Fast Eddie, King of the Bees: 1

by Robert Arellano

  “I always get up early. Besides, I’m not used to the sun.”

  “Did they keep you in a dungeon or something?” she muttered from the dark-roasted depths. “Anyway, your new clothes look nice.” Merry’s eyes started to shine as the bean worked its mojo. She placed the steaming cup on the table and lay a hot, soft hand on the back of my neck. “We have so much to catch up on, Ed.”

  My eyes at the level of her swelling chest, nose trapped by the dilation of her heaving cleavage, I fiddled nervously with the bridge of my glasses and mumbled, “Please, I prefer—muh!” She clutched my head in both hands and pressed it between her breasts. A cocktail of convoluted passion stirred inside me. My mouth watered. My tongue ached with a dull longing. I was all choked up. I felt my lips swelling. I guessed it was for love of mother, but I could not be sure. Was this the way sons were supposed to feel? My head was spinning, thoughts were swimming. A drunken distraction overtook me. Just when I thought I couldn’t take any more the air was filled with bells. It was a clanging from on high, a cosmic disclaimer, the clamor of a deity’s disfavor. As the tolling subsided, in a flood of emotion I grabbed Merry back. “What was that?”

  Before I realized that she had even let go, Merry turned her back and was ferrying her coffee away. My lenses were foggy and smudged. “See who’s at the door, honey,” she said nonchalantly. “I’m not dressed.”

  On the stoop, a brown-suited courier came bearing a parcel. It was a good-looking package, the kind I might have swiped had I seen it at the station out of range of someone’s grasp. “Mister Corrente?”

  “He’s not here.”

  “I have a delivery for a Mr. Edward Corrente.”

  “Oh. The name’s Eddie.”

  “Sign here.” He handed me a pad. Barely recovered from the doorbell racket, still reeling from mammilary knowledge of Merry, here I was with my third big shock in as little as a minute. Sure, I knew how to write what he wanted, but should I assume the new nomenclature just because the so-called shepherd who had sampled my DNA told me to? Over the past twelve hours I had entertained answering to Eddie Corrente, but that was very different from inscribing myself such. Although admittedly I had not consciously considered bailing out, thus far it had all felt like a free trial, no obligation to buy. But the way these things worked, the digital signature would go into a database with a billion other declarative John Hancocks. If I cast this assumed identity in cyberstone, didn’t that presume embodying this new Jersey personality for virtual eternity? Could I so brashly define myself as my every mother’s son, my daddy’s little girl? I was on the adrenaline edge, tearing myself in two between fight and flight, when the delivery man added, “An X will do.”

  Inside the box, wrapped in wispy tissue: the most grotesque pair of footwear I had ever seen. It took four different shades and grains of cowhide just to mold the toes, and the clashes continued on up the sides in all the hues of a Technicolor yawn. Even the laces made a multicolor zigzag pattern. It was hard to believe they were Cons, but there it was on each of the tongues: the trademark star.

  “Bring them inside!” Merry roared from the hall. Doomed, I did. “They’re huge—those things would probably even have fit Pauly’s mom! Well, go ahead, Ed. Put ‘em on!” I swallowed and slipped the hideous things over my socks. To my dismay, they fit. “Why don’t you take a stroll around the block?” Merry said. “Break ‘em in.”

  I was Frankenstein tromping down the street. The neighborhood’s extravagant houses were like layer cakes behind the bullet-proof glass of a bakery that the day before would have refused to buzz me in. The shoes were awful. With each step, a sickly anaesthesia seeped into toes, arches, heels, heart. The shells themselves were light, but dragged on my spirit like lead, the feeling worse than when feet fall asleep. It was like lugging around a couple of dead, wet cats.

  As I returned to my new trap, a pall of gray descended and rain began pelting me. The shower seemed to bode well, reminding me of the distant comfort of urban shadow, and perked me up a little when I went back inside. From somewhere on the ground floor came a deafening whine like the howls emerging out of the underground of a rat’s faraway yesterday: the hydraulics of the T careening around subterranean curves, the moan of air-conditioning exhaust from the sidewalk vent of a South Station skyscraper, the echoing hollers of a Dig City rally. Dwellers of the street always detected such speech right under their feet, and I was drawn to the source of the comforting cacophony. But how had these urban strains harkened their way here? Overcome by a combination of infantile impulses—exhilaration, disorientation, even a little dependency—voice cracking, I called, “Mom?”

  “In here, honey!” she shouted cheerfully over the hypnotic dissonance. I walked into the living room, face flushed with anticipation and a zeal to please. Merry had nosed herself and the vacuum cleaner into the far corner of a field of immaculate white. Approaching, I thought I’d ask if I could help. Merry raised her eyes to me, her own countenance flooded with affection that would seem sufficient to bring me to my knees. Bent over to get beneath a table, the full furlough of her chest beckoned pendularly. In my mind, I did not resist. Merry lowered her gaze and her complexion turned ashen. O gawd! had she caught me looking at her tits? Overwhelmed by feelings at once arousing and unpleasant, those of both infant and man, I turned away. That’s when I saw the trail in my wake. Huge treads had tracked mud all over Merry’s clean carpets. With the irrational inkling that it might undo the damage, I made haste to retrace my steps, resulting in a calamitous run-in with an end table. One of my two left feet glanced off a delicate wooden leg, triggering a chain-reaction of crystal figurines and porcelain notions, after which the hip pocket of my dungarees hooked the corner of the sideboard, setting off another avalanche. By the time the fiasco was finished, my reeling heels had upset the populations of practically all the living room’s surfaces and the white carpet was covered with the black schematic of a bizarre tango.

  Merry did not get angry. She would not indulge me with the kind of hostility I was used to as a rat. Instead, she cooed from the kitchen, “How about a nice mug of hot cocoa? Mommy makes the best hot cocoa.” Flushed, sulking, defeated by toppling furniture and traitorous trinkets, I sullenly sipped at the bitter, scorching liquid, knees and hips mottled black-and-blue beneath the denim of new jeans.

  Cursing clumsy feet and convulsing hip, which together threatened to imperil the tenuous filial bond, I spent the rest of the day where I could not hurt anybody or anything: in the study, on the recliner, with my shoes up where I could see them. Bound volumes with suspiciously uniform spines all shelved at attention, the Corrente family editions, when quarried for their contents, answered my roll call with martial decorum, one by one barking crack! Desperate for consolation, I turned to Melville and the nostalgia of those terrestrial passages set around my erstwhile home state, the sibling tenderness of Ishmael’s surprise at finding himself in bed with Queequeg, and a seafarer’s empathy for the sense of inescapable alienation.

  Merry interrupted “The Counterpane.” “I made you a sub for lunch, honey. Mommy’s got some special shopping to do, and when Daddy and I get home we’ll have a special treat.”

  “Have you read any of these?”

  “Nah, Daddy bought ’em by the yard. Pauly plays with his computer and I use this room to work out, but a mayor’s supposed to have books.” She shrugged. “By the way, what’s ‘Moby’ mean?”

  “I’m not sure. Large, I think. Or maybe immortal.”

  “Wow. What’s it about?”

  “A really big fish.”

  “Too bad.”

  I looked forward to Pauly getting home that first night, if only for remission of how mortified I felt at being left alone with Merry. Maybe he could help salvage this day for me. Perhaps I still stood a chance to make a reasonably healthy start in my new life. Bored by “Cetology,” I fingered Pauly’s term awake, closed the lid on the commode, and took a seat in front of the screen. By the books, I could see he wasn�
�t kidding about the fortune, but the rest had been braggadocio. It was written all over Pauly’s emails: I was a son of a plumber. In 1643, Italian mathematician and physicist Evangelista Torricelli had discovered the basic principle behind water pressure systems. Some four centuries later, Pauly Corrente, crouched inside a cabinet with pants at half-mast, ass smiling vertically into the kitchen, bumped his head on a P trap and got a bright idea. Pauly found a couple of computer geeks to program the code and, early on in the Age of Deregulation, when so many bankrupt cities sold off control of their utilities, he bought up the water works and began making billions as a plumbing racketeer. The simpleton genius at the heart of his plan: If a city didn’t pay, he could make it so waste never went away. We’re sorry … try your flush again later. After reading all about it, I did not picture myself as a legacy of sepsis, but if nothing else I got the idea that, with a little imagination, any loser could do better than remain a sideshow act all his life.

  I ate Merry’s hoagie and went wearily up to my too-bright room. Hallucinations of a phantom hand broke up my fitful nap, and I was roused from shallow sleep to the waking nightmare by that abominable sound: “Son?”

  Half-awake, disoriented, I stumbled to the door. “Surprise!” The Correntes stood at the bottom of the stairs, Pauly burdened with bundles, Merry holding a flaming cake. Just my luck: I had found my parents on the eve of my birthday. After putting out the fire, I uneasily ate an obligatory piece of saccharine sponge. Surveying my feet approvingly, Pauly said, “Nice shoes.”

  I already felt weak, and yet it was time to unwrap the gifts: a skateboard the size of Manhattan, huge snowshoes or two oversized tennis rackets, and a whole host of spherical missiles in a variety of sizes and shapes, from base and basket all the way to foot. Merry had already begun stashing this stuff in the hall closet when Pauly held out a small box. It looked harmless, hardly larger than his hand, and he seemed so eager to foist it on me that I plumbed a last reserve of fortitude. While the ribbon slithered to the floor, Merry and Pauly, each duly coiled, prepared to pounce. The lid popped off of its own accord. On a little bed of cotton wadding lay something altogether too familiar that, in the context of a gift, appeared before me as a ritualistic object of dread. “Mother helped pick it out,” Pauly said.

  I must have blanched when I lifted it like a dead thing with trembling fingers. “A wallet.” I parted the pockmarked cowhide. Folded inside was a crisp, parchment-proof ten-thousand-dollar bill. The ink was as green and bright as an emerald. Merry squealed with delight.

  “Here’s another little item to put in it.” Pauly palmed something from his coat pocket. “Close your eyes and put out your hand.”

  I immediately knew what it was by the touch. “I haven’t taken a test,” I protested.

  “Sure, but I know some nice guys down at motor vehicles. I take care of their parking tickets; they take care of the little incidentals.”

  “But I don’t even know how.”

  “Aw, it’s easy, honey,” Merry said. “I taught myself in a day.”

  “Best way to learn,” Pauly chimed in. “Besides, you won’t have to worry about getting pulled over in my town.”

  The license contained rough estimates of my height and weight, erroneous data about hair and eye color, and the DOB allowed me for the first time to calculate exact age. “I’m seventeen?”

  “Sixteen, really,” Pauly said, “but we added a year so you can go it alone.”

  The pict had been lifted from the news story on the Net. The text read “Edward P. Corrente,” doubly upsetting, for the formal first name and the surly sur-. “Wait—what’s the ‘P’ for?”

  “We thought you might like it…” Merry began.

  “And if you want, you can even start to go by it,” Pauly added. “A lot of great men have gone by middle names, you know,” he pontificated, as if someone should have been taking dictation, “F. Scott Fitzgerald, O. Henry…”

  “It wasn’t there in the first place,” Merry went on, “but we figured we would put it in since we had to get you a birth certificate.”

  “Because of the flood,” Pauly said.

  “Sure,” Merry corroborated, “flash flood.”

  “Of course, we can’t simply call you Pauly, that’s already taken. And plain Paul would be confusing, you being the younger and everything.”

  An uncertain admixture of horror, repulsion, and scorn welled up in me. There wasn’t any definite target for the volatile combination—after all, the folks just thought they were being nice. Merry drove home the poisonous spike: “Pauly Junior, though—that has a nice ring.”

  I was led outside in a demented daze. In the driveway, there was a brand new SUV with a big bow on top. Pauly jangled the keys in front of me. It took a mammoth effort of will to get my lips to part. My slightest movement was stifled, as if the world had been submerged in honey, and the words came out like bubbles. “I can’t tell you how strongly I feel. I think I have to lie down for a while.”

  Merry pouted. “Aw, aren’t you hungry, PJ? Daddy and I were going to take you out to dinner.”

  “I’ll get something from the kitchen,” I lied. As a matter of fact, with my first taste of the cake, drenched with signification, my inexorable appetite had been misplaced. “And would you mind calling me Ed—”

  “No problem, Ed,” Pauly interrupted.

  “—dee. Please, Ed-dee. Just call me Eddie.”

  I wobbled back upstairs on unsteady legs. I was sixteen, same as my shoe. I hoped that they—age and size—would not continue to increase in tandem. Before shutting the door to my room, I heard Merry say, “Did you see how surprised, Daddy?”

  Pauly replied, “Just like your mother, Mother.”

  Pickpocket is picked off the street and plopped smack in the cleave of comfort’s bosom, goes from nesting in newspapers to getting engulfed by a gaggle of goose down, from barely paying the rent to having a bomb of an allowance, from wearing out cheap cloth sneaks to crushing concrete in calfskin slam-dunkers. I should have been happy, right? On the contrary, something about meeting my parents germinated a bleak delinquency that summer caused to bloom into fullfledged dementia. It festered while I lay awake at night, my imagination returning to the soporific sounds of train brakes, jet engines, and truck axles rattling over fretted Kendall roads. I longed for the reassuring trickle of leaky pipes, the uplifting blast of a broken window’s cold draft, the comfort of a newspaper cot.

  A kid is supposed to take a decade and a half to enjoy the laid-back buffet, a smörgåsbord of dolls and toy trucks, of going out for teams, trying on different styles, and getting rejected for dates, but I, after an abortive infancy, had been required to rush straight into adulthood. After all those years of callused self-sufficiency, I found myself cracking the can and getting to the contents of the teen inside. He had been there all along, hibernating like a locust. As a juvenile criminal, I had been the goody-two-shoes, a sweet boy, obedient and idealistic. Now, as a town-and-country kid, I felt as if incarcerated, high-top shoes laced over my ankles like leg irons, a literal chain, the wallet’s bane, around my waist.

  As for the SUV, I refused to pilot that metal death monstrosity. It sat in the driveway, the bow still on the hood. And so, as I walked everywhere, I had to wear the horrible high-tops. When I had requested Cons, the options in my imagination had been limited to flimsy, synthetic, and monochromatic. How I pined for those simple, spent, modern-day moccasins I had ransomed at Quincy Market. Instead I had to go barefoot or sport that pair of garish blemishes. They were the footwear of abomination, the badge of my repatriation from road rat to spoiled brat, and my awkwardness in them never abated.

  All the balls I had been given for my birthday—which my delicately-trained hands were way too clumsy to throw, much less catch—lay around the ground floor like mines, ready to upset my imbalance in the vicinity of fragile furnishings. A submerged fleet of lazy Susans kept containers in a state of perpetual rotation, leaving me clumsily capsizing the litt
le vessels, sending contents careening. Entropy reigned, and wherever I walked I was its unwitting envoy, always knocking things over, setting unexpected pinwheels spinning, tripping booby traps. On city streets, I had never had any difficulty avoiding swerving bikes or speeding motorists. Here in utopia, however, the meagerest odds and ends were always bobbing and weaving at unfamiliar tempos. Every atom vibrated to a confounding rhythm.

  In bed each night, I tossed and turned in the insufferable fluff for hours of sleepless rumination, pining for the cozy reassurance of brick and steel encroaching from all sides and above, the simple satisfactions of a good day’s work on the streets of the Beast, the joys of a smooth pick and a clean snatch. I had given it all up, and for what? The mayor’s mansion had its amenities, but it was no place like home. After sunset in Ho-Ho-Kus, senses were inundated by the residue of smug suburban serenity: warm-lighted windows one by one yielding to TV’s blue-hued idylls, the baleful barking of neighborhood dogs who had slept all day and eaten kingly suppers, and, seasoning everything, a viridian proliferation of vegetation, sickeningly saturated with smelly chlorophyll, respiring the foul flavor of photosynthesis into the crypt-like cool of evening. At dawn, the din of crickets gave way to mornings fraught with blinding sunlight and the cycle started all over again. Who could stand it? Day in and out, the dreadful grind of what year-round slackers cynically call “summer vacation” droned on in dreary indistinction.

  Since the moment I had heard of my parents’ earnest to resume guardianship, I had gradually discovered the crux of what had always been my simple wish: I wanted a map to a couple of untidy stones I could spruce up, shed token tears over, and then be finished with; to have a clue as to whether I was Catholic, Jewish, Protestant, Muslim, or other, descendant of Curwen, Irving, or Prynn. I wanted to imagine life with a last name. I would have privately preserved the patronymic and publicly remained Fast Eddie so as not to malign the echo of my ancestry. To have known merely that I had a surname, were it Mann or Munster: Certainly such meager irrigation would have more than satisfied the thirst at the source of my being, but instead I had been drowned in a deluge of unwanted knowledge. It was all too much, what I had ended up inheriting. A naïve presumption which had sent me to seek out simple genealogy had instead landed me an indenture of domesticity. So single-mindedly had I pursued the abstraction of discovering my heritage that I had never allowed for the possibility of corporeal custody. I asked for it. I wished that instead I had just turned myself in on the stoop at Faneuil Hall or been nabbed by that sneaker freak Mano. I knew better than ever the accuracy of that aphorism about what you wish for, and what you get when the gods want to punish you.