimono with a red dragon on the back. A lit stogie with a long white ash poked from his circular lips, and a curly blond wig topped with a rhinestone tiara was on his head. His spindly bare legs were crossed and fuzzy pink bedroom slippers dangled from his stubby feet.

  “Harry, how could you?”

  “Easy,” he said, standing in the doorway. “I found that stuff in your closet.”

  “I know where you f
ound it.” The kimono was a gift Harry had picked up in a port off the Asian seas. “But why put it on Wolf?”

  I snatched the cigar from Wolf’s lips and crushed it in the sink.

  “I just wanted to see if I could change his appearance.”

  “Well, I hope you’re satisfied. How humiliating for him—the possible psychological damage.”

  Harry gestured toward himself. “I’ll tell you who’s got psychological damage around here.”

  “That’s no reason to take it out on him.”

  As Harry screwed up his eyes as if to puzzle out the remark, I examined Wolf’s anatomy to make sure that Harry had not engaged in any other assaults. Relieved, I stepped back, thinking that under those golden locks with that pencil-line mustache Wolf resembled a thinly built member of the gay culture.

  “Why don’t we get a dog?” Harry watched me remove the clothes from Wolf’s frame. “We can talk to it; take it places, and even play dress-up just like we do with the manny.”

  I envisioned Spike, growling and snapping in pink ballet shoes and a matching tutu. “It just doesn’t work for me, Harry. If something bites me, I might bite it back. That’s how things were done in my family.”

  “You don’t have to repeat old mistakes.”

  “It’s encoded in my genes.”

  I dropped the matter of Wolf’s feminine attire. I knew what was going on. Wolf had stolen the spotlight from Harry—both in and out of our marital relationship— and Harry was determined to get it back.

  The Gigolo

  I had just tidied the apartment, a monthly chore I always finished in a single day, and as I’d found in the past when cleaning, mice had invaded the pantry. They must have tired of the Pop Tarts because this time they ate the Velveeta and Goldfish. Both unopened packages had holes bored in one side and out the other.