Inner Tube: A Novel

by Hob Broun

  At eleven that night I boarded a Trailways Night Owl Express for Las Vegas. Crescent moon over the Shadow Mountains, high school lovers across the aisle. I smoked until my throat felt torn, surprised to discover so many regrets. At sunrise a wide woman with greasy blonde hair stepped into the toilet with a flight bag and came out dressed as a cowgirl.

  Breakfast at the top of the Strip: silver dollar pancakes, keno numbers dropping out of the loudspeaker. The man on the seat next to me held a vibrating device to his throat in order to speak.

  “Lost my wife,” he said, sounding like a Martian. “Wouldn’t mind ’cept she’s got the car keys.”

  That seemed like my cue to get started. Nothing in the way, so run. I took my divorce money to the cage, came away bulging with chips, found an empty blackjack table where I could play multiple hands. Lorraine, the dealer, kept pulling four-and five-card miracles and I was down six hundred before I could finish my first gratis cocktail. Nice.

  I went up a brass escalator, into something called the Red Rooster Room, where dull-eyed union musicians played sleeve-garter jazz. I had some martinis and thought how grim industrialized pleasure could be. Right on schedule. I was lighting the filter ends of cigarettes and talking to myself, about to cross over into perilous nobody-seems-to-care territory. Blessed instinct led me back to the pack. I wobbled south past the Stardust and the Flamingo, where Bugsy Siegel started it all, from crap table to crap table, throwing away ten dollar chips on the field numbers, into and out of Romanesque bathrooms to confirm my hunted look in mirrors. Bells and bars and plums. I finally went broke, quarter by quarter, in a shiny corridor of slot machines, bellowing my relief until ejected by a black security guard.

  Next thing, I was crouching by a fountain lit with blue lamps. Above me on fluted columns rose a huge sign announcing the week’s headliners: SHIRLEY BASSEY and JACKIE GAYLE. I crouched and shivered and rubbed my red eyes. A car pulled up on its way to the street and the driver rolled his window down.

  “It ain’t deep enough to drown in.”

  I peered at his ruffled shirt, velvet bowtie hanging from the near half of its open collar like a festive little animal. I thought about our wedding chapel, Violet’s and mine.

  “Scene of the crime,” I muttered.

  “Take it to the pit boss, they’ll usually come up with your bus fare home.” He looked away from me to study his teeth in the side mirror, big wide teeth. “Okay, so get in, go ahead. I feel righteous tonight and you look harmless enough. Jesus, do you look harmless.”

  The name was Vic. He worked the lounge backed by a trio. Ballads and belt, special material written specially for him. He showed no curiosity about me, probably figuring he knew my story without having to listen to it. He drove carelessly, ignoring lights, to a mini-mall east of downtown and sent me to pick up his order from Joey’s Jade Pagoda. Vic was in a hurry, still five sets to do.

  “Drop you and the chow off with Addy, then I got to get in the wind.”

  Addy?

  She was Vic’s “baby” sister: pallid skin, heavy glasses, beer opener nose, and a quilted satin jacket that matched the spread on the enormous circular bed. She didn’t want to shake hands with me for fear I might give her something.

  “Bad kidneys, weak heart,” Vic whispered as I began to unpack egg drop soup, steamed noodles, sweet-and-sour chicken wings.

  Addy rolled her eyes and clucked impatiently for her dinner. I couldn’t tell if the fumes made me ravenous or sick.

  “Really, no fucking around,” Vic said on his way out. “She keeps a gun under the pillow, and believe me, she’ll use it.”

  It was past noon when I woke up on the floor near Addy’s bed, face down in orange shag carpeting that smelled like baby powder. I heard television voices’ debating the international debt crisis, then Addy saying her toenails needed trimming.

  I laid low with the Farbers for almost a month. It was one of those situations that seem to create themselves, a natural balancing out. Addy nourished herself with complaints and requests, I lost thought in the tasks, swam lap after lap in the pool, and Vic was free to disappear for days at a time.

  I took Addy’s temperature each morning, pretending it was other than normal. I squeezed grapefruit, administered cool cloths and tablets, massaged her spasmed muscles, read aloud to her from gothic novels. Addy liked to pout and sulk so I would coax her out of it.

  “This just isn’t worth it,” she’d say, twisting into the pillows. “I shouldn’t wake up anymore.”

  And why was I expending my compromised resources trying to persuade this willful, bone-white crank to take a walk in the sun? I suppose because that was the part in which I’d happened to be cast. Everything bright like the yellow grapefruit and the red marbleized countertops I sponged before and after each meal.

  Vic came by to drop off grocery money. He looked fit and refreshed, tighter around the eyes. We stood on the little concrete condo balcony and watched a fat boy pour chemicals into the pool. It was dusk, warm and wistful.

  “So how’re you and Addy getting on?…Super, super.” He ran his hands along the railing as if smoothing something out. “I guess you can see how much she needs someone. She can be hard to follow sometimes, but there’s so damn much there.”

  The vehemence took me by surprise. He couldn’t get out of there fast enough. But he was back at 3 a.m. with an Australian showgirl and a gram of coke. The freshness was gone from his face, his eyes droopy again. The girl was going to spend the weekend, he said. An old friend. She looked at me vaguely and cupped the crotch of her motorcycle pants.

  On Saturday Addy threw a tantrum, sobbing and calling us all parasites, until a doctor arrived to give her a shot. Vic paid him in cash. A Panamanian knocked out a French Canadian in a televised welterweight bout. Addy slept. Vic and the girl emerged from the shower. Out on the balcony, they grilled salmon steaks and argued. Vic popped out to the liquor store. The girl came over to my sofa. She talked about convent school in Canberra while she masturbated me. Addy slept. Vic opened the Medoc and sang “Falling In Love With Love.” I took four aspirin before curling up on the sofa.

  Very early Sunday, the girl jostled me awake.

  “This scene is too bloody sick,” she said. “I think we should both get out of here.”

  There were warming sunspots on the backs of our heads as we headed west in her Trans Am. It was good to be moving again, even back the way I’d come. I started to talk some talk, feeling shrewd.

  “Sister!” The girl clicked her tongue. “I can’t believe you fell for that schtick. They’ve been married seventeen years.”

  29

  ONCE, WATCHING GULLS WHEEL over the drilling rigs off Long Beach, I was told by a friend zealously colorless save for the ownership of an armadillo-skin guitar from Paraguay, a hawker of Spartacist magazines frequently shoved, occasionally decked, outside factory gates, that “All information is propaganda.” As absorptive as any generalization, probably more useful than most. I have been put upon and overworked; my theoretics, in turn, have been overindulged, my brain peptides allowed to swash and roil, perhaps to overflow. My desk is littered with papers where blanks are to be filled and boxes checked while I Wearily ponder such imponderables as: Connection between listening groups organized around radios in the street by market research pioneer J. Goebbels and coin-op TVs now ubiquitous in airports and bus depots across U.S.? I evoke my friends here now, the apparitional strumming of some coal miner’s anthem on his armadillo guitar, and his warm bath of certainties. I hear him say: “Communications technology is a byproduct of empire, developing out of military/industrial operation. As simple as the acronyms. OSS. RCA. NASA. COMSAT.”

  Today, as I said, has been excessive, an overlapping of the tiresome and the inflammatory, a granular, unedited movie of unstable colors beginning with a two-car head-on barbecue half a mile from the facility entrance. Breakfast cereal arrived in my duodenum like bark chips. A lobby stooge who didn’t look old enough to vote compelled me
to pass through the metal detector. I received in the mail an academic paper titled “The Protestant Supernatural: I Dream of Jeannie and My Favorite Martian,” and by phone a reprimand from a drone, who wouldn’t give his name, for failing to undergo the biannually required medical exam.

  And so to work, a mild trepidation, admittedly with some precedent, that I was going to pick up interference—portents not only unnecessary but undesirable—dropping over me like a mist net. Two of my work orders had been urgently annotated with red felt marker. I slipped these to the bottom of the stack and spent more time than I had to on an abstract of the early sixties quiz scandals. I reviewed, on microfilm, the news play (son of prominent literary historian weeps in disgrace), and scanned a few of the culprit programs, Dotto, Twenty-One, etc. (“Welcome our returning champion and art lover, Gunnery Mate Bill Gwynn!”). How quaint all the shock and indignation now seemed, these elementary manipulations drawing a hot bewilderment like that of children discovering their parents in bed. The day’s first imponderable: Innocence lost or skepticism earned? Had the Apollo moonwalk actually been faked in a studio?

  Chewing antacid mints, I moved on to a little project slugged SENSITIVE by the always chary Assignment staff. Evidently, a midwest interactive cable system—with, I assumed, a few pols in the background—wanted to move in the direction of the viewer-response political referendum. Your living room a voting booth! Should the administration continue its support for the Israeli occupation of Crete? Press now. Data enter. Suffrage by remote control seemed logical enough; all the wiring was in place. My task was to search out and analyze extant paradigm models, that is to say, see if anything similar had ever shown up on a TV show. A complex and detailed indexing system is in force here, but I didn’t know if it was up to this feckless job. Shit or Shinola? Was there a difference? I put it off on a pliable Third Tier researcher and went to see Ellen with mixed, vagrant feelings.

  I found her watching Tommy Sands sing “Teenage Crush” on Kraft Theatre.

  “My dreamboat.”

  “Is this work?” I asked.

  “What the fuck isn’t?” she said balefully.

  Then, as if her mouth had been formed around speech long before I came in, as if the speech had been long thought out, if not definitively composed, she began to describe a week of compulsive pickups, of kneeling on car seats, lost clothing, fear in public parks. Her voice was low, smooth, cold. She spoke with a balance of obfuscation and detail that made my stomach clench and my cock stiffen, dropped finally away into glaring silence. I canted my eyes away, occupied my hands with a cigarette, thinking: She moves far outside your gravity, in a path too clean and swift for you. Don’t think it. Don’t even think it.

  Ellen resumed her speech. “And all for the stupidest reason. Because my father married again. His fourth.” Pause. “A little thing from Dothan, Alabama. A platform diver.” Long pause. “Shit, it’s not that. Not that unsavory, secret Daddy love they paint on women with a stencil. I don’t care who he fucks. But the gratitude, the catering—to me, I mean. God, all that sugar water. The reminders are enough to choke me.”

  “Reminders?”

  “That he doesn’t have the slightest idea who I am.”

  “So you have to go out and show him.”

  “No.” She glared emphatically. “I have to deaden myself, pursue sensation until I reach insensibility. It isn’t the volcano erupting. It’s the lava after it’s gone cold.”

  “I like a good aphorism.”

  Delvino just inside the door, shiny as a wax-sprayed supermarket apple. Predatory eyes. The roving reporter. He affected leather-trimmed suspenders and his normally invasive geniality inappropriate for any situation.

  “Can I help you?” Ellen said without much noticing him.

  “Probably to see me,” I mumbled, starting out.

  But Delvino came further in. “Good seeing both of you together. Chemistry is so very important. We’ve always felt that.”

  “Yeah. We were just volleying a few ideas back and forth.”

  “Exactly. This is a cooperative.”

  Ellen had measured him out by now and sat, short hands in wide lap, like a houseguest in an uncomfortable chair. Nowhere the small rote defiance I might have expected.

  “I don’t think you and I have been to the same parties,” she said.

  Delvino did not move or smile, a mandarin. “I wouldn’t guess you care for parties.”

  The glass beads at her wrist clicked like a tapped phone line. “Birthday parties, political parties. Do you suppose it’s because I’m too easily embarrassed? I like to walk downtown and pretend I’m from a foreign country.”

  Delvino nodded, still not smiling. But he moved now, across and around the Panelyte rectangle, face molded in aimlessness. He riffled papers, weighed things and turned them, traced surfaces; not in purposive inspection, it seemed, but with the restful, not restive curiosity of someone waiting for an appointment.

  “No grid overlays?” he said at last.

  “I can do them in my head,” Ellen whispered.

  “I’m the man for taking care of glitches. Anything else I should know about?”

  I imagined Delvino taking an extension course in Interrogation taught by an ex-Miami cop, more recently Tenneco chief of security in Guayaquil, Ecuador. Delvino’s contempt for the other students is so complete, so automatic, that he is unaware of it. He takes voluminous notes, does outside reading, gets an A.

  “You’re sure?” he was saying. “Resentments you might have been saving up?”

  “I don’t save them,” Ellen said. “I spend them right away.”

  Delvino’s laughter was something that came all in one burst. He cocked an appreciative index finger at her.

  “Can we keep each other up to date? Can we do that?” He swung round in the doorway, twinkling. “Have a good weekend, you two.”

  Ellen came up out of the chair and shoved me back. “You were a big help.”

  “What, I think he really likes you.”

  “Don’t be an asshole.”

  Hoisting a jangly black shoulder bag, she curved her mouth in exasperation. “Some watchdog you are.”

  “That’s rich. Since when am I in any position to…Where you going?”

  “Home. Where the heart is.”

  “But the buses don’t run till…”

  “So I’ll call a taxi,” her voice fading down the hall. “I can afford it.”

  Today’s dialogue all ominous and overcareful. And where was the heart? More propaganda. Rumbling, as of a distant waterfall. Was this work? I was supposed to lead myself to conclusions. All right: Ellen’s father was craven. Her chair was still warm. And I had placed myself at such a remove it had made her angry. My theoretics again, my pulled punches. But after all, where really was the heart?

  Back inside my own rectangle, which I should never have left, I found materials relevant to the SENSITIVE project. Impressive speed on the part of my 3T man. I looked over the précis codes and inserted the first tape.

  “There is nothing wrong with your television set. We are controlling transmission. For the next hour we will control everything you see and hear and think. You are watching a drama that reaches from the inner mind to…The Outer Limits!”

  This seemed antithetical to what those midwest telecrats were hoping to sell and I went no further. Why not confabulate a report? All propaganda is information. Would anyone care? Would anyone notice the intrusion of manifesto?

  “From this image of a distrustful electorate it is possible to proceed almost syllogistically to a translation of the core values individuality, mobility, diversity as solipsism, instability, product differentiation.”

  Would anyone, and certainly I include myself, be able to look at a straight line and see the arc of an infinite circle?

  So I sit here in the dwindling afternoon watching a Japanese cartoon about a cow that plays the banjo. I feel indistinct and confused. Distinctions blur and sure dimensions are made unrecogni
zably soft. I have an aphorism for Delvino: One must ignore the obvious and look for the pertinent. Quite tidy and wise. But what are its applications, if any? The cow sings “Jimmy Crack Corn” with a circular mouth that expands and contracts. I think of a poisonous anemone. Not pertinent, not interesting, but habitual. Jumpcuts, static—memories are made of this. I cannot visualize what is invisible above me, the angle of sun at this hour and how it might intersect with an expanse of tinted glass. But I can see words hanging bannerlike in the recirculated air: subtext cipher indoctrinate. Not penetrating, not even palliative. An empty, reflexive habit of coloring /covering over, then discovering a secret underneath. I wish Ellen could share some of her insensibility. I wish, I wish.

  Fountains of plastic foliage, a fermenting sugar smell from crushed candy and spilled pop. The lounge is quiet. I close my eyes and concentrate on the texture of the upholstery.

  Foley skids in, hangs furtively by the vending machines like he’s planning to bust them open, then sits next to me and talks with a copy of Architectural Digest in front of his face. He says he’s being watched. Light beams aimed at his apartment window, probably a transmitter somewhere in his car.

  “Come on, why would they bother you? You’ve got seniority.”

  “Exactly it.”

  He mentions stress tests, voice printing. His hand digs at my shoulder.

  “You may be next,” he says. “I just wanted you to have the information.”

  I watch him hurry away. I think how good it will be to get out of here and into the barren landscapes, traces of lava long gone cold.

  30

  THE DODGERS WERE FILLING the ballpark in spite of first-stage smog alerts. A Russian defector and paladin of the cello washed up on Seal Beach. Daily Variety reported that a certain TVIP had decided on a career change after waking in the middle of the night with bleeding palms. I had been back from Las Vegas six weeks, moving from couch to couch, wearing out the patience of friends, most of whom were Violet’s to begin with. Time was heavy. I spent a good deal of it trodding hillside neighborhoods, eating fruit out of the yards. Even pampered housedogs could sense my inner funk, growling and showing their teeth as I passed.