Gulp. “So . . . we’re still in love?”
She laughed, a hardy, healthy laugh, what a young fellow must learn to encourage in women prone to anxiety depression. “Yes. When are you coming to see me?”
A man was never too beaten to ponder a Boop weekend. The tiger’s tale had been released, but dreams still imploded when the tiger lunged. She would be the antidote; next stop Texas.
Betty seemed emotionally and financially stable in the suburbs with a tiresome boyfriend who was way too analytical—
What?
She’d invited me, an old beau of no income, to travel five thousand miles to visit her and her boyfriend? No, silly. Interest in the boyfriend had died and so would the liaison, soon. It was just . . . nothing. She would tell him that day, the day of my arrival. Don’t worry—the boyfriend would not be around, and her kids were young enough to fall asleep by eight.
We’d changed physically, grown out of self-conscious youth and beauty. My hair had thinned. I had skin damage from the sun and a scar slanting across my forehead where God whipped me with a running backstay in heavy weather to chastise my sins. She said it wasn’t noticeable in low light and hiked her shirt to show breasts of two different sizes. “What can I say? They wanted the right side.” I assumed they were the children.
Most notable was the comfort we shared, the open affection and bonding she’d recalled in her time of crisis. We snuggled on the sofa to share more. She said I should sleep in the basement till she gave the boyfriend the news. We shouldn’t hurt him.
Because he really was a great guy. She simply couldn’t stand to be around him anymore; he was so boring she could scream, and the sex was way off. “He eats me for forty-five minutes. Where the fuck is that at? That’s not foreplay. I got chapped lips—wait! You’ll love this!” She scooted to the edge of the couch and turned to me to better animate her point, her immersion in the world of diapers, babies and domestic routine. “I was on the phone with my friend Cookie, telling her how I have to get eaten for forty-five minutes. She was so envious, but I told her it wasn’t what it was cracked up to be, because I had chapped lips. I had Suzy Q on my lap—you know how parents think their children can’t hear. Well, Suzy Q says, ‘Mommy, am I gonna get chapped lips from I eat too much?’ Ha! Don’t you love it?”
I laughed on cue, ignoring her free flowing imagery as we harked back to the good old days. We dallied on the prelims and Betty led me by the hand to the basement where we swooped to old home week in our world of discovery newly spiced with experience. Betty seemed happy, loved and appreciated. She said it was best, messing up the guest bed like that, so the soon-to-be-ex boyfriend could see that I was sleeping downstairs. Then we had tea.
Anticlimax can be comfortable in the suburbs. The charade to hide our middle-age liaison would make no difference to anyone. Her affliction had been sex with no affection. The shrink drew it out. Randy Mutton worshipped her, fucked her a few thousand times and then left her—the love went away, or maybe it never was. She moped, saddened by the shortfall. I consoled her with a reminder that love’s irony was not hers alone to bear.
Embraced again by beauty and fantasy fulfillment, we renewed the bond. She broke up with the boyfriend a few days after I left, though he must have known. Betty and I could not be an item, and she must have known that too, yet her post-coital happiness got wildly emotional, recalling Betty of no spaghetti and certainly no acid. Then again, she’d achieved a rare interlude on our brief time together, which amounted to a cock-a-doodle-do over love everlasting. Never mind that it would last forever because of the chronic distance between us. It made us both more secure with ourselves.
We stayed in touch till I had a layover in Dallas two years later. It was still a decade before cell phones, and a few hundred miles proximity warranted a call. “Hey. What are you doing?”
“Who is this?” She’d recognized my voice in the past, and likely recognized it again.
A man behind her reiterated, “Who is it?”
“It’s me. Your one true love. I’m in Dallas.”
“Uh . . . It’s not a good time. You can’t come to visit. Okay?”
“I said Dallas. I can’t come to visit. I called to say hello and ask how you’re doing.”
“It’s not a good time. I’m very busy.”
“Who is it?” asked the mellifluous voice nearby, its benign curiosity telling the tale. Among Betty’s many effusions had been a confession that came at the tail end of our visit. She’d asked if I remembered a certain fellow. We’d been friends years ago, and this fellow had also been pals with Randy Mutton?
Sure, I remembered the guy.
“I fucked him.”
Maybe it was good for her, but it sounded like something else. She got curiouser and curiouser; it happened on a Christmas visit to her parents who lived in the same town. He couldn’t get it up until he could, because she helped him as only she could—“Do you have any idea how many guys have told me that I’m the very best?”
I hadn’t dwelt on it because I had an idea how many guys, and avoiding her stats and ratings seemed more convenient. “I got him up. But then he couldn’t keep it up.” She sighed, maybe at the replay. Then she laughed. “What a mess.”
Was the mess figurative or literal? Was it him, her or the gooey aftermath? “Why did you do him?”
She didn’t hesitate. “I thought I’d give him a thrill. He was so depressed all the time. It was miserable—oh, God! Do you remember Dick Dunning?” Yes, I remembered Dick. He too was Randy’s pal. He and I got arrested in Florida when—never mind. She’d done him later that same week. She laughed; she and Dick were inevitable, they were such good friends for so many years, and when Randy left, well . . . Boy, no problem keeping it up on that guy, which really was what she needed after the disaster with the limp noodle guy. Oh, and Keith Schaeffer. And Ricky Berman . . .
“Busy week.”
“No. Not the same week. Please . . .”
“Rick Berman?” Rick Berman wasn’t friends with Randy Mutton—he was opposite, conservative to a yawn, a serious student focused on a dental career. “You dated Rick Berman?”
“Not dated. We just, you know, hung out one night. I got to tell you, that guy is the worst fuck on the face of the earth. God! So demanding, and for what? Six seconds of bang, bang, bang, grunt, snort and out.” She laughed again at the ridiculous package Rick Berman had presented.
“Why?”
She sighed again in a set piece. “I don’t know. Give him a thrill.” She dented my continuing affection through eight or ten guys, till she came to the denouement, the be-all, end-all of Betty’s affliction, transforming my fondness to enduring sympathy. She’d been horny, “really horny,” much worse than usual, and she couldn’t relax or think of who to call. So she called a babysitter—a babysitter! At ten o’clock at night! Well, a woman has to do what a woman has to do. To think that she would have gone “out” without getting a sitter would be unacceptable. And irresponsible.
With the sitter secure in front of the TV Betty headed out just anywhere and wound up near the airport at a hotel with a lounge and a bar, empty except for a guy who agreed to buy her a drink. He also agreed to fill the gap in her love life up in his room and repeat as necessary. “Hey, he was a twerp, a salesman in a cheap suit. You’d think he’d never been laid. I know he never had what I gave him—especially not from his wife. Oh, man, he starts calling me, and then he found out where I live and started parking across the street. He stayed there three days, till I called the cops. I had to get a restraining order. Man.”
I didn’t ask why; she’d made the why of her adventures apparent: because.
Also apparent on that last call from Dallas was that her new man would stick around as long as her past didn’t come sniffing the bushes for more. Maybe he’d said as much or she sensed it, so she was curt, not rude, really, considering the circumstance. And there we were, hardly a decade out from fifty with communion behind us.
Bett
y Boop defaulted to basic need. That night she needed long-term romance. Good for her, sacrificing an old flame to keep her new man. Was Betty teaching me a lesson in love lost with her marriages and a cavalcade of buckaroos eager for the blue ribbon thrill ride?
I don’t think so. If it was convenient, she would have invited me to Houston for another round of friendship. I wouldn’t have gone, because a man and a dog will judge a journey’s distance by the reward at the end. More tea and crumpets seemed like water and dog biscuits by then. I called to see how she was doing and found out.
Very well, thank you. Please don’t call again.
The high points in life are passionate. Friendships fade. People go away. Or they become somebody else, or things change internally, which all amounts to the same thing. Betty Boop faded to patterns and the national anthem. We went full circle and then some. Terminal from the outset, as many couples prove to be, we gave each other what we could.
Forty is young enough for vigor, old enough for true friendship. A man learns that women grant favors like the Easter Bunny hides eggs, with plenty for every kid to find his fair share. The wildly experimental world of the 60s settled out by the 90s.
A new woman moved in, and hardly a year later came a blessed event, a new two-wheeler.
Around the Clubhouse Turn
MOST PEOPLE DON’T die one day. Failures accumulate: teeth, kidneys, gall bladder, appendix, uterus, ovaries, prostate, joints, pancreas, colon, gums, heart, lungs, skin—like a fire sale, everything must go. A man can feel wrung out at thirty-five if he’s sunburned, windbent, beer-funked, broke and indebted. One day in the charter trade, a fat man came up the stern ladder in apparent pulmonary complexity. He was twenty-something and breathing hard.
“Are you in trouble?” I asked.
“No,” replied his diamond-studded wife. “He’s not used to so much exercise.” He’d snorkeled seven minutes. At a hundred forty pounds with no body fat I sometimes swam an open ocean mile just to blow off steam, so I was wealthy next to the guy ten years younger who couldn’t even see his peepee. But at the grocery store he could fill a cart with anything he wanted—two carts—and I couldn’t, until I could. Hungry people generally live longer, but hungry isn’t happy, and pangs become chronic. Or maybe a growing appetite was the first symptom of crazy youth fading away.
At a social event, an interviewer asked George Burns at ninety-seven if he was glad to be there. Sure it was a setup, a good one. George Burns twirled his cigar. “At my age you’re glad to be anywhere.” He lived to a hundred, but how much had he seen pass away as he still quipped with the best of them? Inventory tends to shrink on friends, abilities and what will last. What’s the compensation?
Laying it over in a sweep and farther over into a curve connects the world to the self, matches speed with angle, balances centrifugal force keeping the bike up and centripetal force holding it to the road. Thoughts are gyroscopic, mortality and acceleration engage in sweet symbiosis, up and out on a gentle twist, goosing reality to seventy-five at four grand.
Into the straightaway the cosmic/mechanical interface clarifies life. Memory fragments tumble with simple labels: youth, aging and the time in between and maybe what’s left and how much. Painfully obvious to aging persons is the complexity of maintenance, till it’s easy to speculate on what component will fail and take you out.
The 90s opened on a new Sturgis. Harley had a Sturgis in ’83 to debut the Kevlar belt as secondary drive—the belt that turns the back wheel, in this case replacing the chain. No Sturgis followed till ’91. It looked like a Sportster or Super Glide with external shocks, and like a Sturgis, black and orange with the big engine. It prototyped the Dyna series, attempting agility in a heavy cruiser.
The shop owner stepped up and said, “You want it. I see your checkbook in your pocket. What you came here to do is get excited. You could write a check and ride it home. Like you want to.”
What a nudge, not even aware of the big fat fault in his Mr. Smarty Pants idea. “Oh yeah? What would I do with my car?”
He laughed. “Leave it here. Park in my spot. I’ll move mine across the street.” He shrugged. “Have your girlfriend drive you down later for your car. You got a girlfriend, don’t you?”
Yes, I had my checkbook and a girlfriend. He said his wife just had a baby, and he was getting high again but without drugs, on sleep deprivation. He seemed haggard. “A baby? How old are you?”
“Fifty-one.”
“So when the kid is thirteen, you’ll be sixty-four.”
“Yeah. So what? How old are you?”
It was a lazy, sunny Saturday with nothing on deck. An easy check could liberate things from inertia. And yes, I wanted it. But I played it cautious. “I’ll drive it down the street and see if I like it.”
“Fine. First write me a check so I can be getting the paperwork together. You don’t like it; we tear everything up. Okay?”
“You’re pretty good.”
“Yeah, I am. But you’re good too. This ain’t rocket science. You got it written all over you.”
The Sturgis sat high but ran well. Seventy-four cubic inches was overkill on an island that ran out of road in short order. That rig logged mostly sundown trips to the grocery on a road that wended along a volcano slope and headed to the grail at last. Hanging on to scooter grips after gripping a phone all day felt refreshing, at times game changing. Straddling two wheels instead of a bucking business bronco brought the old spirit home. War cries in the wind expressed gratitude. Two years and three thousand miles to the grocery store later was enough. Tropical countryside was nice, but the road was brief and repetitive.
A friend who introduced me to meditation years before had a landscape company, so I hired him for my new place. One day on the way to lunch he advised in his minimal way that I’d done well and should never sell. What an odd thing to say. I’d just built it and moved in—a house aloft on two acres of lush garden in a place called Haiku. Well, it’s nice to arrive at a place not so different from youthful values; arrival came sudden as a surprise after forty years of wandering. A magical home in the country, income, a great woman, good prospects—could it be another setup, too good to trust?
“Everything changes. Be aware.”
“You mean beware?”
“No. I mean be aware. Take nothing for granted.”
“That doesn’t sound relaxing.”
“Maybe you relax too much.”
“I doubt it.”
And that was that, except for wondering what the fuck.
The business partner was bankrupt when we met. As a would-be mover and shaker he wasn’t afraid to gamble, like many low achievement people. That sounds harsh, and he really didn’t seem low achievement. He’d driven a taxi and pimped a bit on the side, as your Honolulu taxi driver will do by necessity, to make ends meet till things pick up. And things invariably picked up, notwithstanding a masters degree in business administration. His graduate degree was not from a State U, but it wasn’t Ivy League either, which may have accounted for his intermittent common sense. My business partner could generate cash flow easy as low pressure makes for breezes. He just lost it all, every time. Well, I could fix that; just watch. Impressively inured to insult, he laughed at my rough critique on his losing situation. As friends in need, we would partner his business smarts on merchandising, personnel, payroll, legal docs and tax returns with my street level smarts and raw talent on advertising.
Between ’89 and ’95 the business paid no taxes. Federal tax is based on net income. Hawaii tax is 10% of the net and 4% of the gross, along with payroll tax and withholding taxes. Not filing is worse than not paying; the statute of limitations begins with filing. In August of ’95 the State Tax Division called to say, “Ey. You know what? You no pay your tax.”
The partner explained, “I’ve been meaning to tell you about that.” He’d been meaning since ’88, when we’d last filed.
Why does the Grand Tour stop in scenic overview of business fail
ure? Because failure or marginal success came naturally for so many years with no fault or shame, because of nothing to lose. But losing on a bunt, on an easy lay up or an end run through a hole can indicate flawed fundamentals. Or maybe things can go more wrong with something to lose.
As cosmic veterans with know-how we saw ourselves as raconteurs, time travelers, spacewalkers—as veterans of the Age of Aquarius, we knew right from wrong and how to avoid the reaper. With proven skills in the ground game and the air game we took the lead. Indifference became strength and we won on daring, wit and contentment. Comrades in the goof could do no wrong . . .
Until rough weather loomed on a camping trip to Montana, where psychic phenomenon signaled the downfall, dead ahead. Beginning at a camping emporium in Missoula with a few grand in knives, binocs, sleeping bags, cook kits and on and on, it felt grandiose, another goof in retail therapy with a vengeance on what we’d missed. Stuff sailed into the giant cart—exotic toys for the partner’s kids—wait a minute. They weren’t there, and such obtuse spending seemed wasteful, no matter what we’d missed. He scoffed. “What? We don’t have the money?” So I shrugged and tossed a camp latte maker onto the pile. He shook his head. “Man. Loosen up a little bit, wouldja?”
Okay, maybe he was right.
He read a book high on the bluff in a canvas chair as I cast a Mepps spinner across the stream—across the years for the old magic. Sunlight on little wave faces shimmered in a steady breeze. Reeling, tugging, waiting could simulate an injured fish, but the stream felt empty; the world had changed. Trout don’t like cloudy water. The flow was lifeless in the crisp Montana air. Wind waves lapped the shore as gusts wafted in sudden exhalation, and in a minute I buckled with terrible sadness.
Welling out of nowhere, sobs heaved under a burden of grief. Setting the rod aside I knelt and wept. The partner soon stood there. “Hey. What’s wrong?” I couldn’t say—it wasn’t the day or the moment or the shape life had taken or its potential. But the love all around us caved in.
1969 and Then Some Page 22
