Fat Bald Jeff

by Leslie Stella

  “What’s a Shirley Poppy, model four-five-nine?” I asked, looking at the first item.

  Jeff replied, “A blowup doll,” then went into sordid detail.

  Ha! Who’s shirking off now, Coddles?

  “And don’t overlook the items he purchased off the Internet from the Adult Happy-Nappy Corporation. They deal in intimate products for the contemporary infantilist.”

  I stared. “You mean … ?”

  He nodded. “Gets off on wearing diapers and sucking on a pacifier while his secretary changes him.” Hence the closed-door lunch meetings with Miss Fernquist each week!

  “And he’s not the only one,” he said. He went on to show me the itemized corporate credit card report that listed the executives’ annual purchases: airline trips, clothing from Neiman Marcus, and bills of sale from various salons and spas, among other things not usually paid for by one’s employer. The bigwigs at the National Association of Libraries were as corrupt as television evangelists.

  The day sped by. Received a phone call from Mother, anguishing over the lumbering Swede.

  “Mother,” I interrupted, “can’t we talk later? I’m very busy at work. Don’t you think I do anything here?”

  She said dryly, “I know what you do there,” and hung up. I switched off solitaire.

  Fat Bald Jeff came to collect me at five o’clock. We were going to his hovel to plan the website. He said he had kept a secret network connection to the Place from his home computer for two years and could access all the information off the private financial reports and confidential personnel files.

  “Not so private and confidential, eh?” he said with a wink. I am relieved that Jeff’s on my side.

  We exited the building, and I’m sure we made a merry sight climbing aboard the stinking Chicago Avenue bus. I had on a dowdy A-line rayon dress in prisoner-calming blue, matching gloves, and Cuban heels. It seemed the appropriate choice this morning as I agonized over my hangover. Jeff wore his usual T-shirt and denim mainsail jeans in slimming black. His motorcycle boots were scruffy and black. To accommodate his girth, he had added extra holes to his belt, possibly with his teeth. Also black. (Belt, not teeth. Teeth are yellow.) We sat in the front seat together, or rather he sat in the front seat and I folded myself into a greeting card next to the window.

  I asked politely for an inch of room. He sighed irritably and shoved over.

  “It’s very bad for my coccyx to hang over the edge of the seat,” he complained.

  “Well, I certainly can’t sit this way for more than a minute. My spine is not made of foam rubber.”

  Ended up sitting in his lap, which seemed the only reasonable thing to do. The other passengers snickered, but I think we held up our end of it with dignity.

  “Let’s get off here,” he said. “We can pick up dinner on our way to my house.”

  I looked around for the café or urban market. But he led me to a disreputable-looking corner shanty. A baleful youth stood outside, looking us over. I clutched Jeff’s pork-roast arm for reassurance, but he squirmed out of my grasp.

  It was nothing more than a liquor store, and a shabby one at that!

  “There’s nothing to eat here,” I whispered.

  “Why are you whispering? Anyway, there’s plenty to eat. Canned stuff down that aisle. Chips over here.”

  I sniffed distastefully. “It smells like rotting meat.”

  “See? I told you there was food.”

  I wandered around uncertainly. I found a bottle of Malibu Rum in the aisle marked BEAUTY AND HEALTH, but there was absolutely nothing edible for a person battling irritable bowel syndrome. I complained to Jeff, who said the only other place nearby for food was Chicken George, two doors down from the hovel. Chicken George had recently been under investigation for luring neighborhood cats into its back door, whence they were never seen again. I am a great lover of animals and could not possibly patronize such a place.

  We approached the cashier, a sallow and crabby-looking Middle Eastern fellow, with our goods: rum and canned corn for me; Fanta grape soda, potato chips, baked beans, and Zingers for Jeff. When we got outside, Jeff grumbled that he had been shortchanged a dollar. I pointed out a police car parked right in front of the store, but he just told me to can it and pushed me along.

  “In a neighborhood like this, poor, fat, bald guys have no friends,” he muttered.

  I said, “In what kind of neighborhood do they have friends?”

  Struck by the sad eloquence of my words, we walked along in silence.

  I tried to hold his hand, but he jerked it away. “I’ve got carpal tunnel syndrome,” he said. “Do you mind?”

  The hovel loomed before us like the Shanty of Usher. The grotesque mongrel strained at the end of its chain as Jeff stumped into its sight. On the front step sat a skinny man with long, tangled red hair, big gym sneakers with no shoelaces, snug white jeans, and a sleeveless shirt bearing the Rebel flag. I shook my head in disgust. Everyone knows it’s too early in the season to wear white.

  “Hey, fat boy,” called the man. “I’m missing a bag of weed. You steal my weed, fatso?”

  “I didn’t steal your weed,” replied Jeff in a tight voice as he scrunched by the growling dog. I clung to Jeff’s shirt all the way down the sidewalk.

  “Well, it’s gone, right outta the garage. I saw you messin’ around back there with some woman.” He leered at me.

  I cleared my throat. “Excuse me, I’m not his woman.”

  “Just shut up,” hissed Jeff.

  “Maybe I’ll let Kong here search you for it.” The animal yelped and twisted around at the sound of its name. Jeff and I had reached the building and continued down the walk toward the rear fire escape.

  “Anyway, fat boy, my mama been lookin’ for you,” the man shouted after us. “You better pay your rent, fat boy, or Kong’s gonna get real ugly.” That’s ridiculous. Dogs have no conception of real estate.

  “Why me?” huffed Jeff.

  We reached the top landing of the fire escape and he opened his door—whereupon an emaciated hag flew out of the loft and flung her broken twig arms around Fat Bald Jeff!

  “Mrs. Nibbett!” he cried, disentangling himself from the hag.

  She opened her mouth in a wide, frightening gap-toothed grin. “Oh Jeffy, I’m so glad you’re safe! I was sick with worry, I tell you. Sick!”

  “I’m all right,” he said gruffly, “but you really shouldn’t go in my apartment without my being there—”

  “Oh Jeffy, what secrets are there between lovers?”

  I would have staggered backward in amazement at this vaudevillian farce had we not been two and a half stories above their rotten yard.

  “Mrs. Nibbett, I have to go inside now, okay?” said Jeff, inching by the harpy. He pulled me inside by the wrist, but before he could shut the door, she stuck her withered claw-foot in and jammed it open. She had a lot of strength for an animated corpse.

  She breathed heavily, and up close I could see the layers of pancake makeup on her dry-onion skin. Where her lips must have once been were now just smears of frosty red, and silvery-blue eye shadow filled the sockets of her skull. Cotton-ball hair stood out in tufts from her scalp, and she wore a moth-eaten white nightgown. From within its folds she withdrew a stubby white candle and a Zippo. She lit the wick, carefully shielding the flame from the breeze, and handed the candle to Jeff.

  She said, “Here is a candle to light you to bed; and here is a chopper to chop off your head!” I screamed and ducked behind Jeff, who calmed her with tranquil murmurs of assent as he shoved her out of the apartment. But the claw remained fast in the doorway.

  “You owe me four hundred dollars,” she rasped, spittle flying. “Can we make an arrangement?”

  “Yes, yes!” he shouted, heaving the door against her.

  “Jeff, you’re going to break her!” I cried, peeking over his meaty shoulder.

  The hag gave the door a mighty shove and stared as though seeing me for the first time.
She gasped, “Who are you?”

  I gulped. “His woman?”

  Jeff took advantage of her surprise and slammed the door shut. She hummed a funeral dirge as she drifted down the fire escape.

  He blew out the candle and tossed it in a bucket under the Peg-Board. It landed on a pile of a hundred others. He clapped his hands together, rubbed them, and said brightly, “Well! Shall we begin?”

  I stumbled wearily to the futon. “I can’t even remember why I’m here,” I said. “What was that thing?”

  He dismissed the whole episode with a wave of his hand. “Just the landlady. Annoying monthly drama.”

  I spread out some relatively clean newspaper on the futon and sat down. “And what about Lynyrd Skynyrd on the front step?” I ignored the mental image of righteous Val defending his favorite mustaches.

  Fat Bald Jeff barked that he’d already told me all about these people and that we had better settle down to create our scandalous website. I would have liked to argue, but it was already five minutes past my dinnertime.

  It was dark by the time I boarded the lousy California Avenue bus. I was terrifically nervous about walking the three remaining blocks home from the bus stop, so I held my pepper spray out in front of me and loudly sang “Love on the Rocks” with a fervor that would have made Neil Diamond sick with envy.

  Made it to the building unmolested. Paco was sitting on the front stoop, smoking Pall Malls. How relieved I am to have Paco on my front stoop instead of a trailer-trash ruffian! Even if his cigarette smoke defiles my bronchial tubes.

  “New neighbor,” he said, pointing to a U-Haul parked in front. A handsome man emerged from the truck, carrying a box marked CHINA. He smiled and said, “Excuse me” as he passed me on the sidewalk. Thrills! What good luck: he had looks, breeding, manners, and his own china. Quite old, though—he must be forty—but who better to appreciate my youth and charm? And judging by the way he appraised my figure, in spite of the matronly A-line, he couldn’t be a member of the fancy lads’ club.

  Would’ve helped him carry his belongings upstairs, except my arms have the strength of bendy straws. Went into my bedroom to think about the future, now that Fat Bald Jeff had shown me the promise of our website. Scary to think of Fat Bald Jeff, slaving for ten years in the Hole without a raise, without real friends, without hope. But Jeff said everything had changed for him now. It had taken him almost two years to compile the evidence he had, two years of waiting for the right moment to present it to the public.

  “This makes those ten years worthwhile,” he said.

  “But what about afterward?” I asked. “When it all blows over?”

  He smiled grimly. “It will never really blow over for me, because I will have been the one who caught them at their nasty little games. Even if you are the only one who knows that I was behind it.”

  But his life wouldn’t really change just because of a little prank, would it? Mine would remain just as rustic and lacking in financial excess. Our jobs would still be deadening, our bosses still creepy—just more careful about hiding their misdeeds.

  “Don’t be too sure,” he warned.

  My bedroom could do with a little change, but I needed money for that. The Lemming had never been very generous about lending money. Felt sad to be stuck in a bedroom painted landlord beige. What I had to show for myself after twenty-six years of struggling against mediocrity: a three-legged dresser with chipped paint; a closet full of thrift-store glamour, just this side of ragged; a ceramic lamp made by Father that shorted out and jolted me every once in a while; a wobbly nightstand that held my drink recipe book and Gran’s old Bible. Of everything I owned, the nightstand was probably the nicest item, and that used to belong to Val. I covered it with a lace doily, but I could still see pentagrams carved on the surface.

  Without Val Wayne, I would be truly alone in this world. Gran is too consumed with her physical ailments to care about me anymore, and Mother is obsessed with ham-fisted Sweno, king of Norway.

  When my parents finally turned the minibus toward home after two and a half uncivilized years of peddling and communing, I was fifteen, and they weren’t speaking to each other anymore. They enrolled me midsemester in a progressive school in Evanston, a Montessori where we students selected our own topics for study. I said I was interested in dresses and flowers, so they put me in home ec and biology. Val was my lab partner, and when we refused to dissect our frog on moral grounds, the teacher clasped us to her bosom and congratulated us. You cannot rebel at a Montessori!

  Val’s parents were hopeless hippie idealists too, but at least by the eighties they had decided to get jobs. My father was still chanting under the kitchen table and digging in forests for magical roots. Val had been an outcast at our school, where he was not just the only black student, but the only burnout. It was the burnout status that alienated him. The teachers encouraged him to select an African name, to get in touch with his ancestry. He called himself Black Moor for a while, but confided to me that it celebrated not the invasive Barbary Coast Muslims, but rather the mystical Ritchie Black-more, Deep Purple guitarist. After school, when our classmates went off to sit on the commons and discuss Nietzsche over coffee, Val offered me corn-silk cigarettes, which we smoked behind the jousting arena.

  “One day,” I had said, “I’m really going to rebel. I’m going to marry a rich old buzzard with plenty of footmen and Aubusson tapestries on the walls.”

  “One day,” he said, drawing out his chained wallet and showing me a creased magazine picture of Duane Allman folded within, “I’m going to have a mustache like this.”

  Our friendship had been cemented right there. We both longed for things we couldn’t possibly have, but neither of us was cruel enough to tell the other.

  Even my parents liked him, and said they felt secure about me going off to school at University of Illinois in Champaign-Urbana because Val was going too. Unable to attend a really choice university (Grandmother had some money but had wasted most of it on food and rent for my parents), I was relinquished to whatever lousy education she could afford. Aghast at the prospect of a state school and its lack of old money and social connections, I threw myself on the loom during textile workshop day and bawled. Val set aside the druid costume he’d been creating for his final project and comforted me.

  “Don’t cry, Addie,” he’d said. “You might meet some rich kids at U. of I. Sometimes they go to state schools, if they’re really stupid.”

  “They do?” I whimpered.

  “Sure. And try not to think of it as a state school, but as a really-far-away-from-your-parents school.” That helped. As it turned out, my classmates were not well-connected Old Boys as I had hoped, nor corn-fed bumpkins as I had feared, but just suburban dolts who played Hackey Sack on the quad all day.

  When my father died right after graduation, Val helped Mother sort out his things. Aunt Jane was useless, Grandmother was too grief-stricken, and I had to heat up casseroles and launder Gran’s hankies.

  Val had been boxing up Father’s suits to take to Goodwill, and he offered Gran some sympathetic words on his way out. She’d been weeping for days on our sofa, taking breaks only to spike the tea and stare at Father’s baptismal picture.

  “He’s in a better place now, Mrs. Prewitt,” said Val.

  Gran sat up, dried her eyes, and looked around at our dump of a house. “Yes, dear Val, that’s for sure.”

  So when Val knocked on my bedroom door tonight, I longed to confide in him all the plans Fat Bald Jeff and I had brewing. But Jeff had ordered me to keep my yap shut. I was somewhat offended, as everyone knows I’m no gossip. Heaven knows the only thing I’ve ever tried to be in my life was a comfort to my parents.

  “Your mom called,” he said.

  “Good Lord, that prying shrew! What does she want?”

  “She was upset because she and Jann were breaking up. She said she tried to call you at work, but you were busy,” he answered. Mother loves to air her linens.

  �
�Hooray!” I cried. “I can’t believe it. Finally something is going my way!”

  Val regarded me sternly and said, “Why don’t you stop thinking about yourself for five minutes and call her?”

  “Oh yes,” I said, fairly giggling with glee. “I shall be a most sympathetic ear while she’s tossing his barbells and great, striped exercise pants out the window. I can’t believe my good fortune! First the handsome new neighbor and now this.”

  Val asked what new neighbor, so I took him out into the hallway to peer down between the banisters at 2R.

  “I can only hope 2F is less standoffish with him than they are with me,” I said, but Val shushed me as the good-looking gent emerged from the apartment followed by a decrepit elderly lady.

  “I think that’s it, Mom,” he said. “Call if you need anything.”

  The old horror sneered at him and made a comment about sons who abandon their mothers to live in slums.

  “Okay, Mom,” he said mechanically. “See you soon.” And he left.

  Val and I exchanged puzzled glances. It couldn’t be! There was a perfectly good nursing home only a block away. She couldn’t be living here with us, the bright young things, not counting Paco and the giantess and the lonely drifter in 1R.

  The lady looked up through the banisters at us. “Who’s there?” she croaked.

  “Just your neighbors in 3R,” called out Val. She narrowed her already-slitty eyes, appraising us. I bet she was one of those Hungarians; they’re always appraising others through distrustful, narrowed eyes.

  “Living in sin, are you?” she said and disappeared inside her apartment. We heard all the locks turn, then the sound of something heavy being dragged across the floor and shoved against her door.

  “I can’t believe it,” I said, drinking warm milk and whiskey out of the FIFTY AND FOXY mug. “Why is this happening to me? You know I can’t abide old people.”

  “I can’t believe she thinks I would live in sin with someone who looks like Austin Powers.”

  I said, “Forget about blasting Uriah Heep and Deep Purple anymore.” He groaned and dropped his head into his hands. “And no more drinking in the laundry room,” I despaired. “Or the hallways or the backyard.”