Maverick Jetpants in the City of Quality

by Bill Peters

“I know you from the bus,” Raw Dog says, suddenly right next to me. I expect an accent, but his voice is Mr. Rogers-American. Whatever cologne he’s wearing smells like sunned-up propane.

  “Yeah, I ride the bus,” because that’s what I think people in the way-downtown say.

  Raw Dog swats it off. His small-pupiled eyes are like tiny concentric rings of bluebird feathers.

  “Did I see you at something down here, a while ago?” he says. Which should be Bad Sign No. 2: The Proto-Stachening, the way he phrases this, without specifying.

  “Weapons of Mankind?” I say. “I went to one a while ago downtown?”

  “I’m sure that’s where,” Raw Dog goes. “What’s your name?”

  “Nate,” I go, trying not to stare at his head-divot. “I’m friends with Andrea. I was trying to find him.”

  “Andrea; right. Welcome aboard,” Raw Dog goes, not introducing himself back. He shakes my hand, this soft, hairstylist-type handshake.

  “Come here in this place twenty years ago?” he goes. “Guys getting thrown out of windows. The Inn upstairs, they shut it down. The phone keys were plucked off. A raccoon was living in one of the bathtubs.”

  “Wow!” I say, laughing girlishly.

  “It’s about to get way nicer now, it’s already happening. I’m in real estate. We’re fighting to get solid minds into apartments down here, and it’s been working. See this thing?” He pulls up the left side of his button-down shirt. Clipped to his belt is this gray plastic box, the size of Lip Cheese’s TI-82 calculator, with a tiny computer screen and a telephone cord that tucks into his pants.

  “This cord?” he goes. “It goes into a generator, the size of a York Peppermint Patty, implanted up my butt. When I lose feeling in my legs and fingers, I press this button,” he points to a green button, the size of an M&M, “and these wires send an electric shock up my spine.”

  “What happened?” I ask him.

  “This was 1981 Old Rochester, my point being,” he says. “I had to deliver papers to Philip Ayinger—the developer who liked to bet in the Canadian lottery with certain notable Italians,” he goes, in this quick, casual way like this is a Stock Anecdote. “His wife was going to divorce him, and I found him in Bullwinkle’s. I came in, envelope in hand, sat down next to him. He immediately takes off!”

  “Oh man,” I say, virginally.

  “I chased him out of Bullwinkle’s all the way up Lake Avenue, past the Kodak lot, past a CVS; I chased him up to near Holy Sepulchre. I chased him past three post offices. I chased him into the suburbs. And then, Ayinger swings around into the lot of a CVS, a different one, reaches into a dumpster, and pulls out a gun, like he’d taped it to the dumpster’s inner wall in advance. So I run at him. I’m running—” He points his right index finger into his ribcage and his left index finger into the small of his back to mimic the bullet path. “The bullet chipped my spine. So if you want to get shot, get shot in the leg. Or, just take it through the head and get killed.”

  Raw Dog nods to a white guy across the room who has a beard the size of a grocery bag. “But problems like Shawcross? The Columbus Day bombings? They come in twenty-year cycles. That guts the landlord business.” He gestures toward my tie. “But for a well-to-do guy like you, looking to make a move, you could get in cheap in this part of town, month to month. This building I’m talking to you about, I just rented out the second floor to a stockbroker. A day later, the city announced plans to turn some abandoned lots into parks. Gangs? You only have to worry about gangs if you’re in prison.”

  I make a chin rest with my thumb and forefinger. A real-live Nate HQ: I’m already imagining Necro and Toby, groveling before me in designated shifts.

  “We can drive down now, take a look,” Raw Dog says. “I can get you in there next week. First month: Free. Hardwood floors, a billion square feet—you could turn this place into a nice little fuckpad.”

  We leave the bar, get into his rust-acne’d car, a Volkswagen hatchback. He revs the car until the engine sounds high-pitched, like a paper-shredder motor, then makes a right onto Lake Ave., where any walk alone is a long walk, and whose low slabs of closed businesses are broken up by grass and abandoned lots. A payphone’s front panel has been ripped off. A man in a running suit is lying, facedown, on the sidewalk, arms at his sides.

  And right when you think I’m going to out-Necro Necro, Raw Dog turns toward me and becomes Total Roasted Face of Satan: “Growing up here,” he says, voice slower now, “there used to be a place that made white hots. I’d go in, they’d always say: Get out of here you bum! But I loved their white hots. They made the best sausage casing, Nate. I’m very specific about sausage casing.”

  He nudges his elbow toward the red Country Sweet restaurant, where there’s a crowd outside, backlit by the light inside the place.

  “All these niggers,” Raw Dog goes. “They just walk around, man. Shitty apartments but everyone’s got nice cars. What you doing, man? Not much, just hiding my drugs under this porch here, just hitting people in the head with a hammer. You know what these people need? They need to get somebody pregnant. Fatherhood, that’s the real best policeman.”

  Get your free month, Nate, is the thought I’m clinging to. After that, find some job, and Raw Dog will be a name on a rent check.

  We turn down some streets I don’t recognize. Raw Dog stops the car. We get out. I don’t see any apartment building, any lit-up entrances. Worse, there are no streetlights, and everything looks dark and algae-covered. Raw Dog stands over me. He leans his head-divot down toward me. “Go ahead. Stick your finger in it.”

  The air tightens in on me.

  “You’ve been looking at it. Stick your finger into my head dimple.”

  “Oh—I can’t, stick my finger—”

  “Dammit, Nate, dammit!” He slaps his palm on the hood and leans his head-divot closer.

  I’m stuttering for pay now: “What? I—”

  “Can’t, comes from the ancient word cunnan, which comes from Cunnahos, the ruler who burnt his children!”

  “What?” I say.

  “Can’t, comes from cunnan! Which comes from Cunnahos, the ruler who burnt his children!” He is screaming this. His breath is warm like a neck against a cold hand. “Repeat it!”

  “Um, can’t, comes from Cunnahos, the ruler who—”

  “Say it harder!” his voice echoes.

  “Can’t comes from cunnan which comes from Cunnahos the ruler who burnt his children!”

  I press my finger into the divot and look away. It has this smoother-than-bone feeling, like skin over plastic. Technically speaking, my Holy Grail Points have punctured the heavens. But it is clear: I Have Made a Terrible Mistake Tonight.

  When I look up, Raw Dog is holding a rusted crowbar.

  “Hand over your wallet and don’t ever come to the city again,” Raw Dog says. “Hand over your wallet, with your precious, moneyed, lightened, plural hands.”

  Except out of nowhere, I feel something like rabies gush through my spine. Because I can’t get a job, can’t get a Plan, can’t get a Home or a Cash and can’t get a Nate HQ. Suddenly I’m whipping index fingers, closing my eyes, and yelling into the air in front of me: “You thought I was rich? You thought I could move into an apartment and make a place nicer? My food chews itself, out of fear. When I make love to the ground, trees grow! I hope you have a lot more room up there besides that prod, because—”

  I don’t see or feel it so much as I get this computer reaction of: I have been hit, in the forehead, with a crowbar. A sneaker scrapes the pavement near my ear, everything the color of burlesque. I feel my wallet float upward, whispering against my pocket lining’s fabric, and a second later, feel it slap down between my shoulder blades.

  When I wake up, I’m nowhere to be found. A van is parked nearby with missing tires. The boltwork of the overpass above me loosens when cars pass.

  I stick a newspaper to my head and stand up. The top three inches of my head feel like they’re draining through a
water filter. The blood tonguing down my face turns everything mucus colored.

  After years of sidewalks and store-window gates, I walk into what is apparently a diner—I can’t tell completely because if I look straight ahead I get blood in my eyes. The brightness inside empties out my head.

  “All right?” a waitress asks me in a Spanish accent. Forks tick against plates.

  “Just call a cab,” I say.

  She sits me down at a booth. “Put this on,” she says and wraps two dishrags around my head. Her face is like seeing a million pictures of moms bunched into one.

  I try to scratch the back of my head, so I maybe look casual. Because, my initial reaction is, I’m actually embarrassed. As in, can I get a job looking like this? Will girls not like me because I’m bleeding? Then, I feel the first sobs being sucked out of my face. Here they come.

  “I can’t do anything right,” I say.

  The waitress yells something in Spanish. One of the cooks dials on a rotary phone.

  “All anyone does is lie to me,” I say.

  “Cab is on the way,” she says, then pats my shoulder and hands me a napkin. She does this all with one hand, because, with her other hand, she’s holding a dinner plate with a hamburger on it.

  After the cab comes, I’ll get thrown out and walk the rest of the way when the driver finds out I have no money. But for now, sliding up the 490 onramp, I listen for the different grades of pavement—the way the cab sounds like water through pipes on a gray patch of bridge, or the way it sounds creamier over sections of newer, blacker pavement. Cars with blacklights mounted to their undercarriages blast by, and the cab feels better than a bed on wheels, with me finally knowing, my God, the city actually ends.

  THE SADNESS CUSTARD MONTAGE

  A tornado-swipe later, my head is on Mom’s lap in the backseat of Fake Dad No. 3’s Hyundai. Street lamps are overhead, a BlueCross BlueShield blimp in the sky. The fluids in my head shift as the car shifts lanes.

  “That’s not a fight,” Fake Dad No. 3 says, his voice weirdly non-Thundertrident-ish. “In a sustained physical altercation, there would be a real mangled quality.”

  “But look at him bleed,” Mom says. Her palm is sweating when she places it on my forehead.

  “Please try not to Patronize the Victim, Debra,” Fake Dad No. 3 says.

  “I’m not Patronizing the Victim, Gareth.”

  “Goddammit Debra you are Patronizing the Victim, you’re only using one parental tool. If you only use one parental tool, you’re going to inflict trauma!” he says, yanking the car over a lane. “I’m only being transparent with you, okay; I’m only being transparent with you.”

  Mom leans over me, so I can only see her face and a little bit of one of the Holy-Shit Handles above the rear passenger-side window. And Mom, whose maiden name is Portfolio Insurance, she literally whispers to me:

  “If somebody hurt you, in a fight, I can call a friend who knows someone who is a trained professional, who can take care of people who do these things.”

  “Mom, what?” I say.

  Which makes me start crying, because even if I am laughing, I’m still bleeding operas all over the car. Mom tries to squeeze my arm, but I twist toward the seat well because I don’t like it when she touches me.

  Later that night, two butter-colored curtains separate off my hospital bed from the other beds. When the doctor arrives, I stare at his mouth cover. Out of the corner of my left eye, I see him pull a thread, stretched tight, thin like a saliva strand, out from my forehead. The X-rays show a white, pencil-line crack running across my skull’s cheek, ending at the eyehole. Otherwise, my skull looks like every skull I’ve seen in history, and this causes a Sadness Custard Montage within a Sadness Custard Montage.

  “Do I need a skull-cast?” I ask the nurse.

  “Heads generally heal on their own,” she tells me.

  Back home, the afternoon is beautiful, tree leaves like flashing camera bulbs in the sun. Outside, Mom runs the lawnmower underneath the living room window. On the TV, celebrities walk around with their smug, unscarred foreheads.

  Before dinner, while I’m in the bathroom, I hear the phone ring. “He’s not here, Toby,” Mom says. I peel the bandages off. A crayon-line of scar curves across the right side of my forehead. I have a swollen werewolf brow; my right eye is maroon and puffed shut.

  When I meet Real Dad at his room in Penfield Manse, I barely recognize him. His hair is buzzed short, and he’s wearing a tweed jacket, plaid shirt, and black jeans. His place, for whatever reason, is bright, well swept, and smells like Windex. The hardwood floor shines, the fish tank with music magazines is gone, dishes no longer piled up to the chin of the sink faucet. The little ashtrays he made out of tinfoil, that he folded into the shapes of boats or stars, that he set on everywhere so he wouldn’t have to lean forward to ash out his cigarettes—gone too.

  “After the last time I saw you, I figured: Time for Change. Mötley Crüe,” he says. “The way that album is all Midgets and Piss, and then impossibly, inexplicably, the last song is ‘Time for Change,’ with a children’s choir.”

  I sit down on the loveseat, whose cushions and creases have been cleared of crumbs and novelty rock cards—which are like baseball cards, but with members of Saxon.

  “Because,” he continues, “all I’ve spent my money on since I’ve moved here is Belgian beer and these workplace training and conduct videos that I like to make fun of. What would the nightlife guides say? Saunter around the ‘suppository-wrapper-littered’ bedroom floor in this BoHo entry with the ‘finest samplings’ from the ‘condiment fridge?’”

  Which immediately reminds me of how Raw Dog described my non-Nate-HQ, and I get that knot in my throat, the Sniffling, Part 8: The Proto-Proto-Stachening. The tightening in the pipes, whole parts of my life pulling out of me through my eyes.

  He leans forward, standing over me. “Well, your Mom is still with BCBS,” he says, in his stable, un-sneery, talking-to-Mom voice, which he never uses around me. Which can only mean I’ve done something horrible or really acted out in some way I can’t even understand.

  “The stitches alone: probably a $2,000 operation,” Real Dad says. “You’re expensive.”

  My shoulders buckle. His hand hovers over my back, like he’s trying to figure out whether to pat it.

  “Okay, let’s not,” Real Dad says, looking around for a Kleenex, maybe. “Just settle down for a second.”

  He sits down next to me. He has a new coffee table as well—black and rectangular in a sushi-place way.

  I drag a few sniffles the weight of staplers. “I have a question.”

  Real Dad sits forward, forearms on knees, and folds his hands and looks at me. No Wall of Comedy.

  “You don’t think I’m stupid, right?” I go. “You think I’m funny, right?”

  Real Dad cycles through a few facial expressions. I stare at the floor, and feel his weight shift on the loveseat.

  “You know, the last time I heard of anyone being down on Lake Avenue was that Foreigner song, ‘Rev on the Red Line.’ Only song, ever, about Rochester that went national,” he says. “Completely inaccurate. This is the most difficult city in America to get laid in. You’ve seen me keep the two-second distance; seen my well-placed signaling. Women here are not at all after good drivers.”

  I laugh. The snot muscles diffuse a bit. I can breathe regularly again.

  “At least there’s this.” He reaches down under an end table between the loveseat and the wall, and tosses a crumpled ball of birthday wrapping paper in my lap. “It’s late. But Guns N’ Roses never performed on time either, and you know what it got them?”

  “Are you asking? Right now?”

  “Pussy. The old Bensonhurst Grapevine.”

  “The old Manchester Pizza Hut,” I sniffle residually.

  “The old Klem Road North Medicine Ball.”

  I toss the wrapping-paper ball from hand to hand. Real Dad runs his thumb along his cheek, like he’s unused to how
it feels after shaving.

  “How about you just open it before I start to hate myself?” he says.

  I un-wad the Happy Birthday layer of the wrapping-paper ball. Then, in a way that sort of looks like finding a piece of steak spit into a napkin—and I mean that in the most neutral way possible—I see this piece of loose-leaf paper, folded into eights. Written on it are the letters G, A, D, Bm, G, A, D, Bm, all the way down the page.

  “Oh wow! Thanks Dad! Wow! This is—this is great! Wow! Thanks!”

  He plucks the piece of paper from my hand. “You don’t know what it is yet—you don’t even have the perceivability to even intuit what this is.”

  “So what is it?”

  “What—it—it’s a song!”

  “Oh.”

  “The lyrics aren’t all in place yet,” he goes. “Still sort of in the conceptual phase.”

  “So, it’s just chords?”

  “Chords is half the song, Nate! Did Van Dyke Parks walk into the studio and shit out the Metropolitan Museum of Art? He had chords.” He shapes the chords with his left hand. “But the song’s about, I’ve decided right now, it’s how you don’t take crap from people when, say, you’re stopped at a red light, and some guy comes up, opens your hood, and jerks off into your brake fluid.”

  The sun gets some cloud cover, which rounds away the sharp shadows but makes the room brighter. “I know you’re on the rocks with your friends,” he says. “Debra said something about this Toby guy. Calling you. And, I can sense, this Toby, he’s been stressing you out, man.”

  “It’s Necro. He’s supposed to get thousands of dollars from this guy—” I begin to say, but Real Dad’s pulling out his bass guitar case from under the loveseat and unlatching it, and I think the case rumbling across the wood floor drowns me out.

  “That’s what I’m getting at with this song,” he says. “Because Toby? He’s thinking, this Nate guy, he’s got one up on me. He’s thinking,” and, then, Real Dad plucks a single note on the bass quietly, “he’s thinking, ‘I have nothing. So how can I jerk off into Nate’s brake fluid?’”