Ricky Nelson, the young, clean-cut, blue-eyed, song-writing lieutenant responsible for “intragravitational ballistics,” was still horny for Diane Proscuitto and trying to keep all eight appendages of the rival male spiders off his potential bride. The scriptwriter had awarded him the winning line of the entire movie. Toward the tragic end, he said, “Good God, not the digi-gyrosystem.” Suffice it to say that it was a very black day for Ricky Nelson, Diane Proscuitto and the life support systems of two of my favourite planets. Slim Pickens, as befitted his role, didn’t seem to give a shit but had his moment of grief as he conceded, “The President of the United States will be very disappointed in us.”
As the final credits rolled after the second show, the light rose to a soft azure hue that prevented anyone from ever truly observing the cracked plaster ceiling, the shabby, ancient asbestos curtain and the universal dinginess of the theatre. The Tuesday night hard-core first-nighters applauded and shouted. They had witnessed, by their standards, a cinematic masterpiece. Some shook my hand on the way out. “Watch your step,” I answered professionally, trying to keep patrons from tripping, slipping and otherwise self-destructing on the battlefield of popcorn cups and assorted garbage ritualistically distributed throughout the theatre during the show.
I failed to locate Richard and longed to be with Melanie, who had looked so sad in her traditional sort of way from inside her ticket booth. I wished to be rid of my tragedy-struck cellmate for the night and would have given the rest of the undestroyed solar system to be alone with Melanie for the next hour.
It was my job, however, after ushering out those I had ushered into this world of illusions, to clean up some of the mess. I half-heartedly knocked trash off the seats, put out smouldering cigarette butts and picked up the odd piece of lost or abandoned clothing. A quick peek in the lobby proved that Melanie was still in the booth, alone and counting the night’s take. Richard was nowhere in sight. I went back to my duties.
As I was combing the aisles I came across a brown lunch bag filled with something. Temptation told me to give it a look. Sure enough, inside was maybe half a pound of marijuana. It smelled like high-quality weed, but then who was I to judge? I couldn’t see throwing out any such bonanza, so I stuffed it in the black trash bag with a mental note to retrieve it before dumping the evening’s refuse. I waved to Carl, the theatre manager, on my way out to the trash bin. He seemed very pleased. Grabbing me by the wrist, he breathed heavy Spanish onions into my face and said simply, “Boffo box office.”
“It was rather a charming film,” I agreed.
“The mutants loved it.” Mutants was his pet name for the theatre-goers, mostly outcast youngsters and culturally deprived adults. Carl’s unqualified, honest greasiness made him one of the few truly sincere people I knew. He liked me because I laughed at his dirty jokes. Carl was also a projectionist and rolled the films himself most nights.
“Did you hear the one about the unemployed dentist and the nun?”
“No, I didn’t.”
Just then Melanie arrived, put her hand lightly on my shoulder and gave it a squeeze.
“Some other time, Fred. You two kids have a nice walk home. Don’t do anything I wouldn’t do.” Carl left me to Melanie. Anxious to hustle the girl and the weed away, I decided against changing out of my usher togs.
“Have you seen Richard?”
“Your friend? He said he’d meet you in the car. You drove tonight?”
“The rain. His leg.”
“Poor Richard.” A deaf man could have heard the compassion in her voice. That worried me. If Richard still wanted her, he would play up the injury for all it was worth. Before long, he’d be another welfare nation pleading to the UNICEF of her heart for mercy. “He said his leg was bothering him but that he’d wait for you. You rather I go home on my own?”
“Of course not. Why not come over for a cup of tea?”
She was all smiles now. “Sure I’m not intruding?”
“No way.” We were just outside the doors of the Queen. I held her gently in one arm, the trash bag in the other. “I love you,” I whispered to her.
A new, cold wind had pulled in from the north, a reminder of harsher seasons. Richard was pretending to be asleep in the cramped back seat, his plastered ankle and naked foot sticking out the driver’s window, so I crawled in from the passenger’s side. Melanie sat down beside me.
“Isn’t that sweet,” she said, motioning toward the corpse in back. I had never in my whole life thought Richard sweet. I don’t think his own mother had ever seen him as such.
Melanie leaned over and slid her hand inside my shirt as I kissed her. “I’m not going to be around this fall, you know,” she said to me.
Somehow I had never thought past the end of the week. I hadn’t even begun to contemplate what would become of our relationship at the end of the season. I think I had assumed we would continue forever, even though my own confused emotions baffled the hell out of me. “Stunned in the afterglow” is a suitable expression that describes it. I wasn’t even sure I was in love any more. For all practical purposes, I was happy with that fact. If this wasn’t love, let it be whatever it was. It was certainly better than anything that had ever happened to me before.
“So you’ll move back to East Weston. I’ll be going to university about twenty miles from there at Dexter. I can drive down every other night, and we can sneak off to the school buses if you like.” But I was missing the point. She wasn’t smiling.
“I got a scholarship to go to a school out west.”
“How far west?”
“Like the other side of the country.”
“And...?”
“And it will be over for us.”
“You’ve been watching too many of those Frankie Avalon movies again.” I was really pissed off. Breach of trust, your honour.
“I love you,” I said unconvincingly again.
“We do love each other...sort of.”
“Sort of?” I ran a red light and nicked somebody’s trash can rounding a corner, retracing a homeward path through parlour city. If I was going to be bummed out, I wanted to be in the right neighbourhood.
“If you’re mad at me, just stop and I’ll get out.” Melanie looked deeply hurt at first, but as she stared out the window I could see her already distancing herself from me, her heart going out to the battered people on the night street — two bag ladies, a trio of muscatel guzzlers and a pair of teenage prostitutes.
“No,” I said. “Just help me get over it.”
“I owe you that. I’ll miss you too, you know.”
Already the summer was collapsing. On the verge of adulthood, and somebody was kicking me back down the stairs into the basement of adolescent agony. Betrayed. It was my own fault. Suckered in. All those shitty songs about winning and losing in love. Only the lonely. Yes sir, Mr. Orbison. Why do fools . . .? Teardrops on my pillow. Only love can break your heart. On and on, all those corny old songs. I looked over at Melanie again, experiencing maybe for the first time in my life that knife-edge between love and hate. I remembered what I had seen her do to her parents. Beneath this Dorothea Dix was a cruel little mother. I didn’t want to believe it. I still loved her. I just had to convince myself a little harder. Richard squirmed in the back seat. Blood-thirsty. This would do him good. I was sure the bastard was awake. Me dangling at the end of the hook.
I pulled to a stop in front of a liquor store and gently kicked Richard in his bad foot. He pretended a return to ad hoc consciousness. “Red or white, bro?”
Richard cracked an eyelid, saw us parked in front of his favourite house of merchandise.
“Vin rouge, of course.”
I waltzed into the store past two foot-patrol cops who paid more than a little attention to my usher’s uniform and the bulging bag sticking out of my back pocket. I really didn’t care. It was a night for blooming destru
ction. And, of course, I wasn’t legally old enough to buy booze to boot.
The grandfather behind the bottles didn’t seem to worry about age. Experience was written all over my hardened face. No fumbler with wallets here. If I was underage and smartass enough to waltz past the bluecoats, Abe Lincoln there behind the cash register wasn’t about to cramp my style. He found me the full jug of Paisano red and passed it my way.
Back on the street the cops were hassling a couple of young kids with loud radios, and I pulled away without ado.
“The longest day of summer,” Richard announced. “Solstice!”
Melanie smiled. “He’s right, this is it. Tonight.” She had been talking with Richard while I was gone. I sensed conspiracy — both of them knowing that it was the summer solstice, me left to do the dirty work of booze-buying. Them thinking, how wonderful, the first day of the rest of our lives; me thinking ugly thoughts.
Ugly thought one: a pivotal day, the Earth’s crust not fully capable of holding me up. The first day of Melanie slipping away. She had been mine but only once, during those impossible moments at the back of the bus, dreaming our lives away in the dustballs of our slipping youth and the explosion of our love.
Ugly thought two: this sacred summer already slipping away. Every day hereafter shortened by a masochistic orbit. Downhill to winter, to old age, to civilization. Ella was right. I could be nothing but civilized. Jailer, hand me the keys, please. Already Richard was recovering from his ego trauma. The true victim was about to go centre stage.
“Fred, are you all right?” Melanie was reading my face.
“I’m okay. I was just thinking about all those poor kids in Indochina.” I said it just to make her feel guilty for feeling good.
Richard intervened. “What say we crack the seal on the rotgut and begin the sacred transports?” I passed him the jug. Nobody knew yet that I was carrying the weed as well. Richard rinsed his teeth with the wine, as was his style, then swallowed and belched loudly. Melanie laughed. I had never thought of her as a party girl, but she had no trouble hefting the bottle, filling her cheeks and gulping it down. It was a weird scene. Clearly we were on one of the undestroyed planets. She passed the jug over to me as I tried to follow the flower streets back toward Hibiscus.
“Isn’t there anything kicking around to pour it into?” I asked.
Richard popped a rusty ashtray out of the wall in the back, emptied the back-seaters’ butts out the window and passed it forward.
“Perfect.” Melanie poured and I slugged it back. “To the longest day of the year.” Richard handed Melanie a pen, and she signed his cast.
“Let him without sin stone the first cast,” he pontificated.
Melanie giggled, and as I studied her between shots of ashen wine from my cup, I found again what I had been looking for. I did still love her. She was right there inside me, soft and warm like a cloud in a dream, and when she smiled I gathered the fractured summer and began to glue it back together. But I wanted her all to myself tonight. Yet even that wouldn’t do. Soon she’d be gone; she’d find the other coast, a continent away, while I became a civilized human adult here on this shore. Somebody was twisting a piece of rusty barbed wire around my heart. The heart Gene Pitney had sung about, the heart Hank Williams ached with all the time, the heart that bled the blood of life from the wounds of the living. Shut up and drink, I sang inside my skull. We were home. There was no sign of Brian’s car, that familiar diagonal obstacle jutting out somewhere along the block like a psychedelic jetty.
It was not late enough for the night showerers to have begun their dark ablutions. We crossed the threshold without delay and entered our hall of purple ooze. The floor was sweating dark, oily jewels. A single bulb lighted the kitchen, where Brian sat bolt upright at the table near the remains of the ill-fated toaster. Something was wrong.
Richard was impervious. He leaned his crutch against the door jamb and hopped over to sit down by Brian. “How bad is it?” he asked, ignorant of the exact melody of the dilemma but trying to fake the tune.
“Pretty frigging bad.” Not a typical answer at all from one who sustained all blows and, while never truly smiling, always held up stoically.
I knew then that it had to be something to do with his car. “What happened? Did they tow it away?”
“I drove it into the bay.”
“The cheapest car wash in town,” Richard chortled, chugging some wine and passing the bottle to Brian. Brian wasn’t amused, but Melanie giggled. The wine had already gotten to her.
“Well, what happened?” I asked gently, pouring some Paisano into a Bugs Bunny glass, insisting that Brian take the medicine.
“I was driving down Eucalyptus Street, heading down toward the docks just looking for a place to turn around. The bay was up ahead and the street was too narrow for a U-turn. I was tired and didn’t feel like having to get out and shove the car backwards out of somebody’s driveway. So I had this idea that if I gave her the gas, then hit the brakes and cranked the wheel hard, she’d come around. Like Steve McQueen in Bullitt.”
“Just like Big Steve,” Richard echoed.
“I hit the brakes hard. Only something gave. There was nothing there. I think a brake line rusted through. So there wasn’t much point in taking a left turn through somebody’s picture window. I was going about fifty when I went off the bulkhead.
“You know, it was sort of beautiful for about two and a half seconds. I wasn’t scared. I even made some distance. Flew over three rowboats and a Sunfish before coming down. Then it got scary. I couldn’t crank the window down, so I had to shove open the door and swim for it. She sank down to where just the roof was showing. Three plastic flowers looking up at the sky. She just floated there for a minute. I thought maybe she was on the bottom. But then she was gone. Wasn’t even anyone around to congratulate me. I just walked home. I don’t even think anyone will notice the car unless a boat runs into it or something...but it’s plenty deep. May she rest in peace.”
“I’ll drink to that.”
“Did you have insurance? Maybe you could collect,” I suggested. “It’d probably be good for five hundred dollars.”
Brian shrugged. “That car and five more like it wouldn’t be worth five hundred dollars, not to anyone other than me. It wasn’t covered for drowning.”
“Then it’s a wake,” Richard insisted.
I introduced Melanie.
“Sorry about your car,” she said. “I really liked your car. We’ll all miss it.”
Richard found some ice cubes for the wine and turned on the tiny radio over the fridge. It was time to reveal the treasure of grass. We toasted the found and the lost. Then the end and the beginning. The good and the bad. The ugly and the beautiful. The true and the false. Heaven and hell. And so forth. The night showerers began on cue. Someone outside our back door with a bar of Lifebuoy sang “Cara Mia Mi” under the drooling shower head.
“A throwback to the animal kingdom,” I explained to Melanie.
Richard started to tell indecent jokes, and Melanie kept laughing at them until tears rolled down her face. They were getting chummy, and I didn’t like it. Brian didn’t drink much but just sort of faded off to his bunk, where he fell asleep in his clothes without even lifting weights. Richard began to sing along with Morrison and the Doors on the radio. “You know the day destroys the night, the night divides the day. Try to run, try to hide, break on through to the other side.”
Melanie had to use the bathroom, and I suggested she go upstairs to one of the hallway communal toilets. Left alone with Richard, I wanted to know what was making him so happy.
“So did you watch the movie or what?”
“I liked the part where Ricky Nelson was sitting in the control room playing with the computer, and the spider lady walks in and wraps her legs all around him. Then Slim Pickens shoots her.”
“I didn’t see you
in the theatre.”
“I was way in the back. Relax, I’m not trying to steal Melanie. Look at me. I’m a cripple. Who’d want me?”
When Melanie came back, we all smoked a little more until we were beyond repair. Then suddenly Melanie asked if she could see Richard’s bedroom — the painted walls, the suspended fender, the black lights.
I glared at Richard, but he was seven sheets to the full moon. “Go my children, go,” he instructed. “Burn out the dregs of summer in my tent. It’s only fitting. I’ll stay out here and guard the canyons against aliens, barbarians, warring warriors and politicians. Convey my apologies to the muses of ecstasy and spend the night in far pleasure dome.” He could have gone on like that all night. Instead he slipped over into a stupor.
I turned off the radio, listened to the dribbling water in the shower, the cadence of the refrigerator, the snoring of Richard, then gathered Melanie in my arms and led her off as she had requested to Richard’s room, to his bed, where we lay down beneath the Holy Fender. I snapped on the ultraviolet. Whatever happened next, I have since forgotten. I was robbed of something spectacular or embarrassing. I expect to retrieve those moments in my last fleeting seconds before I die. For the time being, memory of the event remains non-existent.
Organized Crime Back in Town
Sometime in the middle of the night, I’m told, I got out of bed and wandered off. Melanie couldn’t figure out what was going on. She said I got up at about three o’clock and stumbled through the darkness out the back door, where I took a shower. I was gone for about half an hour, eventually returning to slip beneath the covers beside the confused but warm Melanie, at which point I do remember making love to her for (presumably) the second time that night.
“I was afraid you’d gone out and turned yourself into a werewolf,” she told me afterwards. “You were like an animal.”
The Summer of Apartment X Page 6
