“Gosh,” the plump girl said, glancing once again towards the kitchen.
“Goddammit,” a croaky southern drawl yelped from behind the partition. A loud metallic bang followed.
The back door being slammed open.
Boone took off, leaving Shandi standing at the order window. As he rounded the corner of the building, he saw a skinny, stringy haired guy in a white T-shirt and khakis sprinting across the back parking lot, heading for a car wash and the field beyond.
Aw man, I don’t wanna chase this fuckstick, Boone thought.
Resigned, Boone started running. He had gone about three steps when Shandi blew past him, barefoot, holding her high heels in one hand and going like a bat out of hell.
Boone paused, watching her run. Like everything associated with Shandi, it was quite a sight. Sucking in a deep, gasping breath, he took off in her wake.
The skinny guy glanced back over his shoulder. Upon sight of Shandi speeding towards him, he let out a girlish squeal of terror, took a hard right, then a left through one of the car wash bays. Shandi tracked him like a guided missile, her bare feet slapping on the wet pavement.
Boone lagged way behind, his labored lungs getting the best of him. Wheezing terribly, he stopped to lean against the wall of the car wash. Up ahead, he saw Shandi make a diving tackle, taking Skinny down in a cloud of dust. Spurred on by the sight, Boone trundled off as fast as he could go.
Through the dust, Boone could see Skinny struggling with Shandi. Skidding to a halt, the big man slammed a scabby fist into Skinny’s nose, trying not to put too much of his substantial weight into the punch.
Shrieking, Skinny flopped back in the dirt, hands clasped to his face.
Boone collapsed onto his ass, then went flat on his back, whistling with every pained breath. Shandi knelt beside him, worried. “Boone! You okay?”
He grinned up at her, nodding, although the tears streaming from his eyes told a different story.
“Are you havin’ a heart attack or something?” Shandi asked. “Should I call an ambulance?”
Boone shook his head. “Shit in my chest,” he gasped. “No big deal, just… can’t breath so good.” He felt goosebumps rise on his arms as Shandi laid her hand on his chest. Why oh why can’t this chick be a chick, he grumbled to himself.
“My nosebone,” the skinny guy said, sitting up. His stringy hair fell in his face and he prodded gingerly at his bleeding nose.
With a long, squealing effort, Boone heaved himself upright. “You Radio Ketchum?”
“Yeah… You didn’t have to hit me.”
“Sure I did,” Boone said. He tried not to watch too closely as Shandi stood up, dusting herself off and straightening that tight skirt.
“You got any dreams, Radio?” Boone asked.
Radio squinted past tendrils of greasy hair, confused. “I guess like anybody. Sometimes I fall off shit. Sometimes there’s fuckin’.” He shot a mortified look at Shandi. “Sorry about my language, lady. I ain’t got no decency.”
She waved it off and finished adjusting herself.
“I’m not talking about dreams like when you’re asleep,” Boone said. “I mean, like, hopes and dreams.”
Radio stared at the rather impressive woman who towered over him. “Oh. Uh, I guess I wouldn’t mind gettin’ me a little RV someday, toolin’ around in it.”
“Well,” Boone said, putting some effort into getting on his feet. “You’ll never see that dream come true if you keep foolin’ around with your neighbor’s underage daughter.” He offered a hand to Radio, who took it.
As Boone pulled him to his feet, Radio said “Jimmy Page had himself a girlfriend like that. Younger’n Stacy, too.”
“Jimmy Page did indeed have a painfully young girlfriend at one point,” Boone agreed. “But one of many differences here is that you, Radio, are no guitar god.”
Radio sniffed and wiped blood from his upper lip. There was no way to argue with that.
• • •
Radio rode quietly in the backseat of Boone’s car, gawking at Shandi’s lush head of hair.
Boone was fairly well fed up with himself. There was no way he could’ve caught Radio on his own, and not only that but Shandi had gone above and beyond even after he’d insulted her with that secret identity comment. Plus she just smelled fucking great.
“That went a lot smoother than I was figuring,” he said.
“Yeah,” Shandi said. “I didn’t even tear my dress.”
Boone was grateful to hear the playful tone return to her voice. “I gotta say, that was a hell of a tackle.”
“I used to play a little football in high school,” she said, smiling.
Boone looked at her, agape.
“I confuse the fuck out of you, don’t I?” Shandi asked.
“Hell yes you do.”
Shandi let out a pleasingly girlish giggle. “Look, Boone — I’ve had more than one guy hit on me without knowing that I come with a secret toy surprise. If anything, it’s flattering. Means my ruse is effective.”
Boone gave her the quick once-over. “No kidding.”
“I’m just sayin‘ — don’t sit around sweating your masculinity for my sake. You might have more posters of Bruce Lee with his shirt off than I even knew existed, but it’s pretty obvious you’re not gay.”
“Really?”
“Yeah,” Shandi said. “You’re not settin’ off the slightest tingle of my Spidey-sense. You, my friend, dig the chicks.”
“Chicks are awesome,” Boone said, relieved.
Radio, who had been listening to all this with some degree of confusion, finally spoke up. “Excuse me, lady, but are you — I guess there’s no polite way to ask so I’ll just do it: am I to unnerstand you’re a man?”
She turned to look at Radio, lifting one of those incredible eyebrows. “What do you think?”
“I’m just gonna say right now that today’s been a rough one,” Radio said, shaking his head.
Smiling, Shandi turned back to Boone. “So we can relax, then?”
Boone nodded. “I feel very relaxed.”
“Good,” she said. “Then we can get around to something else — like how you wound up with that hole in your tooth.”
Boone smiled wide, showing off the tiny hole. “That, young lady, is a story for another time.”
Wanna know how Boone got that hole in his tooth? Read Squirrel Eyes, a novel by Scott S. Phillips! You can sample the first two chapters below.
Squirrel Eyes is the story of Alvin Bandy, lifelong movie junkie and would-be filmmaker, who finds himself alone in Hollywood after his girlfriend Alison sends him packing in favor of another man. With his career — if you can call it that, when it consists of one incredibly bad movie he wrote — on the rocks, Alvin hatches a drunken plan to course-correct his screwed-up life: he travels to his hometown of Albuquerque, New Mexico to seek out his first girlfriend, Kelli, and do what he never did before: have sex with her. Kelli, however, won't be had so easily, and lays down a challenge to Alvin that could either be his undoing or his salvation...
Funny, dark, raunchy and sentimental, Squirrel Eyes is a novel about the strength of dreams, the depths of lust, the power of guilt and above all, the glory of cinema and the hold it has on us all.
"If you somehow cloned the perfect science bastard love-child of Cameron Crowe, J.D. Salinger and The Kinks, it couldn't build a better story of underdog charm than Squirrel Eyes. Scott S. Phillips creates fascinating and endearing characters, then drops them in the hot zone of their own mangled lives, with nothing but their wits and pop culture to protect themselves."
— Axel Howerton, editor, Dark Moon Digest, author of Hot Sinatra
SQUIRREL EYES
Chapters 1 and 2
I was a terrible drinker. When I say this, I don't mean I was an alcoholic or that I drank a lot, particularly; I mean that I just wasn't any good at it. My skinny frame condemned me to a life as a lightweight, and that was making me rather angry.
&nb
sp; I took another swig of alcoholic lemonade. Girl-drink though it was, clutching the bottle of Wally's Hard Squeeze made me feel kind of manly in my own pathetic way. It was my second one, and I was already lit.
Contributing to my fury was an outstandingly overwrought episode of The E! True Hollywood Story about some washed-up actor on the verge of a comeback. As the show (filled with scandalous gossip concerning the guy's drug, alcohol and prostitute binges and his near-death experience after a particularly rousing weekend) wound down, the actor grinned like a shark and trundled out the old saw about having "no regrets," and how, if forced to live his life over again, he "wouldn't change a thing." It had all been a great learning experience. Movies, he said, were his life.
What a load of crap. I wanted to tear his intestines out and beat him senseless with the ropy ends.
I've had my heart broken — I mean really broken, that how-can-I-go-on, slit-wrists-are-the-only-remedy broken — twice in my life. The second time was because of a girl.
Movies got to me first.
Technically, though, I didn't catch on to what they had done to me until after the girl had done it, too.
Regrets? I had a few. Like getting out of bed in the morning. If I had to do it all over again, would I change things? Starting early and often. For instance, if I could relive the third grade, I might raise my hand and ask to go to the boys' room rather than piss my pants and have to deal with the other kids' vicious teasing. Fifth grade? Maybe I'd stand up to Mike Shipton — even if it meant an ass-kicking — rather than act like a damn pussy and let myself be picked on mercilessly for the rest of the year.
The Big One, though?
I would've steered Alison towards a different job. Maybe I wouldn't have lost her to Franzke or whatever the fuck the bastard's name was.
No regrets, my ass.
I am the Golem built from the mud of Hollywood. My brain processes life at 24 frames per second; my heart pumps sticky concession-stand muck through veins of curled celluloid. And maybe like the Golem of legend, I too am a soulless creature, animated only by the thousands of hours of pop-culture imagery funneled into my body over the course of a lifetime.
But at least the Golem served a purpose.
Normally, I'm a pretty gregarious drunk, on those rare occasions when I do drink — all goofy grins and back-slapping and professions of undying love — but my usual pleasantly soused persona had been beaten into submission by events of the last year, turning me into a sort of William Holden with a considerably smaller reserve of testosterone. Sour and surly — and anti-social to the point of becoming agoraphobic — I spent most of my inebriated hours staring at the television in my pocket-sized studio apartment, especially since the bottom fell out of Big Planet Entertainment, the b-movie production company I'd been working for. Suddenly I was heartbroken and unemployed, and what money I did have was running out fast. This was Los Angeles, after all.
I realized I shouldn't have spent the seven bucks on those damn lemonades, instantly becoming irritated at the thought. Why the hell shouldn't I have something to dull the searing pain of the numerous red-hot pokers lodged firmly up my ass?
I grabbed the remote and switched over to the Food Network, where Emeril was whipping up a mouth-watering oyster-bacon pie. Maybe if I stared at the screen while eating my dinner of potatoes (my main source of food since losing my job) I could somehow hypnotize myself into enjoying them. I thought about Roscoe's Chicken and Waffles and absent-mindedly picked at the shredded orange upholstery of the thrift-store daybed I was perched on, previously used as a scratching post by a couple of cats. Man. Waffles. And chicken. Chicken and waffles. I took another pull off my lemonade and stared blankly at the television. The cable was the last thing I was going to let go of, just before electricity.
Things started going wrong shortly after Alison and I moved to LA, almost exactly a year earlier. It didn't occur to me how badly until a few days after I moved out of the apartment we shared; then one night while struggling to sleep on my friend Chad's miserably uncomfortable couch, it all finally sank in: the sound editing job I'd been promised wasn't there, Alison had no luck finding work (until later, of course), and I was dropped by my agent. I guess I didn't realize how shitty things were going at the time because nothing ever seemed all that bad when I was with Alison. She had a way of smoothing out the rough edges, no matter the situation.
Then she pulled the rug out from under me.
Before the move, I'd been making regular trips to LA — about five years earlier, I had landed the agent on the strength of an action script I wrote, and while the hoped-for Big Sale ("low-to-mid six figures," you always hear) never came for that one, the script had scored me a lot of meetings at the studios. Nothing came from those, either, although in an effort to please all those development execs, I had written numerous pitches and even went through four drafts (unpaid, of course) of a treatment for an action film about a heart transplant before cooler heads prevailed. When a second spec script went out, I landed a writing assignment that eventually went sour, but paid enough that Alison and I could afford to move to LA.
During one of my visits to the big city, I met the guy who promised me that editing job. He was a bit of a scoundrel, and since I was already used to being jerked around by Hollywood-types, it wasn't much of a surprise when the job never materialized. However, being unemployed had made Alison as distraught as I'd ever seen her, and my lack of meaningful work wasn't improving her condition any.
Desperate for some way to cheer her up, make her feel like we hadn't made a huge mistake in moving to LA to pursue our respective dreams, I tracked down Drew McCarney, an old friend of mine who worked for a post-production house in Santa Monica. As luck would have it, the post house was hiring, and Drew lined up an interview for Alison.
If I'd had any idea what that would lead to, I would've worked two jobs — Fatburger and Astro-Burger, anything — rather than let Alison take the job at that post house.
Oh yeah — my agent? She was just "reducing her client list," and was very apologetic.
I tried to focus on Emeril's oyster dish, but a phlegmy cough echoed from the bathroom as the guy next door choked up an oyster of his own. I could hear everything he did, not because the walls were thin but because the bathroom window opened onto an airshaft traversing the space between our apartments. I rarely saw the man and almost never spoke to him — he had invited me over for a glass of wine once, but mostly we communicated only through the sound of our various bodily functions. The man was in his late forties or early fifties and had been an actor at one point. While I was having that wine with him, he had very excitedly dug out his reviews for a play he'd been in sometime around 1977 — the praise for his acting was glowing, but he didn't seem to have ever done anything else. Now he was making a living by collecting signatures for some kind of political organization or cause or something, and was pinning his hopes on a board game he had come up with — some New-Agey thing wherein players have to ask questions of one another by using their innate psychic abilities. I figured it must take longer to play than Monopoly.
As my neighbor began splashing around in his tub, I found myself paying less attention to the TV and giving far too much consideration to the idea that I would probably end up just like the poor old sap. I had one writing credit — a crummy horror movie, shot on digital video — and the thought of trying to pick up girls ten years from now by bragging about that piece of shit terrified me.
Truth to tell, at that point the thought of trying to pick up girls terrified me all by itself.
One night after driving a couple of Alison's female co-workers home, I'd told Alison that if she ever dumped me, I would never be able to date anyone else. Those girls had done nothing but talk the most inane shit — the best night to hang out at Durvey's Lounge (Thursday, because that's when the cute softball players came in after their game), how annoying men are (damned annoying), and which of their male co-workers was the most fuckable (a pretty long list
, causing me to bite my tongue lest I say something mean about desperation).
The irony, of course, was that at that point, Alison already had a list of her own. There was only one name on it, but then Alison was never the sort to be desperate.
I shakily got to my feet, the daybed springs thunking as my bony ass released them, and wobbled over to the window. LA was a big, forlorn, miserable place. The street my building was on was lined by thin, towering palm trees, and now and then huge fronds would drop onto parked cars below, setting off their alarms. As one might imagine, this generally happened in the middle of the night. My cigar box of an apartment was on the second floor, overlooking the back yard of a house next door to the complex. In the yard was a smaller guesthouse, which stood directly beneath my window.
Woozy from the alcohol, I pressed my face against the glass and peered down at the guesthouse, trying to will the cute Asian girl who lived there to come outside. I didn't see her often, but her appearance was always enough to stop me dead in my tracks no matter what I was doing. She had a thing for tank tops, which I liked just fine, although I didn't approve of the baggy jogging pants she usually wore. Most of the sightings involved the girl walking from her car to the house (or vice-versa), usually accompanied by her boyfriend. How I loathed that guy. He was the typical Aspiring Hollywood Weasel, spending most of his time posturing in the driveway while talking on his cell phone, and from what I'd overheard, his conversations usually centered on how drunk he had gotten the night before. He and the girl seemed to fight a lot, too. I sometimes fantasized about finding her in tears after one of these fights; I'd throw open the window and ask what was wrong, being tender, caring, witty — all the things her boyfriend obviously wasn't, and soon her head would be resting upon my shoulder while I stroked her hair and soothed her pain. Usually, these fantasies just made me feel crummier.
The best sighting by far had occurred about three weeks earlier. The cute Asian girl had come outside to water her plants, sending me into an hysterical fit of ducking and weaving as I awkwardly attempted to position myself to gawk at her without being seen. She handled her business far too quickly, turned to stare at her car for a second, then went back into the house. My disappointment turned to overwhelming delight when she re-emerged moments later with a bucket and began washing the car.
Roomies: A Boone Butters Adventure Page 2
