The Summer of Apartment X

by Lesley Choyce

  “I’m sorry.”

  “Don’t be,” she said, bringing an end to the discussion.

  Later in the day I tried to piece together my night walk. I remember crashing into the refrigerator in the darkness, then seeing Richard half on, half off my bed. A prismatic moving light from someone’s passing car lit up the inside of the rat’s hole briefly. I picked Richard up by the cast and hefted him back into my bed as we descended again into darkness. “But I don’t want to go to school,” he yelled in his sleep, thinking he was home in the suburbs with his mother waking him in time for chemistry class.

  Another passing headlight let me see Brian, curled in a fetal position, his blankets kicked off the bed. I covered him with a sheet, then made my way to the door. The shower was running, but I opened the door anyway. It hadn’t been hooked. I’m sure that nine-tenths of me was still asleep.

  I heard a familiar voice saying, “Hey, buster.” But it was dark. A pale, pockmarked, half-pie moon leaked down an icy light. The fifty-watt bulb over the shower was blown out or stolen. I couldn’t find a thing to say about my intrusion. Ella was just a ghost in the moonlight, wrapping itself back into its familiar towel. “The dead awakens,” she said to me, then kissed me once on the neck, biting hard enough to leave tooth marks I would later discover. Then she was gone as the back door of the shower flapped in the cold night wind. “Welcome to the club,” she sang to the back yard on her way out.

  The shower was still running, the water lukewarm but warmer than the air. I stayed there for maybe twenty minutes with the back door still flapping and me starkers and mostly asleep. I saw phantoms of other night showerers approaching in the outside gloom, but none confronted me directly. Someone tripped over a broken lawn chair and cursed. The rest were silent. The night showerers had undoubtedly sworn an oath against communication.

  I apparently dried myself with one of Brian’s crumpled blankets and went back to Melanie. The hard part came in the morning when I tried to remember who I was.

  Before Melanie woke up, I lay there fading back into the warm glow of simply having that soft body beside me. I insisted that I loved her. For the very first time in my life I understood, however imperfectly, why a man would ask a woman to marry him. I simply liked the idea of waking up like this every morning for the rest of my life. It was as agonizingly intense as those first sweet moments of talking to Melanie through the glass as she sat inside her ticket booth. Then I would have defied a Cossack army to tell me that what I felt was not love. This was different. The innocence was gone. Love, in my former mind, had insisted on innocence and naive belief in the infallible other. I was aware of my fallible other, of some cruelty hiding inside her like a concealed weapon. The switchblade behind the curtain. But I was convincing myself that I could live with it. I, too, would eventually feel the cut, but my skin would learn to heal quickly or to toughen up. For love, of course, or whatever this was.

  Maybe this wasn’t even love at all but a glorified notion of sex. That, too, was all right. I could live with it, make a life out of it. Melanie would never be able to go off to her university on the other coast now. She would see us for what we were; I felt no fear of that. And yet I wasn’t willing to wake her, scared that something would go wrong. I stared up at the orange fender. Half dreaming, I tried to hold on to the sweet longing that mingled with new definitions of who I was and what was now important. I should have been hung over. I must have been, but something in the night shower had purged me of alcohol, burned-out nerve endings and damaged brain cells. I touched Melanie gently on the arm, felt the soft, light hair along the skin. And then I felt within me the blunt impact of something else. Something lost. Something I could no longer be. This was how it ended.

  Nobody had, or would ever, sucker me into going off to some battlefield where I would lie down in a trench, a spray of M-16 Communist bullets rushing past my ears as I peed my pants, saying to myself, “It’s all over — you’ll never be a kid again after this.” I didn’t need that.

  And the less heroic tricks hadn’t worked either. I had climbed a mountain or two courtesy of the Boy Scouts, driven somebody else’s car down a deserted freeway until the needle wobbled uncertainly over 120 mph. And I had never needed to go out in the night with tire irons and chains to confront enemy tribes of other townships just to prove an issue of manhood.

  The transition happened somewhere between the end of Spider People from Venus and Melanie’s final gulp for air in the middle of sex in the middle of the intoxicated black light night. And only now did it cut like a knife, sliding beneath the pleasure and pure happiness as it ripped out the old familiar cadaver of what was once me.

  What I felt then was what everyone feels: when you finally get yanked off the tightrope of adolescence, you look down to find that you’ve been cheated. There never was a net there. They only made you believe that to get you up on the wire to begin with. So much was behind me and no way to go back. I would do what every other red-blooded male of my generation, and all those before me, had done. Fake it, cover it up, pretend it all meant nothing. A perfect con artist from here on. I was falling without a net, and what was required of me was a pleasant face for the audience on the way down. As long as I kept my eyes off the sawdust and my limbs twisted up with Melanie’s, I could certainly handle the descent. But I didn’t want to have her with me when I hit the floor of the circus tent and kept right on going into the darker recesses of the hollowed planet beneath.

  Melanie stirred, and I pulled her around to face me. Her breath was all ash and stale wine. I believe she thought I was ready to make love again, and she sang a soft sweet sigh into my ear. But I wasn’t. I could forgo sex for the moment. I just wanted every other assurance in the world.

  The storm and the north wind had changed the town overnight. At ten o’clock in the morning the beaches were empty. Guards sat resolutely inspecting a sea swept clean by the offshore winds as the tiny rippled waves were bullied away and their tops feathered from the confrontation. Melanie had returned to The Laurels, Richard was nursing a hangover, and I was out running on the beach with Brian, who was wearing his ancient white sneakers, green with mould, peppered black in spots with mildew and cured to an unwholesome magenta by Richard’s purpling fluid. I was trying to help Brian burn off his angst.

  “I don’t know anything about angst.”

  “Angst,” I explained, short of breath, trying to keep up with Brian’s more conditioned pace, “is a sort of unhappiness peculiar to twentieth-century man. It’s what we get uptight about when there’s no good reason to be uptight about anything.”

  “Then I don’t have angst. I just feel lost without my car. It was all I had in the world.”

  He wasn’t trying to be melodramatic. He meant it. We were still young enough, vulnerable enough to get emotionally welded to something like a rusty Chevy with bad brakes and no reverse. Brian had been abandoned to the world by his parents. For Richard and me, this had just been a summer fling before university and a life ever after polishing off fifty grand a year. For Brian, this was the real thing. Cleaning gum off tables for the rest of his life. Picking up burger wrappers on oily parking lots.

  I was forced by a pain in my lungs to get him to slow down a bit. Brian was used to this, but my body was about to go on strike. “Ease up, tyrant.” He kept running. Then I saw that the idiot was choking back tears. He was about to cry over drowned metal. I gave a last burst of speed and tackled him around the gut, pulled him down into a pile of washed-up seaweed infested with a thousand tiny sea insects that leaped all around us.

  “Someone like you wouldn’t understand, Fred.”

  “The hell I wouldn’t. Try me.”

  Brian surprised me with a fist driven like a V8 piston rod into my stomach. I doubled over and went into a dry heave as my muscles refused to give me a chance for some air. Brian left me there and raced off down the beach as far as the next black rock jetty, then came
full stop in the sand and jogged back. Two lifeguards from the next beach over were looking our way but didn’t budge from their chairs.

  “I’m sorry, Fred. I shouldn’t have done that.”

  I smiled the smile of the near-dead. All I wanted out of life right then was about four cubic inches of oxygen inside my lungs. Brain cells were looking for court action. The Paisano in my stomach wanted to go AWOL. Finally I threw up all over Brian’s back as he held me to him.

  Brian didn’t flinch. “How bad is it?”

  “Not that bad,” I lied. I wasn’t even mad at him. My head reeled, and I sucked at the air. He was still holding on to me; I was the first to become embarrassed at the situation. Some tourists were walking by now, grabbing their kids in cut-offs and pulling them away from us.

  “You can use my car whenever you like,” I said. I knew he couldn’t afford to buy another one. If he was to survive, he would have to save every cent he made this summer.

  “It’s not the same.” I knew it wouldn’t be. Maybe I could figure something else out. Brian took off his shirt and went to wash it in the ocean. Then we took off our shoes. I stuck the ten dollar bill I was carrying into the toe of one sneaker, and we went for a swim. The offshore winds had blown the warm water away. The sea was cold and a magnificent blue-green. We swam out past the end of the jetty, and the lifeguards down the beach began to blow their warning whistles. Next they raised a bullhorn and ordered us in lest we get arrested. It was, I knew from Richard, illegal to swim beyond thirty yards from shore. In fact, there was a city ordinance making it illegal to drown within city limits. To drown oneself intentionally or otherwise was a crime. You could be fined a thousand dollars or spend fifty days in the slammer. We swam ashore and jogged back in the direction we had come as the cool morning breeze dried us.

  What Brian needed more than anything else in the world right now was protein. I insisted he let me buy him a meal at the Pancake House. It was there that I read the news in the complimentary morning paper:

  ORGANIZED CRIME BACK IN TOWN

  Early this morning, fisherman Blaine Cruiz noticed an oil slick near his boat moored in the vicinity of Eucalyptus Street. He phoned police, who sent divers down into the murky bay water, where they located a ten-year-old Chevrolet Biscayne. No occupants were present, and a thorough search turned up no body on the bay floor or near the pilings of the wharf.

  Police Chief Howard Simms stated today, “The disposal of a car such as this fits a clear pattern of recent Mafia attempts to eradicate adversaries: competing hoodlums from other shore towns, stoolies, and non- loyal crooks. In the old days, they always used good cars. Now they mainly buy junk cars to save money. Cars like this one.”

  There was an extraordinary photograph of Brian’s car held aloft by a crane brought to the end of the wharf for the resurrection. The Chevrolet was suspended vertically in mid-air over the bay like a great fish pulled up from the depths. Brian looked at the photograph and cracked his face wide open with a smile. The waitress came by and set down the plates. She looked at the headlines and the picture. “More crooks in this town these days than you can shake a stick at. They never found that poor sucker. Sharks probably got him.”

  “Probably,” Brian answered, a shit-eating grin now planted on his face.

  The rest of the article noted the missing licence plate (which must have simply fallen off in the accident) and the fact that no one had reported the car stolen. A sidebar discussed recent gangland activities up and down the seaboard, corroborating the theory that the event was most certainly the work of syndicated crime. “We’re going to have to crack down tougher than before,” Simms asserted. Anyone knowing anything about the crime or able to identify the car (which was to be stored at the city tow-away lot) was asked to contact Simms personally.

  “What are we going to do?” I asked Brian.

  “Nothing.” He dug deep into his pancakes, shovelling into his mouth four thick wedges the size of spatulas. He seemed pleased that his car had met its end with such public attention and distinction.

  I had almost assumed that somebody would phone the cops from Hibiscus Street, where Brian’s car and its reckless parking positions should have been legendary. But I underestimated the power of desired anonymity and thus of non-interference among the summer transients. The police never came looking for Brian, and they never found the missing licence plate. It hadn’t occurred to me then that Brian himself might have removed the identification. All I knew for sure was that this was the first decent meal I had seen Brian consume all summer. He seemed quite satisfied to be alive and ecstatic to see his car gain such notoriety. He tore off the front page, folded it and put it inside his shorts.

  Falling in Love with a Chameleon

  After Brian left for work, I drove the somewhat dissipated Richard down to the city parking lot behind the cop station and sure enough, there was Brian’s Chev still dripping bay water all over the asphalt. The damn thing looked clean and renewed, better than it ever had — like a dog who had just had its first bath in seven years. But it would never run again, and Brian wasn’t about to reclaim it after such a fine obituary. We both mourned in our own way — Richard by turning up the Jefferson Airplane until my speaker flapped and me by studying the passing street life.

  Suddenly Richard snapped the radio off and his eyes grew large. He threw out his arm, pointing toward something, but the windshield was in the way, and he smashed his hand against it.

  An MGB, red, with a crumpled left front fender, sat diagonally across from the Chevy, winking with its one broken headlight. “What do you think they do with these cars if no one claims them?”

  “Probably sell them for junk,” I said.

  “Junk!” Richard said it as if that word was the most beautiful in our entire language.

  There was no way around it now. Fate had rolled the dice. They were now bouncing against the wall. “I don’t suppose the car is of interest to you,” I said, trying to remain calm against the tide of emotion.

  “Does a bear shit in the woods?”

  “I don’t know. I’ve never seen one shit anywhere but in a zoo.” Apparently Richard had.

  So we went in and talked to the desk sergeant. “I don’t suppose you boys would like to settle for the Biscayne from the bay?”

  “No way, your honour,” Richard answered. The sarge scowled. “What might one do to acquire the dilapidated British subcompact from the back?” I knew that all that was required was a sealed bid, and after a certain time, if your bid was highest, you got the car. My father had bought the family a station wagon once that someone had been using to steal family pets and sell them for laboratory testing. There were problems with the MGB, however, as the sergeant explained.

  “The wheel’s all jammed up into the fender. You can’t drive it as it is.” The sergeant looked more interested in getting back to the Playboy he had been studying.

  “No problem,” Richard responded.

  “Before we found it, somebody had yanked out most of the stuff off the engine. No carburetor. No distributor, no alternator. Not even a fan belt.”

  “Things can be replaced.”

  “We don’t give it away, you know.”

  We knew that.

  Finally Sarge thought he’d give it his one last shot. “Somebody died in that car. Sixty-five-year-old oral surgeon was in the car with two teenage girls. They were fooling around. He ran into a light pole. Died from a heart attack.”

  “And the girls?”

  “They were having trouble putting their clothes on when the cruiser arrived.”

  “Ah. Human folly. It gets one every time.” Richard was fading into his mock Oxford accent, and I was afraid he would get the desk cop ticked off.

  “You don’t care that someone died in that car? It probably still carries the stink of death.” The cramped quarters of the police reception room itself had a certai
n stink, as if lawmen had been coming there to fart for the past several decades and the smells had been absorbed by the furniture, the walls, the endless filed documentation of criminal habits. Compared to this, the stink of death would seem a fresh ocean zephyr.

  “Mortality has never deeply offended me.” Richard was being persistent. I was sure there were criminal statutes on the books, legal reasons to arrest someone for being a smartass around police. If so, incarceration was almost inevitable for my plaster-legged compatriot.

  “Fill this out. Put your offer down there. We’ll let you know at the end of the month.”

  “Thank you, your honour.”

  We departed.

  “I feel like Paul on the Road to Damascus,” Richard said.

  “Why, are your feet sore?”

  “No, laddie-boy. The car. The cosmic forces. The swirling purple haze, the Macedonian magnitude, the vortex, alpha waves and Bata basketball shoes. The universe coming to a quick fixation on this place. There’s no denying that a kindly Jehovah is behind this. O, come, all ye faithful, the Lord does work in mysterious ways. Right, Vishnu?”

  “If you say so.”

  Of course I soon learned that part of the mystery concerned me. Richard was broke. No job. No earnings. His parents were believers in Christian Science, and as such, at least according to them, they were forbidden to have medical operations, take drugs or loan money to their son. All thanks to Mary Baker Eddy. “It would be like trying to pry open Fort Knox,” Richard explained.

  “How much did you offer for the car?” I asked.

  “Four hundred.”

  “They’ll never sell it to you for that.”

  “Not me, Frederico. You.”

  “Me?”

  “Remember the cosmic forces. Whole galaxies are lined up just for this transaction. Your solvency has astounded the multitudes. Like salt. Like sugar. A man of wealth and property.”