by Thom Whalen
* * *
The next morning, Randal said, “We got lucky last night,” as he unlocked the back door to Elsa’s.
I wondered how he meant that. Lucky with Betty? Lucky that the Snakes let us party with them? Lucky to be alive?
“How so?” I asked.
“You know why they let us hang around and party with them?”
“Because you gave them that baggie full of marijuana?”
“No. Because they want to join the Hells Angels. They thought that the Angels sent me there to check them out.”
“Check them out?”
“Yeah. When I said that I was from Buffalo, they figured that I was one of the Road Vultures, sent to find out if they were badass enough to be Angels.”
“You told them that we were independents. Unaffiliated.”
“They figured that I lied. That we were travelling incognito so that we could see what they were really like.”
“Did you plan it that way?”
“Not exactly. I figured that Buffalo would be a good place to be from. The rest fell into place automatically. We got lucky. We have to figure out how to use that next time.”
Next time?
Randal retired to the office where he began calling job applicants. The second new guy, Rick, hadn’t lasted a full shift when Mrs. Everett was on the grill. She had dismissed him halfway through lunch.
“Next time, try to find me someone who can sort out the difference between a piece of liver and a chicken breast,” she said when she saw Randal. “That’s not too much to ask, is it?”
When Gwen came in, she looked me over. “What happened to you, Gunner? You look like death warmed over. You must have had a hell of a day off.”
“We partied all night with outlaw bikers. I drank four beers. I’m lucky I’m still alive.”
She looked at me like she thought that I was lying.
That was all right. I wouldn’t have believed me, either. I’d never strike anyone as the outlaw biker type. Some doctor in South Africa had transplanted a heart from dead guy into his patient a couple of years ago. That’s the only thing that would give me the heart of a biker. A medical transplant.
“Yeah, right,” she said. “It’s okay. You don’t have to tell me if you don’t want to.”
She joined Mrs. Everett in the front before I could think of a suitable reply.
Lunch seemed busier than usual. Probably it wasn’t, but I was definitely moving more slowly than usual so that would explain why I kept falling behind.
Randal made up for my stupor. He was moving as quickly and efficiently as ever. Drugs, booze, sleep deprivation, and stress seemed to agree with him.
He gave me my break early. Katie joined me at the picnic table even though her shift was over in another hour so she wasn’t supposed to get a break. She must have prevailed on Gwen’s good nature. Which, in turn, implied that Gwen had a good nature that could be prevailed upon.
This job was full of surprises.
“I saw an ad for long haul truck drivers,” she said. “There’s company out west that’ll train you and everything. I think I’d like that. I like driving.”
“Eighteen wheelers?”
“Of course, eighteen wheelers,” she said. “They don’t need people to drive pickup trucks across the country.”
I tried to imagine Katie sitting behind the wheel of semi. It was a scary thought.
“It’ll be fun,” she said.
I imagined Katie having fun behind the wheel of a semi. That was an even scarier thought.
“Go for it,” I said. By the time she was on the road, tearing recklessly down the freeway into that black night, I’d be safely ensconced in a Columbia University dorm room in the middle of New York City far away from wherever she was driving.
“You don’t think I will?” She sounded huffy.
“I think that you’ll do whatever you want,” I said.
“Damn right, I will,” she said.
I started chewing on my barbecue beef sandwich. It was just shaved beef and barbecue sauce from a can, kept hot in the bain marie until a scoop was piled on a hamburger bun. It wasn’t the best item on Elsa’s menu but I needed a change and was feeling reckless.
“I had fun on Tuesday,” Katie said. “I liked riding on your bike.”
“Me, too,” I said. “I mean I had fun going out with you.” I took another bite of my sandwich. “I’d like to take you out again next week. Next Tuesday when I have a day off.”
“Yeah. That’d be good. I wish you didn’t have to work all the time.”
I glowed inside. She was saying that she’d like to go out with me more often than once a week. That was good. But she was also saying that she wouldn’t go out with me on a night when I was working. I didn’t blame her for that. It would have been a late evening date and there’s nothing to do in Wemsley after ten. Nothing except the one thing that she and I hadn’t done yet.
“Me, too,” I said.
“You were out with Randal yesterday?”
“Yeah. We were up in the Adirondacks until three in the morning. I only got a couple of hours sleep last night.”
“What were you doing up there that late?”
“We got invited to a party. A motorcycle gang called the Road Snakes.”
Her eyes grew wide. She believed me. “What was that like?”
“Sex, drugs, and rock and roll,” I said.
She was quiet for a minute.
I didn’t disturb her while she processed that. I wondered if I should have left the sex part out and just said beer and music.
“You had sex?” she asked quietly.
“No,” I said. “A biker chick wanted to but I told her that I had a girlfriend so I couldn’t.”
She looked at me for a minute, and then said, softly, “Me?”
I reached for her hand. “Of course, you. I’m not going out with any other girls.”
“You’re telling people that I’m your girlfriend?” She was careful to keep her voice neutral.
Suddenly, I was afraid that she might be angry. Did she think that I was being presumptuous?
“Do you mind?” I asked. “It doesn’t have to mean anything if you don’t want it to.”
“No. I like it. I never had a boyfriend who was in college before.”
That made me wonder how many boyfriends she had had. “Have you had a lot of boyfriends who were not in college?” Now it was me being careful to keep my voice neutral.
“Not a lot. Some. You know. About what you’d expect an eighteen-year-old-girl to have. They weren’t serious. I never got engaged or married or anything.”
“I understand,” I said. In fact, I didn’t. I had no idea how many boyfriends would be appropriate for an eighteen-year-old girl. I would have preferred her to have had zero, but that horse, apparently, had already left the barn.
Nor did I have any idea what it meant to have a boyfriend who was not serious. Did that mean that he made jokes and laughed while he was doing sex things with her? I didn’t want to think about that at all.
I might party with outlaw bikers but that didn’t make me any less naïve about normal teenage girls. In fact, it probably made me all the more naïve about them.
My silence was making her uncomfortable. “Who did you take to your prom?” she asked.
“Prom?”
“Sure. You know. You graduated this year, right? Your class had a prom. Who did you take?”
“No one. I didn’t go to my prom.”
She looked horrified. “You didn’t go to your own prom?”
“No. They only sell tickets to couples. I didn’t have a date, so I didn’t go.”
“That’s terrible. There were probably a lot of girls who wanted to go and didn’t get asked. Why didn’t you ask one of them?” Her tone was accusatory. To her mind, a single guy who didn’t ask an unattached girl to the prom was about the worse guy in the world. Maybe even worse than a guy who murdered his date afterward. I had committed a sin that
would require serious penance. Many mea culpas and rending of my clothes.
“I guess I was shy,” I said. “I was younger then.” My prom had been only two months earlier, but I felt much older now. I had partied with outlaw bikers. I had felt up a naked biker chick on a mattress in the corner of their clubhouse. I had drunk more than one beer. “Besides, I probably figured that all the girls in the school had boyfriends. Older guys who would take them to the prom.”
Thinking back, I realized something else. I hadn’t asked anyone to the prom because I thought that no girl would want to go with me. I was one of the biggest dorks in my class. I was afraid that if I asked a girl, she’d likely tell me that she’d rather stay home than be seen at the prom with me.
Now I was two months older and a lifetime more experienced. Now, I realized how foolish that was. I had a girlfriend – kind of – and I could party with outlaw bikers – sort of. I wasn’t the dork that I had thought I was.
But I couldn’t explain that to Katie.
Instead, I said, “If I had it to do over again, I would go to my prom. Even if I’d had to keep asking one girl after another until one said, ‘yes.’”
Katie laughed. “I don’t think you would have had to ask that many girls. Unless you picked one who had a boyfriend already, you probably would have had to ask only one.”
“If I’d known you a couple of months ago, I certainly would have asked you.”
“And I certainly would have said, ‘Yes.’”
Everything was right between Katie and me.
Now I had to think of something to do for our next date – on Tuesday.
Before I went back inside, Katie said, “I’ve never met an outlaw biker.”
“They’re nothing special,” I said.
She didn’t say any more about it. But I could tell that she was thinking about it.
When Randal and I finished closing for the night, he said, “You figure out why they call the biker chick Betty?”
“Because it’s her name?”
“Because it’s short for Betty Boop. You know who that is, right?”
“Betty Boop? It’s a cartoon woman.”
“Not a woman. It’s a cartoon dog.”
“Dog?” This was news. The Betty Boop that I remembered from the cartoons looked like a woman to me. I was going to have to look at her a lot more closely next time I saw one.
“Yep. A sexy dog. That’s Betty. The Road Snakes’ sexy dog.”
“That’s not nice.” I didn’t like to hear any woman called a dog. Not even one who thought of herself as the property of a motorcycle gang.
“Yeah, well, you were smart to stay away from her. That dog’s got fleas. She gave me crabs. I’m itching like hell.” He reached down and scratched vigorously at his crotch. “I’ve got to stop by the drugstore tomorrow and get something for it.”
For the rest of the night, thinking about my close brush with crotch crabs completely grossed me out.
