Maverick Jetpants in the City of Quality

by Bill Peters

Before this conversation gets strange, I go: “Wow. G, A, D—this sounds good.”

  Before I even get to the hallway to leave, I’m already squeezing out laughter to myself, joke material squiggling through my head like mosquitoes.

  MOCKTANE/SNAKESHIELD

  But one evening, warm with almost-June, the phone rings.

  Ring! The thin wall of air between my heart and my chest. I’m thinking: Pinning Bow Ties on the Dead still, Toby? Why don’t you take your dairy-quake face and—

  “Nate?” a girl’s voice says on the phone. “Hi! This is Mindy Fale!”

  Immediately, I’m pacing in the dark in my kitchen. My face still looks like a drag-queen werewolf—my eyes are marooned and yellowed, my brow still swollen. The white in my right eye is deep red. Since water is bad for the scar, I still shower with Mom’s shower cap.

  “I’ve been looking through the phone book.” Her voice is milder, less like an angry Bills fan’s, on the phone. “And I thought: Nate!”

  She goes on. “You remember Goody, Ertsy, Ninjacotta—those guys are back. And I was calling, well, because my friend Chad knows about a party at the Pines, and he’s pretty cool, and, so, you should go.”

  Immediately, I’m polished by choir voices. I slick back my hockey hair and grab my black windbreaker, the nice one, and head out the door.

  The party is in Fairport, a suburb on the Erie Canal with craft-showsy houses. The Pines of Perinton is Fairport’s equivalent to the projects—these white, plaster-sided apartment buildings hoisted up by steel beams, with parking spaces underneath.

  I walk up the steeper-than-normal stairs and hear music rubbing up against the walls. Inside the apartment, it’s Pubertypalooza. Here was me at any party, thin enough to shine a flashlight through my chest; me, before I started carrying my wallet in my back pocket.

  The oven light is the only light on in the place. Whoever’s apartment this is is furnished like a porn set: no pictures on the walls; a single chair in the living room and one of those fold-out sofas that’s all foam padding and no wooden frame—the idea of a furnished place. A sweatpantsed woman with a wide part down the middle of her hair reads the newspaper and eats microwaved fish at the kitchen table. A glass pipe is next to her coffee mug.

  Through the living room, I step over a few bird-shaped girls with baggy pants and greasy hair dye who sit Indian-style on the office-gray carpet; girls with chain wallets who will either rediscover the Gap and grow into the nasal, flat-A’s Rochester accent, or commit permanently to Gargoyle Trashdom. The boys have their various neck beads, skater pants, and T-shirts that go down to their thighs. One comes up to me and says, in a robot-type voice: “The only system that can function is an egalitarian system because humans by nature are non-autonomous.” He marches away. All his friends laugh.

  In a spare bedroom with no windows or closet, Mindy Fale is sitting on a bare mattress on the floor. She has blond highlights in her hair since I last saw her and extra cheek mass. She’s touching the arm of this wolfman-looking guy who has a full head of wild gray hair and a shirt that says “Chaditude” on the front with a picture of him skydiving. She’s still in what look like work clothes—black pants and those black, both-sex Reeboks, white button-down shirt untucked.

  You talk to Necro, and he’ll yell out: Night at the Stalls! Which was Necro’s phrase to describe loud, lumbering girls. You talk to Toby, he’ll tell you how she married that twenty-six-year-old guy, named Jamie Something, who went off to the military, and how they divorced after he came home and he spent all day wandering Irondequoit Mall, buying nothing. But I always thought Mindy Fale was nice. I liked having her to stare at. I got high once and told Necro I wanted to drink her face.

  “Whoa Nate!” she says to my face. “You in a fight?”

  “No,” I say. “Accident—car.”

  “Did they throw all the debris in your car afterward? Did you have to draw the accident?” she says. She leans forward, up from the wall, and pinches my wrist from the mattress—“Mmmmocktane!”

  I refuse to say Snakeshield. I always hated that joke.

  “What? No Snakeshield? Chad has Snakeshield; he’s curse-insulated.”

  “Good for both of you.”

  “I met Chad earlier this afternoon,” she says. “He was staring at the book I was reading—Anne Rice!—when I was at Denny’s.” She gestures to the wolfman guy on the couch. “Chad! This is Nate, and this is Nate’s face!”

  Chaditude nods his head and resumes staring at Mindy Fale. He’s a guy who I already know doesn’t laugh or who owns a pet snake or makes his own guitars. He’ll be the guy I’ll pray leaves first.

  That was one thing about Mindy Fale, always: She be-friends the worst people. Here she was, once—back when she was much bonier and her T-shirts fitted her like nightshirts—at Countryside Billiards, which looked like a dentist’s office converted to a pool hall. “Nate! This is Adrik! He speaks Russian!” she said then, and pointed to a crumpled man with a denim baseball hat standing near the vending machines.

  Along those lines, I sit down in a beanbag chair—when beanbag chairs are always taken at parties—and settle in for a wait-off between me and Chaditude.

  “Because Neil Peart, what Neil did was those ride patterns.” Chaditude air-drums the patterns, right hand twitching epileptically. He slides his arm around her, holds both her hands up, as if to have her play air drums.

  But, sometimes, you’re looking through your brain’s archives, and next thing, I remember stories I haven’t told anyone in years. I tell Mindy Fale about that one time me and Necro were standing in the high school parking lot, doing nothing illegal, and we bolted when the school’s red security van pulled into the parking lot just because we wanted to be chased, and so we ran through the woods, and I slid across the ice of the creek and my knee fell in, and how I could feel my one pant-leg stiffening. “Hey Mr. Education: You can’t Riot with us!” I tell them I yelled, even though it was actually Necro. I tell them about the time I got a disorderly after I Nazi-saluted Luckytown Hastings, and spent over twenty-four hours in jail because Mom was on vacation in Bakersfield and Real Dad was at a show at the Bug Jar. I get Mindy Fale to laugh so hard she leans over and places her hand on my knee. I tell them about The Pizzeria Uno Bag on Necro’s Car—all the best ones.

  Chaditude crosses his legs, tightly, at his ankles, and begins to say: “We used to race cars sometimes—”

  “We once lifted a soccer goal and set it in the road!” I go, totally cutting him off.

  I talk so much and so loud my voice gets sandpapery; I talk so much that Chaditude doesn’t even have a chance to speak—total Conversation Box-Out. Until finally, later that night, Chaditude braces his hands against his knees to push himself up. “Well, shit. I’m gonna go,” he says.

  As in, slow motion replay: W-E-L-L, S-H-I-T, I’M, G-O-N-N-A, G-O.

  “Well nice to meet you today,” Mindy Fale says, etc. etc. etc.! We’ll completely read together in the park, she tells him, etc., etc.; of course you can play with my hair, etc., etc.!

  “And then it’ll be like we’re married,” Chaditude says, tartening himself up into Pity-Jello.

  “Of course, sweetie.”

  And because Chaditude apparently runs an absolute Bakery of Long Goodbyes, of course she has to hug the guy, and he has to run his hand through her hair, and hug her again, and, then, finally! He leaves.

  I’ve spent so much of the night looking at Mindy Fale that I don’t even notice that everyone—except the goth-trash still sitting on the living-room floor—has left the apartment. There are cigarette burn marks on the mattress, an empty Tostitos bag floated against a table lamp, a yellow scrunchie on the bedroom carpet.

  “Mocktane,” she pinches my shoulder when she sits back down.

  I still refuse to do Snakeshield.

  She lights a menthol. Her purple-sparkle nail polish is chipped. “So, your face, man.”

  I bum a menthol off her; the smoke is like Dentyne and Novocain. I t
ell her about Raw Dog, about going into the Mattresses in the Streets District. I rest my head against the wall. Blood and mucus drain into my throat, and I swallow.

  “What were you doing down there at all,” she says, more accusing me than asking.

  Which I have no answer for. “Bored.”

  She stares at the ceiling and shakes her head. “Only men, who do this,” she says, “who think if they do that one stupid thing just once then everything will change. At least when Chad saw me today, he could talk about my shirt. He could at least notice that if I can’t stay in school, I can still look good.”

  That’s what I hate. She will never, ever say no to a man.

  “He’s also total Chaditude,” she says, tonguing something off one of her incisors. “Speaking of downtown.” She slaps her thighs and stands up. “Ertsy and Mike found this video. You will love this.”

  We move to the living room and sit on the foam sofa. The goth-trash sitting on the floor lean toward one another more, and the VCR makes a blender noise as the tape rewinds.

  The video itself, a colorized thing made in 1963 by Jam Handy with Rochester Gas and Electric as a sponsor, is some advertisement for the city. Women, dressed up like boxed chocolate, walk through Midtown Plaza. The title flashes, in white lettering: ROCHESTER: A CITY OF QUALITY. Faces are pink and cheeks extra shaded like dolls. But actually, I’m too busy staring at Mindy Fale’s rainbow socks.

  “Oh! How is John Violi? Ravioli Violi,” she says. “You heard what happened, right?”

  “I was right there.”

  “So you almost died, then.”

  I shrug at her. “If you’re going to be negative about it.”

  “Did you ever kind of think that maybe Necro—Conspiracy Booth Andrea—did it? Like maybe that joke was true? Like we’d all wake up one day, and the skyline would be gone, and Andrea would be walking away, kicking a rock, like, ‘I took and dropped my cigarette in a bucket of paint thinner,’ or whatever?”

  I feel myself working into an earthquake.

  “Well you don’t need to look at me,” she says. “It’s a joke.”

  The video shows Midtown Plaza’s Clock of Nations—a white pillar with a red clock face at the top, with spinning chandelier arms and, at their ends, silver pods, each big enough to fit a toddler into. Every hour, the video’s narrator says, the doors to the pods open, and marionettes, representing different nationalities, spin on strings inside.

  The video shows overhead shots of the Genesee River, crowded with trees. The narrator says that, according to Native American myth, the Finger Lakes were formed when a giant reached down and scraped his fingers through the soil.

  “I’m not mad that you brought it up,” I say. “Necro: talking about weapons and emanating domain. It’s just—I wish people I knew had to carry around a card with them, like a driver’s license, that said, ‘Yes, I’m Staying,’ or ‘No, I’m sorry.’”

  “I hear you, I hear you,” she says. “Like: I’m someone who really hates fakery and hypocrisy. Those are just two things with me. Like Kelly Elmwood. If I didn’t know her and love her, I’d hate her. I swear to God that bitch is so dumb.”

  “And Wicked College John, too,” I say. “I mean, it’s awful—his condition. Don’t get me wrong. It’s very sad. But there was this friend of his who they called Sleeps when I visited Bonaventure last fall. Sleeps had this chrome skull mounted above the license plate of his SUV, and the skull’s eyes lit up—red—when he hit the brakes. Sleeps had some friend up from New Haven that weekend, too, this kid who had a teardrop tattooed under his eye, so everyone in the dorm was whispering, “He killed somebody.” We spent the whole weekend driving this kid, who was in the Solids, to campus movie night, or to the coffee shop, or across the countryside foliage in this skull SUV. And Wicked College John was trying not to look scared around this kid, trying to talk up the one time he drove past—not down, past—Cuba Place looking for drugs? And nobody calls Colonel Hellstache on this? About Wicked College John? About the skull?”

  Mindy Fale nudges her elbow toward the screen.

  “Have you ever heard of Genesee Fever?” the narrator says. “Historically, it was probably some kind of rash encountered by Colonel Nathaniel Rochester when he decided to utilize the water power of the Genesee Falls and build a settlement here.”

  “But yeah, Wicked College John is doing better,” I say. “They have him on exercises.”

  The sunrise is like the top of a can being pulled off the sky. The narrator talks about how Rochester planned for future communities with “self-liquidating municipal parking units.” A shot of the Kodak building, a shot of Bausch & Lomb and Xerox and the SC Electronics Store. “The stability of the work-force in Rochester makes for the stability of investments in Rochester,” the narrator says. Eventually, the credits roll.

  “Ken Nordine narrated this?” I say. “My dad has one of his albums.”

  “Midtown Plaza? Kind of a nice place then.”

  “Where was this city a few weeks ago?”

  “Oh it’s all right here,” she says. “You can work hard if you want, but you don’t have to work hard to survive, don’t need money to be sophisticated. It’s sort of recession-proof. Skull License Plate SUV Boy, at Bonaventure, could do very well here.”

  “He has a white wine and cocaine gland in his brain,” I say.

  “His stomach produces its own duck meat so he can digest it, crap it out, and donate it to charity.”

  “He’s so sophisticated, he paid a doctor to perform plastic surgery on his colon,” I go.

  “He paid to have his nipples pinkened,” she says.

  “His shins gelatinized.”

  “He’s so sophisticated, his cock is bilingual.”

  The laughing builds until we run out of room in our chests, until our lungs stutter their way up to our shoulders and can’t go any further, until our ribs strain, until our necks hurt and there’s sweat in the crease between my eyelids and my forehead. When we look up, the smoke in the middle of the room looks like a gorilla’s face. Then, more laughing.

  “He’s so sophisticated,” I say, “his balls bring their own glassware to wine-tasting parties.”

  The laughing whiffles out, and we come up for air.

  “He’s so sophisticated,” she says, sputtering, “his taint’s agent”—more sputtering—“his taint’s agent regularly attends the Vienna ballet with him.”

  Which I’m not sure makes any sense, but we’re sore now. I think at least the fabric of both our shirts is touching, but I can’t tell if the feeling in my arm nerves is her, or me trying to make my brain squint hard enough to move her an inch closer.

  “Nate!” Mindy Fale says before I leave, holding her arms out to hug me. Bilingual Cock? If I could marry a joke, I would.

  The goth-trash rub their eyes and pull the cushions off the couch for pillows, in a routine-seeming way that implies they’ve dropped out of school and have gone to bed at this time on weeknights for the last year or two. I’m in such a good mood I drive through Irondequoit, and I drive past Kodak Park to stare at the Milk Crate Tower, its steam pinkened and sun-frothed. The parking lot is stretched out like elastic, and the cars look violent when the sun whites out their windshields.

  Somewhere in there, beyond the right angles of pipes, Necro is working. Or sleeping. Like that one time he told me that napping spots were hidden across the factory, with pillows and blankets tucked away between machinery.

  Maybe that’s where he is, while I’m out here getting hugged: in a utility room or a crawl space of the factory where someone—thirty-five years ago, when Rochester was a City of Quality—brought in some old sheets, set them on the floor, and, in a legend-like way of their own, or maybe a reverse-legend, told nobody.

  THE SIXTY-SIXTH LETTER

  Except, Toby! I cross my front lawn in my socks to leave out the Monday trash, and his Taurus, all its windows rolled down, dust-bowls up my gravel driveway. “Come on get in, get in,” he yells over the
engine, the ends of his baby-gremlin-teeth smile tucked into his face-fat. “We found Necro. He’s in Brockport. He’s at that Weapons of Mankind Guy—Bambert L. Tolby? His house. I looked up the address! We’re going Rioting on him.”

  Lip Cheese is in the rear passenger seat, because Lip Cheese knows I ride shotgun and never to call Shotgun No-Blitz No-Combat on me. He leans out his window and wipes the corners of his lips, spraying saliva. “I was bored the other night, so I drove past Necro’s house?” he says. “So I park, and I sneak up to the driveway, and there’s a manila folder in the front seat of Necro’s car. And I try the door handle? And it’s unlocked! So of course I go into Necro’s car, and in the folder, I find this paper that says Bill of Lading? And it’s from Dubai, in the United Arab Emir—you know, for potassium nitrate? Copper benzoate?”

  Toby narrows his brow and bounces once or twice in his seat, either from amusement or adrenaline. “Go on, go on—get to the next part.”

  “I noticed: The bill was addressed to—you’ll just love this, Nate, love it!—somebody by the name of James Mason.”

  Lip Cheese wipes his mouth again. “Mason? Mister Mason?” he says.

  Bugs bounce off Toby’s headlights.

  Lip Cheese smacks the heel of his hand into his forehead. “The last name Mason? A reference to Mr. Mason? In Red Dawn?” he says. “It’s a fake name, Nate. Timothy McVeigh did almost the exact same thing. One of McVeigh’s favorite movies was Brazil, and he sometimes used the name ‘Tuttle’ as, like, a handle? They say him and his friend used fake names to rent storage space. These kinds of people that Necro hangs out with? They love Red Dawn.”

  And I realize that I have done something awful: I have created a Runaway Cockdrama. Because, we’ve never had a Cockdrama last longer than three months, which is the criteria for a Runaway Cockdrama. The average length of a Cockdrama? Nine days. Previous longest: the Great 1996 Cockdrama of TJ’s Big Boy, which lasted one month. I don’t even know if Toby and Lip Cheese even know if they’re joking anymore, or if they’ve been joking for so long they’ve become serious.