Tug tracked down Pavel Bilodeau in the manager’s office.
The short, mid-thirty-ish fellow—casually dressed, blonde hair perpetually hayricked, plump face wearing its default expression of an elementary-school student subjected to a pop quiz on material unmastered—was busy behind his desktop ordinateur, fingers waltzing across the numerical keypad to the right of the alpha keys. Spotting his unexpected visitor, Pavel said, “Right with you, Tug.” He triggered output from the noisy o-telex (its carriage chain needed oiling), got up, burst and shuffled together the fanfold printout, and approached Tug.
“This is a spreadsheet of the Little Theatre’s finances, Tug.”
Tug got a bad feeling from Pavel’s tone. Or rather, Tug’s recently omnipresent bad feeling deepened. “Yeah?”
“Receipts are down—way down. I’ve got to cut costs if I want to keep this place open.”
“I read about this cheap butter substitute for the popcorn concession—”
“I need bigger savings, Tug. Like your salary.”
“I’m being fired?”
Pavel had the grace to look genuinely miserable. “Laid off. Starting today. You can collect.”
Tug sank into a chair like a used-car-lot Air Dancer deprived of its fan. “But I was coming here to ask for more hours—and if you had found any leads on a place for me to stay.”
Pavel clapped a hand on Tug’s shoulder. “You know the worst now, Tug.”
Regarding his newly-ex employer, Tug suddenly realized the gap of years between them, over two decades’ worth. Pavel looked incredibly young and callow—like the growing majority of people Tug encountered lately. Kids! They were all kids these days! He tried not to let his resentment of Pavel’s relative youth and prospects surface in his voice.
“But how will you run the place without me? Dave and Jeff can’t work round-the-clock on four machines.”
“I’m installing automated digital projectors. The new Cinemeccanica o-500’s. No more film. It’s a bit of a capital investment, but it’ll pay off quickly. Jeff will handle days, and Dave nights. They’ll have to take a pay cut too. Together after the cut, they’ll still make less than you do now. They’re young and inexperienced, so they won’t mind so much. Oh, and shipping charges on the rentals come down dramatically too. The files get transmitted over CERN-space.”
“I’ll take the pay cut!”
“No, Tug, I think this is best. You wouldn’t be happy just pressing virtual buttons on a monitor screen. You’re too old-school. You’re filaments and sprockets and triacetate, not bits and bytes and command language strings.”
Tug wanted to voice more objections, to protest that he could change—but a sudden realization stilled his tongue.
What Pavel said was true. His age and attitudes had caught up with him. If he couldn’t manually load the reels of film and enjoy guiding their smooth progress through the old machines for the enjoyment of the audience, he would feel useless and unfulfilled. The new technology was too sterile for him.
Tug got wearily to his feet. “All right, if that’s how it’s gotta be. Do I dare ask if you stumbled on any housing leads?”
“No, I haven’t. It’s incredible. The shorebirds have totally deranged the rental landscape. But listen, here’s what I can offer. You can store all your stuff in the basement here for as long as you want.”
The basement of the Little Theatre was a huge labyrinth of unused storage space, save for some ancient props from the days of the live-performer Salmagundi Circuit.
“Okay, that’s better than nothing. Thanks for all the years of employment, Pavel. The Little Theatre always felt like my second home.”
“Just think of it as leaving the nest at last, Tug. It’s gonna work out fine. Bigger and better things ahead.”
Tug wished he could be as optimistic as Pavel, but right this minute he felt lower than Carole Lombard’s morals in Baby Face.
4.
Trash Platter Chatter
Hangdogging his way through the lobby, Tug ran into the Little Theater’s lone janitor and custodian.
Pieter van Tuyll van Serooskerken was a Dikelander. Like a surprisingly uniform number of his countrymen and countrywomen, Pieter was astonishingly tall and fair-skinned. In the average crowd of native brunette and ruddy-faced Carrollborovians, he resembled a stalk of white asparagus set amid a handful of radishes. Today, alone in the lobby and leaning daydreamily on his broom, he seemed like a lone droopy stalk tethered to a supportive stake.
Pieter’s native country had been one of the first to collapse under the rising oceans. Dikeland now existed mostly underwater, its government in exile, its citizens dispersed across the planet. The Dikelanders were among the longest-settled Big Retreat immigrants in Carrollboro and elsewhere in the USA, hardly considered an exotic novelty any longer.
Back home, Pieter had been a doctor. Informed, upon relocation to America, of the long tedious bureaucratic process necessary to requalify, he had opted out of the prestigious field, although still young, hale and optimally productive. Tug suspected that Pieter’s discovery of Sal-D, or Ska Pastora, had contributed to his career change. Blissfully high throughout much of each day and night on quantities of Shepherdess that would turn a novice user’s brain to guava jelly, Pieter found janitorial work more his speed.
With a paradoxically languid and unfocused acuity, Pieter now unfolded himself and hailed Tug.
“Hey, Ginger Ale.”
Pieter, in his perfect, nearly accentless yet still oddly alien English, was the only person who ever called Tug Gingerella by that nickname. The Dikelander seemed to derive immense absurdist humor from it.
“Hey, Pete. What’s new?”
“I have almost gotten ‘Radar Love’ down. Apex of Dikelander hillbilly-skiffle music. Wanna hear?”
Pieter drew a pendant ocarina from beneath his work vest and began to raise it to his lips.
“Naw, Pete, I’m just not in the mood right now.”
“How is that?”
Tug explained all his troubles, starting with his eviction and culminating in his dismissal from the Little Theatre.
Pieter seemed truly moved. “Aw, man, that sucks so bad. Listen, we approach lunchtime. Let me treat you to a trash platter, and we can talk things through.”
Tug began perforce to salivate at the mention of the Carrollboro gastronomic speciality. “Okay, that’s swell of you, Pete.”
“So long as I still possess a paycheck, why not?”
Pieter stood his broom up in a corner with loving precision, found a coat in the cloakroom—not necessarily his own, judging by the misfit, Tug guessed—and led the way five blocks south to the Hatch Suit Nook.
The clean and simple proletarian ambiance of the big diner instantly soothed Tug’s nerves. Established nearly a century ago, the place ranked high in Carrollboro traditions. Tug had been dining here since childhood. (Thoughts of his departed folks engendered a momentary sweet yet faded sorrow, but then the enzymatic call of his stomach overpowered the old emotions.) Amidst the jolly noise of the customers, Tug and Pieter found seats at the counter.
Composing one’s trash platter was an art. The dish consisted of the eater’s choice of cheeseburger, hamburger, red hots, white hots, Italian sausage, chicken tender, haddock, fried ham, grilled cheese, or eggs; and two sides of either home fries, French fries, baked beans, or macaroni salad. Atop the whole toothsome farrago could be deposited mustard, onions, ketchup, and a proprietary greasy hot sauce of heavily spiced ground beef. The finishing touch: Italian toast.
Pieter and Tug ordered. While they were waiting, Pieter took out his pipe. Tug was appalled.
“You’re not going to smoke that here, are you?”
“Why not? The practice is perfectly legal.”
“But you’ll give everyone around us a contact high.”
“Nobody cares but you, Ginger Ale. And if they do, they can move off. This helps me think. And your fix demands a lot of thinking.”
Pieter
fired up and, as he predicted, no neighbors objected. But they were all younger than Tug. Another sign of his antiquity, he supposed.
After a few puffs of Shepherdess, Pieter said, “You could come live with me.”
Pieter lived with two women, Georgia and Carolina, commonly refered to as “The Dixie Twins,” although they were unrelated, looked nothing alike, and hailed from Massachusetts. Tug had never precisely parsed the exact relations among the trio, and suspected that Pieter and the Dixie Twins themselve would have been hard-pressed to define their menage.
“Again, that’s real generous of you, Pete. But I don’t think I’d be comfortable freeloading in your apartment.”
Pieter shrugged. “Your call.”
The trash platters arrived then, and further discussion awaited whole-hearted ingestion of the jumbled mock-garbage ambrosia….
Pieter wiped his grease-smeared face with a paper napkin and took up his smoldering pipe from the built-in countertop ashtray. Sated, Tub performed his own ablutions. A good meal was a temporary buttress against all misfortunes….
“Maybe you could live with Olive.”
Tug’s ease instantly evaporated, to be replaced by a crimson mélange of guilt, frustration, anger and shame: the standard emotional recipe for his post-breakup dealings with Olive Ridley.
“That—that is not a viable idea, Pete. I’m sorry, it’s just not.”
“You and Olive had a lot going for you. Everybody said so.”
“Yeah, we had almost as much going for us as we had against. There’s no way I’m going to ask her for any charity.”
Pete issued hallucinogenic smoke rings toward the diner’s ceiling. His eyes assumed a glazed opacity lucid with reflections of a sourceless starlight.
“Tom Pudding.”
Tug scanned the menu board posted above the grill. “Is that a dessert? I don’t see—”
Pieter jabbed Tug in the chest with the stem of his pipe. “Wake up! The Tom Pudding. It’s a boat. An old canal barge, anchored on the Attawandaron. People are using it as a squat. Some guy named Vasterling runs it. He fixed it all up. Supposed to be real nice.”
Tug pondered the possibilities. A radical recasting of his existence, new people, new circumstances…. Life on a houseboat, rent-free. The romantic, history-soaked vista of the Attawandaron Canal. Currier & Ives engravings of grassy towpath, overhanging willow trees, merry bargemen singing as they hefted bales and crates—
“I’ll do it! Thanks, Pete!”
But Pieter had already lost interest in Tug and his plight, the Dikelander’s Shepherdess-transmogrified proleptic attention directed elsewhere. “Yeah, cool, great.”
Tug helped his hazey-dazey friend stand and don his coat. They headed toward the exit.
Pieter stopped suddenly short and goggled in amazement at nothing visible to Tug. Other customers strained to see whatever had so potently transfixed the Dikelander.
“A Nubian! I see a Nubian princess! She’s here, here in Carrollboro!”
“A Nubian princess? You mean, like a black woman? From Africa?”
“Yes!”
Tug scratched his head. “What would a black woman be doing in Carrollboro? I’ve never seen one here in my whole life, have you?”
5.
Moving Day Morn
After his impulsive decision at the Hatch Suit Nook—a decision to abandon all his old ways for a footloose lifestyle—Tug had nervous second thoughts. So in the two weeks left until his scheduled eviction on November first, he searched for a new job. But the surge of competing talented shorebirds made slots sparse.
Tug’s best chance, he thought, had come at the Aristo Nodak Company. That large, long-established national firm, purveyor of all things photographic, ran a film archive and theater, mounting retrospective festivals of classic features, everything from Hollywood spectacles such as Elizabeth Taylor’s Salammbô to indie productions like Carolee Schneemann’s avant-garde home movies of the 1960s, featuring her hillbilly-skiffle-playing husband John Lennon. With their emphasis on old-school materials, there’d be no nonsense about Cinemeccanica o-500’s. But despite a sympathetic and well-carried interview, Tug had come in second for the lone projectionist job to a Brit shorebird who had worked for the drowned Elstree Studios.
Despondent at the first rejection, Tug had immediately quit looking. That was how he always reacted, he ruefully acknowledged. One blow, and he was down for the count. Take his only serious adult romantic relationship, with Olive. The disintegration of that affair a few years ago had left him entirely hors de combat on the fields of Venus.
But what could he do now about this fatal trait? He was too damn old to change….
Tug didn’t own a fancy o-phone or even a cheap laptop ordinateur. The hard drive on his old desktop model had cratered a year ago, and he had been too broke to replace the machine. Consequently, he used a local o-café, The Happy Applet, to manage his sparse o-mail and to surf CERN-space. A week before his scheduled eviction, he went to Craig’s List and posted a plea for help with getting his possessions over to the Little Theatre. Too proud and ashamed to approach his friends directly, Tug hoped that at least one or two people would show up.
Far from that meager attendance, he got a massive turnout.
The morning of October 31st dawned bright, crisp and white as Jack Frost’s bedsheets, thanks to an early dusting of snow. (The altered climate had pushed the typical wintry autumn weather of Tug’s youth back into December, and he regarded this rare October snow, however transitory, as a good omen.) After abandoning his futile job search, Tug had furiously boxed all his treasured possessions, donating quite a bit to Goodfaith Industries. Handling all the accumulated wrack of thirty years left him simultaneously depressed and nostalgic. He had set aside a smattering of essential clothes, toiletries and touchstones, stuffing them all into a beat-up North Face backpack resurrected from deep within a closet, token of his quondam affiliation with a hiking club out near Palmyra.
At six AM he sat on a box at a window looking down at Patrician Street, backpack nestled between his feet, sipping a takeout coffee. An hour later, just when he had prematurely convinced himself no one was coming, the caravan arrived: miscellaneous trucks and cars to the number of a dozen. Out of them tumbled sleepy-eyed friends, acquaintances and strangers.
Jeff, Dave, Pavel and Pieter from the Little Theatre. Tug’s second cousin, Nick, all the way from Bisonville. Brenda and Irene, baristas from The Happy Applet. Those nerdy guys with whom for a few years he had traded holo transects of rare Salmagundi Circuit novelty tunes. The kid who sold him his deli lunch each day and who had had an obsession with Helen Gahagan ever since Tug had introduced the kid to her performance in The Girl in the Golden Atom. And others, of deeper or shallower intimacy.
Including—yes, that fireplug of a figure was indeed Olive Ridley.
6.
Old Habits Die Hard
Tug hastened down the stairs, and was greeted with loud acclamations. Smiling broadly yet a bit nervously at this unexpected testament to his social connectivity, he nodded to Olive but made no big deal of her presence. Someone pressed a jelly doughnut and a fresh coffee into his hands, and he scarfed them down. Then the exodus began in earnest.
The first sweaty shuttling delivered nearly half his stuff to the basement of the old movie palace. Then came a refreshment break, with everyone gently ribbing Tug about this sea-change in his staid life, and subtly expressing their concern for his future, expressions he made light of, despite his own doubts. The second transfer netted everything out of the melancholy, gone-ghostly apartment except about a dozen small boxes. These were loaded into a single car. Sandwiches and pizza and drinks made the rounds, and a final salvo of noontide farewells.
Then Tug was left alone with Olive, whose car, he finally realized, bore the last of his freight.
But before he could expostulate, Narcisse Godbout arrived on the scene in his battered Burroughs Econoline van.
Born some seventy yea
rs ago in Montreal, the fat, grizzled, foul-mouthed Kewbie wore his usual crappy cardigan over flannel shirt, stained grey wool pants and scuffed brogans. Although resident in Carrollboro for longer than his Montreal upbringing, he had never lost his accent. For thirty years he had been Tug’s landlord, a semi-distant albeit intermittently thorny source of irritation. Godbout’s reasonable rents had been counterbalanced by his sloth, derision and ham-handed repairs. To preserve his below-market rent, Tug had always been forced to placate and curry the man’s curdmudgeonly opinions. And now, of course, with his decision to evict Tug, Godbout had shifted the balance of his reputation to that of extremely inutile slime.
“You got dose fucking keys, eh, Gingerella?”
Tug experienced a wave of violent humiliation, the culmination of three decades of kowtowing and forelock-tugging. He dug the apartment keys from his pocket and threw them at Godbout’s feet into the slush. Then Tug summoned up the worst insult he could imagine.
“You—you latifundian!”
Yes, it fit. Like some peon laboring without rights or privileges for the high-hatted owner of some Brazilian plantation, Tug had been subservient to the economic might of this property-owner for too long. But now he was free!
Tug’s brilliant insult, however, failed to register with Godbout or faze the ignorant fellow. Grunting, he stooped for the keys, and for a moment Tug expected him to have a heart attack. But such perfect justice was not in the cards. An unrepentant Godbout merely said, “Now I get a better class of tenant, me. Good goddamn riddance to all you boho dogshits.”
The landlord drove off before Tug could formulate a comeback.
Leaving Tug once again alone with Olive.
Short and stout and a few years younger than Tug, Olive Ridley favored unadorned smock dresses in various dull colors of a burlap-type fabric Tug had never seen elsewhere, at least outside of barnyard settings, complemented by woolly tights of paradoxically vivid hues and ballet-slipper flats. She wore her long grey-flecked black hair in a single braid thick as a hawser. Her large plastic-framed glasses lent her face an owlish aspect.
The Paul Di Filippo Megapack Page 46
