Like every other Boy Scout my age, I had been carrying condoms in my wallet for half my life, but my preparedness had fallen short of perfection. My wallet was back in the car. I was, alas, without protection at this vital moment. I tried to explain.
“It doesn’t matter. Besides, if we don’t make it to the border, we might both die virgins.”
I could only guess at the level of reality we were operating on. Could she hear the bullets and the wailing children all around as well? Our bodies were welded together from the heat. The stale, suffocating air of a sealed school bus almost denied us oxygen to continue, but continue we did until we fit so well together and paced so perfectly that I knew I must have already been caught by a sniper bullet and gone to heaven.
Finally Melanie gasped, “They’re coming!” and we both let go with the final impact, me hoping that what she meant was, “We’re coming,” or “I’m coming,” or, at the very least, that she was still way inside her Third World bus fantasy and that they were purely imaginary.
Whichever it was, my luck held out. No bayonet in the back, no booming principal’s voice, no janitor with a machete. I fell on the floor with a thud and lay there for a few minutes with the dustballs and rock-hard chewing gum spuds. I drifted far away, back to a single frozen-frame image. I had been sitting in a school bus on my way home, looking out the window, when Benny Knight, local grade-six hood, had fired a snowball at my window from outside on the slush-littered sidewalk. The snowball had been mainly ice, and it exploded against the pane with a gun-crack, shattering the safety glass that saved my face from a million stitches. I just sat there, staring at the crazed glass in pre-adolescent wonderment that the world could be such a potentially dangerous place.
After we made our way back across the athletic fields and through the littered woods, we found that Brian’s car had been towed onto the road.
“You own this piece of shit?” the truck driver asked me.
“Not exactly, but I’m responsible.”
“If I tow it away, it’s gonna cost you seventy bucks.” The car had already been pulled out onto the pavement, its front bumper kissing tarmac. “The cops told me to haul it in, and after ten days, junk it if nobody pays.”
“I’d really appreciate it if you let me have the car back. My...wife...here was just reminiscing over her days at the school. We’re on our way to...to a cancer clinic. For some tests. Just tests. May be nothing.”
“Your wife?” He leered at Melanie. “Holy shit, you’re Melanie Vachel. God damn, I don’t believe it.” He continued to leer, then looked back at me. “After all them guys, you picked this skinny one? Shit, I guess fun is fun.” Whatever the hell that meant.
“Look, bud, you ain’t going nowhere for tests. And I’m authorized to impound this car, Melanie Vachel or no Melanie Vachel.” He didn’t seem to want to take his eyes off her. She looked demurely down at the broken beer bottles cluttering the side of the road. Cars were slowing down, passing the tow truck, pointing at the faded flowers on the side of Brian’s car.
“Fifty bucks sees you drive away.”
I opened the door and rooted in my wallet. Eleven dollars. “Take a cheque?”
“Does the Pope open beer bottles with his teeth?”
Melanie handed him five tens. He folded his hands over hers as he took the money, then pocketed it and slammed the hydraulic lever. The car flopped back down on the pavement. The Neanderthal unhooked his chains and drove off, dragging them on the street where they sparked and jangled until he was out of sight.
“Where’d you get the money?”
“My old man. She slid into the front seat of the car, curled up on the seat beside me with her head in my lap and fell asleep. I continued driving three miles in the wrong direction before I found a safe place to turn around without having to back up. I circled the car in the parking lot of an abandoned paint factory where a faded billboard proclaimed, “We cover the world.”
The Legion of Male Virgins Betrayed
Melanie woke up in time to accompany me into the Hall of Motor Vehicles, where I paid my dues after a long line of car dealers, farmers and drowsy housewives.
We stopped at a McDonald’s, and Melanie ordered three milkshakes while I polished off two quarter-pounders. We were back on the road after stuffing our faces when Melanie became philosophical. “It’s a little like living your whole life at the bottom of a well. The sky is up there, and the open world, you know it’s there, but you’ve never been anywhere but on the bottom, and every time it rains and the ground sucks up the water, it comes exactly up to your neck but no higher, and you have to tilt your head back to keep focused on the light from above, even when it’s splashing down rain in your face.”
“What’s a little like living at the bottom of a well?”
“Being a virgin.”
“Then this was your first time?”
“You couldn’t tell?”
“How could I?”
“Anyway, you’re down in this well all your life, and the walls are slippery green slime, and there’s no way to climb up on your own. You see shadows edging near the well top, but no one ever gets close. But then finally, one day, someone leans over and finds you. He comes back with a ladder, and suddenly you’re above ground and the sun is shining. That’s sort of weird, isn’t it?”
“I’m the guy with the ladder?”
“Who else?”
“This doesn’t mean we have to do it in the bottom of a well next time?”
“No. Anywhere you like.”
“Even Apartment X?”
“The mysterious Apartment X?”
“The same.”
“We’ll see.” Then she seemed to lose interest in me as she fiddled with the radio, finding nothing but static, finally tuning in a fundamentalist radio evangelist who came through clear as a bolt of lightning. According to his calculations (pronounced cal-KEW-lay-shuns), his Biblical mathematics, the world would only be around for another seven to nine months tops, and we had best proceed with our bootlicking of the Almighty if we wanted to procure the spiritual asbestos necessary to walk through the flames.
“Just when you climb out of the well, somebody wants to burn down the planet,” I told Melanie. “Maybe you were safer down in the damp pit.”
Melanie wasn’t listening to me. She had drifted far off. The front seat stretched out for light years from door to battered door as the sadness crept back in. She looked out the window at the faded landscape. It had been a very dry June and everything looked like wilted late August already. Men were spraying dead and dying trees against bugs, old warehouses were being torn down, new shopping malls were coalescing in dusty bowls of heavy machinery. Gravel trucks stormed by, and potholes reached up from the lumpy concrete highway to try to pull off a wheel while traffic lights tried to trick me, turning from a fleeting yellow to a crimson red as soon as I approached. Up ahead I saw a foreign car parts store that had recently burned down, its black walls and gutted roof still standing but whittled away so that the place looked like a bombed-out automotive cathedral.
And there by the curb of the highway was a pile of junk set out for the trashmen. In it I spotted what I knew to be the front left fender of an MGB, a fibreglass replacement singed around the headlight hole but otherwise intact. Pulling over to the side of the road, I tried to stuff it into the trunk; failing at that, I crammed it into the back seat. Richard would be loyal to me forever. His dream machine was starting to take shape. I could envision MG parts from all over North America mysteriously finding their way to his bedroom through some cosmic vortex. Rear axles appearing in the back door shower, car doors falling from British cargo planes into our back yard, bucket seats turning up in the kitchen in the middle of the night. Richard had always believed it would happen.
Now that I was an intrinsic cog in the great karmic wheel of the MGB Manifestation, he would owe me his
life.
Melanie took no interest in the fender. I touched her shoulder but she didn’t move. I tried to pull her back toward me, but she remained wedged against the door. Ahead of where we had stopped was a billboard showing the faces of hollow-eyed, desperate kids in stark black and white, beneath them the words “Save the Children.”
“We didn’t make it in time,” she said.
“We tried,” I mustered. The car now reeked of burned fibreglass as I pulled out into the traffic. Silence stretched out over fifty long miles, climbed the causeway and ushered us to the front steps of The Laurels, where the concrete Dorothea Dix waited. Melanie pecked me on the cheek and disappeared.
As I entered my apartment, I tried to hide my smile from Richard by walking behind the fender, presenting it as a peace offering and a shield. He would be shattered to learn that I was no longer among the Legion of Male Virgins. Instead, I offered him manna from charred heavens, the front left fender of his own dreams. But the bastard saw the look on my face, right through the blackened headlamp hole.
“You scheming son of a bitch. Fred, you’re not about to tell me you have deflowered Miss Third World Country?”
“No, I haven’t.”
“Liar.” Richard was livid, intuitively certain of the day’s events. I had inadvertently stolen something very precious from him. I had never believed all his gobbledegook about how you can tell if someone is a virgin or not, yet he read me like a book. “Look at the way they walk,” he’d lecture me back in the ammonia halls of Harris High. “See, that one there,” he’d say, pointing out Louella Lyons. “The legs are a little further apart, the gait more relaxed, knees cocked inward slightly. Scientific, observable fact.”
I could see him steaming up. His face, still purpled from his iodinal ablutions, cranked a shade more crimson at the thought of his whole life unbalanced. His ego snapped like a corroded dipstick in the salty winds of foul fortune. I had never really felt our competition to be so athletic in nature, but clearly I had made it over the finish line before him in the great marathon. His whole life — down the tubes.
“Nothing happened. I renewed my registration, for frig’s sake.”
Richard turned to the mouse-like Brian, sitting on his bed squirting soya sauce onto white bread. “He renewed his Jesus registration!” Richard shouted. “A man of euphemisms at a time like this. So humble. Just to grind salt into the wounds. I sit around here night after night, wasting money on strange women, some that even smell bad, practising, homing in, queuing up my instincts, fine-tuning the trade, saying all the right things, being ever so gentle and alas logical and he, HE drools over a ticket-taker behind glass, spends his nights fading away to pale ghastliness beneath the silver screen in a myopic trance and he, HE has his way, while all of my women go just so far. My whole life I’ll be standing on the ten-yard line facing two thousand pounds of enemy linebackers, my whole life rounding third with Willie Mays firing home to the catcher with deadly accuracy, my whole life slipping back to the end of the pack with a leg cramp, just yards from the finish line.”
“Relax.”
“That’s easy for you to say.”
“You should relax. It can’t be that bad.” Brian adding advice.
“Thanks for the wheels, Brian. I added three quarts of oil. You were a little low.”
“Gee, thanks.”
“Ten-weight-forty, right out of the cans.”
“God.” Brian’s car had never drunk freshly refined oil before, and he was truly grateful, smiling behind his soya sauce sandwich.
“Stop changing the subject, dammit.” I was getting a little tired of Richard’s prolonged moment of adolescent angst. He was headed sixty miles an hour toward a concrete wall, and I was myself halfway along the highway from exultation to impatience.
“I brought you a present, asshole. The gods looked favourably upon you.”
It finally sunk in. “My frigging sports car!” I handed it to him, and he caressed the rough edges of the fibreglass. “Where’d you get it?”
“Not to worry.”
“An immortal with wings,” he said to Brian. Brian smiled, happy to see us friends again. Brian was always one for harmony and low-key conversation.
“A few more pieces and I’m home free. Freddy-boy, you’re forgiven.”
I proceeded to explain the cosmic vortex, how the MGB would hereafter almost assemble itself, mystically attracting parts from all over the country through hidden spiritual energy.
“The Mysterious MGB of Apartment X. Great stuff. I believe you, Fred. Have you sold the film rights yet? Car buffs will one day gather here from all over the vehicular world, passing through the holy waters of the shower, stopping to bless the refrigerator, then paying homage to the MGB in my room.” But he looked worried. “I’ll be able to drive it, won’t I?”
“If the Lord is willing.”
“Blessed be the Starter, Lugs and Holy Choke.”
Lying in bed that night, I had a curious mixed-up feeling that I would soon look back on this day with confusion and doubt. Nothing in the world was to be trusted. Melanie was not who I had thought she was. Richard was more obsessive than even I had believed. God had appeared to us both in the form of a left front fender. That very evening Brian lost his temper in the quietude of his nightly wrist lifts, punching his hand weights through the plasterboard wall by his bed. When Richard and I went to see what was wrong, Brian appeared to be fast asleep. Neither of us dared to touch him.
Back in the cramped solitude of my room, kept awake by the noisy night showerers at the back door, I discovered the most frightening thing of all: I was no longer in love with Melanie. What the hell was wrong with me? I wanted to blot the notion out of my mind, insisting that I did in fact love her, whether she was crazy or not — paranoid, schizophrenic, manic depressive. She was a beautiful, soft, confused young woman who had entrusted herself to me. She was also someone who wanted to save the world. I still had a shot at saving her from saving the world, and part of that drive had come from love, I was sure. No matter how hard I tried to conjure back that love I had felt for her, however, I kept coming back to the delicious feeling of her sweaty thighs gripping my legs. The closest evidence of love I could arouse was the manifestation of lust pointing its insistent shaft ceilingward to the rabble of summer tenants at 307½ Hibiscus and the cloudy heavens above.
I eventually slept, despite fragmented outbursts from a protein-starved Brian as he slept and the constant activity in Richard’s room — flailing and crashing, an unworldly hissing and the unmistakable heavy breathing of a being obsessed. In the morning when I peeked into his windowless cavern, I found Richard asleep with his black light on. The walls had been painted jet black, and the ultraviolet lighting made the place expansive and ominous. Richard’s bed was situated in the exact centre of the cubicle, and above him, suspended on invisible hundred-pound-test fish line, was the beloved fender, painted Day-Glo orange, ghastly and seemingly adrift against gravity like an eccentric Starship Enterprise. It was waiting for the great assemblage of sister parts.
I fried two eggs for myself. When Brian woke, I offered him one but he declined. “I don’t like using your food unless I can pay you back, and I’m saving all my money.” Instead, he consumed five pieces of burned toast spread with one packet each of relish, mayonnaise, mustard, ketchup and barbecue sauce.
“Man does not live by bread alone,” I warned him for the fiftieth time that summer. Brian just smiled that dumb smile. I almost began to fear that if Melanie were to discover Brian, she’d dump me for him immediately, having found the closest living substitute to Biafra available in this shore town. I told myself that jealousy was good — a sign of sustained love (even though it was hard to be jealous of Brian, whom I loved as if he were my own sorrowful son).
Richard awoke with a series of exaggerated yawns, realized he had five minutes to get to his lifeguarding chair, a
nd tripped over the displaced vat of his latest tanning fluid variation. A sickly pool spread over the floor and oozed toward the kitchen, reminding me of a recent pitiful horror flick I had seen at the Queen: Blood Rust.
“My investment!” Richard mourned. He had concocted several gallons of the purpling juice, having discovered economy in quantity, and now it would succeed only in tanning our unscrubbed floors. Not wanting to see it go to waste, he dipped his fingers and began smearing it all over himself in a final vain attempt to soak enough into his skin for the remainder of the summer, trying to make good on the capital.
“Help yourself, lads, before the rats find out and want it all to themselves.” I feared for a minute that Brian was going to try it on toast, but there were no takers, and after Richard had himself oozed out the back door, Brian and I worked the goo into the floorboards with one of Richard’s old football jerseys. The floor took on a rich burgundy stain that was quite authentic, although slippery to a suicidal degree.
The World of Nerds and Cockroaches;or a Dark Shaft Direct to Hell
Brian and I decided to leave our apartment to give the floor time to dry. In actual fact, it never did. Later we tried scrubbing off the oily residue, but ever thereafter, when an evening was warm and damp, the floor would sweat itself into a glistening sheen until it seemed that we lived in a world of purple ice. Under Richard’s ultraviolet lamps, the place took on a bizarre iridescence not unfamiliar to those who frequented the House of a Hundred Horrors, one of the least frightening fright shacks on the shore.
After Brian left for the afternoon shift at his burger joint, I sat down at our recently acquired kitchen table with a Phillips screwdriver and a glass of artificial iced tea to try and repair our ever-unreliable family toaster. Twice it blew a fuse, which sent me upstairs to the door of the invisible caretaker in whose apartment was to be found the medieval fuse box. On my first trip, I discovered the same lovely lady who had introduced us to the world of 307½ Hibiscus. She was still wrapped in a Pepsi towel, and her hair was wet, as if she intended to live out her whole life with that satisfactory arrangement.
The Summer of Apartment X Page 4
