Читать книгу Things I Like About America - Poe Ballantine - Страница 7
ОглавлениеShe’s Got Barney Rubble Eyes
I GRADUATED FROM HIGH SCHOOL WHEN I WAS SEVENTEEN and immediately moved out of my parents’ house into a two-bedroom apartment on Central Avenue in East San Diego with my best friend, Dewy Daldorph, who had recently become a devout Christian. Dewy quickly grew tired of my secular and festive exploits (and my inability to see the light) and moved into a little hut by himself on Redondo Court in Mission Beach, where he could spend more intimate time with his Nazarene girlfriend, though it turned out that she hated the beach. I couldn’t afford the rent, so my two good high school buddies Woodchuck and Goldie moved in with me and shared a room. Woodchuck had a job as a parts delivery driver and Goldie, my second best friend, named for his prominent gold front tooth, was welding iron grillwork in Old Town. We filled the place with bong smoke and beer cans and dreams of beautiful or even passably attractive or even, after seven or eight bongs and a dozen cans of beer, two-legged women, while Dark Side of the Moon played over and over on the little Panasonic stereo by the window.
I was working full time at Pine Manor convalescent hospital downtown, which was packed with attractive young women in short nylon dresses. I joked with them and stared at them and imagined that I could skillfully conceal my erections. Then, one day, I was headed down the hospital corridor about to turn the corner into the break room when I heard what sounded like a donkey being dragged by a tugboat into a river. A new aide in crisp whites sat at a table, her mouth open, the tormented braying sounds emanating thence. Someone, perhaps she, had apparently told a joke. She was laughing all by herself. Her mouth snapped shut when she saw me, and she stared at me as I if were a stuffed duckling dinner with dumplings and buttered baby carrots. No one had ever stared at me like this before. I was a skinny drip with pimples and glasses. Her eyes looked funny and I thought she must be nearsighted. I felt so buffoonishly unnerved and stick-figured and cranberry-faced with sudden prickly rash in my shorts that I moved straight to the snack machine and pretended that she did not exist.
Later that evening she came over to my section, stuck her head in the room where I was working, and smiled at me. “Hi there,” she said.
“Hi.”
“I was wondering if you could help me.”
“What is it?”
“I’ve gotta lift up old Mrs. Fatface, or whatever her name is. In 213.”
“Mrs. Ferris.”
“Yeah, whatever.” She tipped her head and threw back her long, tawny, center-parted, dyed-from-brunette hair. “I need some help.”
“OK,” I said. I followed her down the hall. She moved gracelessly with a mince in her step like an arthritic geisha or a grenade victim from a foreign war.
“My name’s Bonnie Newton,” she said, turning her head and opening her pale masculine mouth at me.
I introduced myself, making sure not to shake her hand because I had recently read a magazine article that stated if you wanted to sleep with a woman, never shake her hand.
“Why don’t we take a break?” said Bonnie, after we had taken care of Mrs. Ferris. “You up for a break?”
She smoked True 100’s, plastic-filtered cigarettes with so little tar and nicotine in them it made you wonder what was the point of smoking them. I smoked Marlboro reds in the box.We were all alone in the break room with the Pepsi machine humming. Her weird, fuzzy eyes were like puddles of shoe polish, and the sharply arched eyebrows above them were darker and more unnatural still, as if she had plucked them completely out, dyed the hairs individually the blackest, most raven black, then replaced each one, inserting the follicles into the pores with a good eyebrow glue. I couldn’t think of anything to say. She leaned over and delivered a chilly scrotum-shrinking whisper in my ear: “I don’t want you to think I’m just a nurse’s aide,” she said.
“What are you?”
“I’m an actress,” she said.
“Oh really. Like movies or what?”
“I’m a member of the Screen Actors Guild,” she said with a haughty jerk of the chin.
“That’s great.”
“I’ve been involved with the Old Globe,” she added. “And I’ve done some movies.”
“Really? Which ones?”
“I had a bit part when I was sixteen in Double Damnation. Did you see that?”
“No.”
“Jason Robards was in that, and Keenan Wynn. I got his autograph.” She nodded rapidly with a sort of squinty electrical wince. “And I’ve had three auditions this year,” she continued hastily. “And I’ll be doing Old Globe Theater and summer stock starting in July, plus this guy’s supposed to call me about some modeling shots.”
“Wow. You’re a model too?”
“Well,” she grated in her dried-out and unmelodic voice, batting her lashes. “It’s like acting. I’d rather act, but you never know. Somebody might see the pictures or recommend me. The money’s good.”
“You’re sure pretty enough to be a model,” I said.
“Say,” she said. “Why don’t you come over tonight and have a glass of wine with me? Are you busy?”
“Not really.”
“I’m new in town and I haven’t made any friends yet. I’ll give you a ride.”
“I have a car.”
“Save the gas. I don’t live far ...”
Bonnie flew down A Street in the left lane in her ratty, little red canvas-top MGB. She didn’t know how to drive. I wanted to grab the wheel to keep her from taking us headfirst into a bridge pillar. “I’m superstitious!” she shouted over the Blue Öyster Cult song playing on KPRI. “I believe that the right lane is bad luck. Are you superstitious?”
“Not too much.”
“I’m also afraid of black cats,” she shouted, tearing down the darkness of Florida Canyon and skillfully evading a crate of lettuce that had tumbled off the back of a truck. “And nuns.”
“Nuns?” I looked back at the lettuce heads, scattered like money all over the road, with dodging headlights dancing all around them.
“I tried to be a nun once. I was too much of a rebel, though. I have a problem with authority.”
“You were in a convent?”
“That’s where my modeling career started.”
“How?”
At the top of the canyon, Bonnie ran a stop sign and as my head whirled around on my neck and my fingers sank into the armrest and the onslaught of traffic converged upon us in our final seconds on earth, she explained to me how her modeling career had begun at a nunnery. “One night me and five other girls sneaked out the window and drank wine and kissed with boys from the vo-tech down by the river. When they caught us, we had to dress this big, dead nun for penance. She was stiff as a board, and while we were lifting her from the table, the hoist snapped and she sat straight up and looked at us, and we all took off out the door. I ran away that night, hitchhiked south, and got picked up by a guy who wanted to take pictures of me.” She shook her head regretfully. “My granny never forgave me after that.”
“Why? Because you left the convent?”
“No, because she saw the pictures. It was a motorcycle magazine. You know, I showed my tits. Big deal. I think she was just jealous.” She glanced down at her prominent breasts. They seemed like two unknown worlds to me, crying out be explored.
“Where was this?”
“Minnesota.”
“Is that where you were born?”
“No, I was born here.”
“In San Diego?”
“My father was in the Navy.”
“You were born in Balboa Hospital?”
“I guess so. I don’t remember.”
She took a left on Landis Street, roared into a lot, and parked crookedly around the back of an apartment complex, which, through the shaggy silver silhouettes of eucalyptus trees, overlooked Balboa Park. I untangled myself from the seat belt and climbed out of her death trap of a sports car.
“This is a nice-looking place,” I said.
“I was lucky to find it.”
“Where were you before?”
“Topanga Canyon. I had some work up there...”
The rank, slow perfume of potted geraniums drifted up to my nostrils. The hairy eucalyptus trees smelled like cats in heat. Off to the east the Romano-colored moon was trapped behind a cloud for a moment before it finally broke and lifted free. Bonnie led me up a flight of concrete shelf stairs. Wind chimes tinkled and I almost kicked over a hibachi. She stopped for a moment to jingle a key and give the door a gentle shove, and I followed her into a hazy, green room veiled with the smell of Charlie perfume. The low pile carpet was chlorine blue, like a public swimming pool. A laundry basket sat on the floor, and feminine articles were laid over the back of the couch, pink and yellow bras, pink and yellow panties. Two cantaloupes on her oval dining room table sent up a musky fragrance, like a fruity version of the eucalyptus trees.
“Excuse the mess,” she said. “You’re my first visitor.” She indicated the panty-decorated couch. “Sit down.”
I took a seat amid all the heavenly underwear. On the floor across from me was a wooden needlepoint rocking chair and probably two hundred record albums arranged in milk crates under an impressive NASA-black Marantz stereo. From the opposite wall a large pastel of a woman in a broad sun hat—a print I think everyone owned in 1973—gazed down upon me with blithering Neil Diamond serenity.
“Why don’t you take your shoes off?” she said, kicking off her own. “I don’t know how anybody can stand to wear clothes. I think deep down I’m a nudist. When I was a little girl I used to go around naked all year—even in the winter.”
“In Minnesota?”
She bent over and showed me her ample white breasts. “Do you like apple wine?”
“Um, yeah.”
“It’s Annie Green Springs. My favorite. Put on an album if you want.”
Bonnie had what I considered to be good taste in music: Led Zeppelin, Deep Purple, Neil Young, Robin Trower, the older more obscure albums of Pink Floyd, all arranged alphabetically, a good sign in a person, I decided. I extracted Meddle from its sleeve and set the needle in the groove.
“Good choice!” she shouted from the kitchen.
“So,” I shouted back to her. “How did you end up at Pine Manor?”
“It was in the paper. What about you?”
I took a crotch sniff off a pair of her clean panties. “Took a class in high school.”
“How old are you anyway?”
I cleared my throat. “Seventeen.”
“I thought you were in your twenties,” she said, swinging around the corner with two glasses of wine. “Why, you’re just a baby!”
“How old are you?” I said.
“Twenty-two. That’s not too old, is it? I hope you like ice.”
I thought of Woodchuck and Goldie sitting at the table smoking their bong, pining over women, and wondering where I was. They wouldn’t believe it if they saw it. I took a gulp of the wine, good, cold, sweet, soda-pop wine.
We played a game of Scrabble and drank more wine. Bonnie was a poor speller and made up words: VOOGLE. I was out of Marlboros, so I smoked her True Menthol 100’s, which were so low in tar and nicotine I couldn’t tell if they were lit or not.
She passed me a folded note. I opened it and read: “Sometimes I have trubble comunicating with men.”
I wrote back: “Don’t feel like you have to be nervous around me.”
“I am so happy to be with you,” she returned.
We exchanged these notes that grew increasingly strange with poor spelling, like disturbing little special education valentines.
“I’m paralized inside.”
“I have never loved,” she wrote again.
“Why don’t you trust me? You think I’m going to hurt you?”
“Who am I?”
“How the hell would I know,” I wrote back. “I just met you.”
“Men have always treated me badly,” she said, crossing her arms and staring at me with her fuzzy black eyes that were either entirely pupil or no pupil at all. By all accounts she was attractive, but whenever I looked into those eyes all I could think of was Barney Rubble.
“Well, I won’t treat you badly,” I said gallantly.
“You don’t have to get back right away, do you?” she said.
About one o’clock that night we drove to the 7-11 on Texas Street for cigarettes and more wine. The clerk, a fellow named Bob, recognized me. We had attended Patrick Henry High School together, where we had both been quietly acknowledged nobodies, not even on the debate or chess teams, or in the Glee Club, whatever the Glee Club did. Bonnie was a little drunk, but she knew how to excite a man. She twined her arm into mine and made a husky-voiced, brighteyed show, writhing and crooning and giggling and showing off her teeth and neck.
Bob watched, mesmerized.
“Can I use your bathroom?” she said.
Bob almost broke his legs showing her where the restroom was in back. I surveyed the candy bars and studied my pimply face in one of the curved corner mirrors. I saw Bob coming up behind me, a pinheaded blob in the mirror. “Where did you find her?” he said.
“We work together.”
“And you’re what, out on a date?”
“Just drinking wine at her house.”
“Alone?”
“Yeah.”
“How did you do that? A fox like that. With bombs like that.” He bit his hand. His lips were all shiny and flecked with saliva.
“Take it easy, Bob. Do you want me to call a veterinarian?”
“Jesus,” he said. “I couldn’t get a date with my own sister. How did you do that?”
I shrugged. Now I knew what it was like to have a beautiful girl. It was not as Bob or I had imagined it. How did anything happen to you? It just happened.
“How old is she?” he demanded.
“Twenty-two.”
“She’s old enough to buy booze.” He grimaced as if recalling spleen surgery. “Oh, man, I’d kill for something like that. Has she got any friends?”
“I don’t know.”
“How long have you been going out with her?”
“Just one night.”
“One night?” Bob spun around giddily, slapping his hip.
“Shhh,” I said. “Here she comes.”
“What are you fellas whispering about?” she reprimanded hoarsely, wiggling her shoulders so the necklace on the top of her breasts jingled and slid. “You’re not talking about me, are you?”
We bought apple wine and Trues and waved goodbye. Bob stood alone in his bright little station and watched with melancholy wonder as we walked away.
“Look what I stole,” she said, when we were back in the car.
I looked down at a bubble package with a little tube of Blistex inside. “What did you do that for?”
“It was right out there in the open. Nobody will miss it. You’re not unhappy with me?”
“No, that’s all right,” I said. “Do you need it? I mean, do you use it?”
“No,” she said.
At three o’clock that morning we were sitting on the floor next to the stereo and it was time to make my move or fall asleep on the carpet like a good little Cub Scout. I had no knowledge of the passwords to carnality, but I had seen a lot of pornography in the hot lunch shops downtown. Annie Green Springs had filled me with sloppy confidence. And she was leaning back before me in steamy invitation, the buttons of her blouse coming undone, so I tossed off the last of my soda-pop wine and reached across to help her with the rest.
“What are you doing?!” she cried in a gruff tone that was meant to sound like reproof, but was instead almost trilling with delight.
“I am unbuttoning your blouse.”
“Are your intentions honorable?”
“My intentions are to take off your blouse.”
“Have you ever been with a woman before, Baby?”
“No,” I said.
“Are you sure you want this?”
“Why wouldn’t I?”
“You might not.”
The word transvestite went off in my head, all those stories I had heard about the small-town (usually Navy) boy who meets the big-city girl and later on that night, to his horror, reaches down and honks the frankfurter. But she wasn’t a transvestite. I wasn’t that green. Then I thought transsexual (the husky voice, the pale masculine mouth, the weird fuzzy black eyes)—well, if he was a she, or however it worked, I thought, hats off to the surgeon! It was too late to turn back now.
“Not here, Baby,” she said, and led me by the hand down the hall. Her bed seemed to glow like an orange grove or a field of lilacs in the dusk. I was vertiginous with brimming, neck-cricking, hydrophobic ecstasy. I groped and grabbed like a blind suckling pig. Her body was sleek and splendid, abundant, refuting all notions of Scandinavian surgery. My jeans, in my robust haste, got jammed like a pair of handcuffs around my ankles. She asked me breathlessly, “Are my titties too big?”
“God, no.”
“Is my pussy too tight?”
“No.”
“Some men think it’s too tight.”
“No, it’s just fine. It’s perfect, honest, really...”
“You’re very nice, Baby. You know that? I like nice men.”
She claimed to have five orgasms that night. I was lucky to have one. I humped and hunched away, like an insect with its head cut off. I seemed to be numb below the waist. My greatest fear had come true. I was not normal. I had masturbated too often, or dulled my senses by seeing too much sailor porno downtown.
For breakfast we ate Hostess Ho Ho’s and Oscar Mayer smoked links on paper plates with plastic knives and forks. I had been sneaking glances in the mirror and congratulating myself whenever possible all morning. She sawed away at her smoked wienie. “Baby,” she said. “Would you consider moving in with me?”
“Moving in with you?”
“It’s not too soon, is it?”
“Well, I hadn’t—”
“I like you, Baby. I don’t want to be alone . . .”
When I returned to my smelly, teenage apartment on Central Avenue that afternoon, Goldie and Woodchuck were sitting stoned at the kitchen table with Steve Jebets, one of the few people in the world I disliked. Jebets was a dark, square, blank-eyed lad with one permanent Alfalfa cowlick projecting from his side-parted hair. He drove a purple Buick Elektra 225 that his father had bought him and dressed as if he’d just escaped from a Saudi Arabian discotheque. He also worked for his father, a developer from the largest city in Pennsylvania, which Jebets pronounced “Philadelthia.” Jebets made fun of my job as a hospital orderly. He said it was “wiping assholes,” and that all orderlies were fags. Woodchuck, with the fine discriminating eye of a rhinoceros, had brought Steve Jebets into our ragged high-school group from his homeroom or somewhere. At nineteen, Jebets was thirty pounds bigger than me. One day I was going to take karate or work out with weights, and sock him in his Philadelthia kisser.
Smoked trailed up lazily from the mouth of a bong. Six raw and drug-drenched eyes stared at me. “Where you been, man?” said Woodchuck, a burly, bucktoothed blond whose hair still had a greenish tint from so many years on the high school swim and water polo teams.
I could smell refried beans. J. Geils’s Full House finished and the needle arm swung back and parked itself in its cradle. “Met a girl,” I said.
“What!?” Steve Jebets roared. “You?”
I moved straight to my bedroom and began to fill a Chiquita banana box with clothes and shoes, my alarm clock, and playing cards. Bonnie was waiting downstairs, and I did not want her to change her mind and drive away without me. I didn’t want anything to do with Jebets either, who liked to talk about all the women he’d had back in Philadelthia. One time the summer before, he had seen me with my sexy fifteen-year-old next-door neighbor, assumed somehow she was my girlfriend, and tried to steal her from me. Her real boyfriend, a welder, cut all four of his tires.
My buddies were all up now, standing in my bedroom doorway, peering at me with their bloody gorilla eyes. “What are you doing?”
“I’m moving out.”
“Where?”
“With her.”
“You’re fulla shit.” Jebets had brought with him from the East a charming manner of speech, which included this classic phrase and many other such unforgettable colloquial gems as: “ya shitbird,” “them’s are fightin’ words,” and “I’m gonna play you the Nose Cracker Suite.” He whipped out his comb and began to groom himself.
“Believe what you like,” I replied.
“Who is she?” he demanded.
“She’s a carnival freak.”
“She must be,” said Jebets, touching up his perennial cowlick. “What’s her name?”
“Bonnie. She’s an actress.”
“How old is she?”
“Twenty-two.”
“How many arms has she got?”
“Twenty-two.”
“That’s less than three octopuses,” said Goldie, who was the only one in the room I liked at this moment because he was the only one who would not try to steal her from me.
“Octo-PIE,” I corrected.
“Octo-pussies,” crowed Woodchuck.
“She must be a pig,” said Jebets, returning the comb to his back pocket.
“No, pigs have four legs. Don’t you remember? Now, if you’ll excuse me,” I said, moving by them with my box. “I’ll make sure to drop you a card.”
“Hey, we’ll come over,” Woodchuck shouted after me.
Not if I don’t give you the address, I thought.
ON OUR FIRST NIGHT OFFICIALLY LIVING TOGETHER, BONNIE and I sat on the couch drinking wine and smoking Trues, and I kept telling myself, I am living with a beautiful woman. How had it happened? It was a miracle. It was like washing up on a desert island or stumbling into the lost regions of a remote African village. The carpet was like the smell of a thatch hut, and the wine was a special green hallucinogenic, and the plastic-filtered cigarettes were made from the poison put on arrows to shoot rare jungle birds from treetops. I felt like the top of my head had been planed off. That serene Neil Diamond girl with the sun hat looking down upon us from the wall seemed to be saying out the side of her mouth in a voice that sounded very much like Bob, the 7-11 clerk, “You’re living with a beautiful woman, ding-a-ling. How did you manage that?”
I watched Bonnie closely for the first two weeks because she was my girl and I was interested to know what in heaven’s name she saw in me. Naturally, I knew something had to be wrong with her. I was willing to overlook a bit of alcoholism, that alarming donkey laugh, and what immediately became recognizable as kleptomania. I had to adjust to a nearly exclusive diet of cake from the grocery store and Oscar Mayer smoked links. Her ability to invent stories about herself bordered on the prodigious, but her memory was poor, so that she was constantly manufacturing new stories, which would clash with the perfectly good old ones. Her autograph of Keenan Wynn that I never saw, for example, turned into a collection of autographs of famous movie stars that I never saw. In the course of one day, her beloved only brother, who supposedly lived in Santa Monica, aged four years. Though she had lived there, she could not tell me where Topanga Canyon was, and one day as we stood in front of a franchise map of the U.S. at the International House of Pancakes on El Cajon Boulevard and she tried to show me where her modeling career had begun in a Minnesota nunnery, she pointed to the upper peninsula of Michigan. I had already been to the downtown library to check a movie directory, cross-referencing Jason Robards, Keenan Wynn, and Double Damnation, and found out that such a film did not exist. But, as I say, I was willing to put up with a few foibles, perhaps even a dangerous girl, because I would not have had a girl otherwise.
Bonnie claimed, with a giggle, to be a nymphomaniac. This may have been the one profession about herself, that and her choice of cigarettes, that was true. I had no shortage of sexual energy and undertook the task of satisfying her, sometimes as many as five times a day, improving my skills and potential for conjugal pleasure by lowering my expectations and occasionally conjuring up a smutty image from one of the sticky-floored rooms downtown. Every night she had dozens of orgasms, bushels of them, more than humanly possible. Though it was the era of the orgasm, and there were best-selling books about orgasms, and wise people from the East commanded handsome lecture fees to discuss orgasms, I learned to have a low opinion of them. In the currency of orgasms there were too many counterfeits. And whatever shudders of genuine bliss you might achieve, you never got to keep one. You couldn’t even remember them.
Every morning Bonnie scribbled, naked at the kitchen table, in purple ink in a pink plush-bound diary that she locked extravagantly with a tiny key inserted into a gold latch and “hid” in her underwear drawer. She liked to write naked in front of me in the sunlight, her painted yellow hair tumbling across her face and down her back, her foot up under her buttocks. As she wrote she would glance at me frequently with mysterious smiles, and say things such as: “I bet you’d like to read this.”
I always told her I wouldn’t, but I was actually very curious. I would have liked to have known what she really thought and felt. Unlike anyone I had spent considerable time with, there was not one substantial thing I could claim to know about her, except that she made Pinocchio look like Pope Paul VI. And the truth about her was in that diary, I imagined. And the truth about me was in there too.
BONNIE WAS SUPPOSEDLY AN ACTRESS LOOKING FOR WORK, but the phone never rang. No one ever came to the door either, except your general-issue Jehovah’s Witness, and then one night a ghetto kid with a box of chocolate bars, and then one other time a neighbor wanting to know if we’d lost a cat. I assumed that Bonnie had no friends—there was good reason to believe this—but one night about nine o’clock, my night off, Bonnie was burning sliced-off-the-tube chocolate chip cookies in the kitchen, and I was sitting on the couch drinking apple wine and watching a program about the manufacture of cheese on PBS with the sound off and Led Zeppelin One playing on the turntable, when someone knocked on the door.
Bonnie dashed around the corner. “Oh, Lance,” she cried, falling out the door, her arms swinging around his neck like ribbons around a maypole. “Come in! Come in!”
I stood up, and my pants gathered into my crotch. Lance looked about twenty-three or twenty-four. He wore a striped harlequin sport shirt tucked into knife-pleat slacks and shiny, tan shoes that zipped up the sides. He seemed very confident to me and good looking in a languid, careless way, locks of his thick curly hair falling over his forehead.
Bonnie frolicked around the room in her long translucent floral evening gown, her breasts jiggling; she kept standing up on her toes and bringing her hands together against her throat. “Come in. Come in. Sit down. Lance, oh, Lance, this is—” she seemed to forget my name for a moment—“Baby.”
He smiled at me in the way you would smile at any adult named Baby. I shook hands with him and felt about as low and masculine as a snail. The arm on the turntable lifted from the record and we were left with a silent PBS cheese documentary. “Nice to meet you,” he said.
Bonnie seemed out of breath. “Can I get you a glass of wine, Lance?”
Lance sat down in the needlepoint rocking chair across from the couch. He must’ve made some affirmative sign on the wine offer, because Bonnie flew off into the kitchen. I studied Lance. He had an actor’s good looks, except for a bulge in the middle of his top lip that pulled it back from the front teeth, and his eyes were a shade too far apart under the buttery locks of hair that fell over his forehead. It gave him the slightest appearance of imbecility. Also, the distance between his nose and mouth seemed a little long, especially with that knot on his lip.
Bonnie returned with a glass of wine. The brightly colored seethrough gown made her look fat. I wanted her to look her best for company. I had only been able to show her off once, to Bob, a poor slob I barely knew, and only for a few minutes before she had stolen that tube of Blistex. I had been getting up the nerve to take her to a party and show her to the boys, though I knew my good friends would assume that anyone loose and crazy enough to fall for me would be fair game for them as well.
Lance accepted the wine, swung the ankle of his shiny, tan, zippered shoe up on a knee, and tipped back in the rocking chair. He took a sip from the wine, nodded contemplatively, then said to me, “So, you’re the one Bonnie has gone wild over, huh?”
“Well...” I blushed.
“Every time I talk to her that’s all she can talk about, Baby, Baby, Baby...”
How often do you talk to her? I wondered, a flame of panic roaring up my spine.
Bonnie stood by with her own glass of wine and stared at Lance contentedly. She had neglected to ask if I wanted one. I could see her naked outline through the gown as she began to rub the back of Lance’s neck.
I hastily lit a True, a funny name for a cigarette so technologically altered as to be difficult to identify as tobacco.
“Lance is an old acting friend of mine,” Bonnie explained, kneading Lance’s neck without taking her eyes from him.
“Really?” I said, getting two or three puffs off the plastic-tipped cigarette, then flicking some ashes on my pants.
“Yes, we were in Strasberg together.”
“Is that in Germany?”
“No, that’s an acting school.”
“Oh.” I grinned and took consecutive puffs off the True.
“We took lessons from Stella Adler.”
“Stella Adler.”
Lance nodded slowly. Bonnie had quit rubbing his neck. Now her hand lay on his shoulder. He seemed unaffected by the attention. His eyes had a soft staring-into-the-fireplace look—a tender reminiscence of those Stella Adler days in Strasberg, Germany.
“She’s Stanislavsky,” said Bonnie, to help me better understand the renowned Stella Adler.
“That’s in Russia, right?”
The actors both laughed warmly. I was redeemed. Everything was going to be OK now.
“Lance is a method actor ... like Al Pacino.”
“Ohhh.”
“He just did a margarine commercial.”
“Did he?”
“Yes. Blue Bonnet. Two hundred thirty-five people tried out for the part.”
“Think about that.”
“We acted together in San Francisco, when I lived there.”
“I didn’t know you lived in San Francisco.”
“I never told you?”
I felt suddenly shaky, like a guy in a tree house who hears a loud crack. I had a sip of wine and lit up another cigarette. There was one still burning in the ashtray.
Lance smiled and patted Bonnie on the behind, calm and comfy as could be, ankle on knee. “I need another glass of wine,” I announced. “Anybody else need one?”
“What?”
I limped into the kitchen. The charcoal chip cookies were smoldering on the counter. I turned off the oven and dragged out the bottle of Annie Green Springs. As I poured the wine, I watched the bubbles gambol and wiggle to the top of my glass. The bottle was gone now. Bonnie would have to buy more. A sensible plan presented itself: I would go back into the room and say, “Hey Bonnie, looks like we better run to the store for more wine. You want to come along with us, Lance? We can drop you off back where you came from, or the Mexican border, if you prefer...”
Bonnie was sitting in Lance’s lap when I returned to the living room, her arm around his neck. “Lance and I go way back,” she said to Lance.
I collapsed into the couch. Deranged voices came to me out of the fog. Kill them with a kitchen knife, they said. Bonnie kissed Lance on the neck and then looked over to check my reaction. When Lance slipped his hand inside her brightly colored gown, she looked at me again. Then she began to unbutton his shirt, continuing to monitor my responses as if she were tuning a car diagnostically. I felt myself petrifying. Her eyes were glittering zeroes, like a woman without a soul, like a woman in a Led Zeppelin song, and the bottom of her face had receded into mist, but the expression was: Aren’t I a Naughty Girl? And shouldn’t you just be outraged at me? Shouldn’t you just kill us both in our tracks and put us into immemorial television history, either a trial or a miniseries? Aren’t I the most wicked creature on earth, but aren’t I having fun?
Lance didn’t seem really to care one way or another how wicked or naughty she was or how high the flames around my face rose. He seemed to be enjoying her breasts.
The actors kissed in a sudden raging, foaming, violent, headswaying, eyes-closed, nostril-huffing lock for a few minutes, Bonnie curled up and unbuttoned on his lap. Finally she stumbled up starry-eyed and took his hand, giving me a sweet, almost apologetic, but at the same time grim and dutiful, smile. Her face was a weird and fantastic convergence of sympathy, cruelty, and lust. It was like looking at a jigsaw puzzle that maniacs had hammered and glued together randomly. Lance’s hair was a bit thrown out of place, his trousers were wrinkled and his shirt was unbuttoned, but other than that he seemed unruffled, the same cool, striding, almost robotic Lance that had walked through the door a half an hour before.
They left the bedroom door open for me. I was numb with disbelief. I had thought it impossible they would go this far. I knew that I should leave right then—but my car keys were in the bedroom. Also I wanted to give her a chance to explain herself. Maybe it was all some awful misunderstanding, or incredible arrangement of incompatible events. Temporary insanity. Hypnotism. An elaborate practical joke. A test of my fidelity. Maybe she was on medication.
And I did not know what the rules were. I had never even been out on a date. Everything I knew about women came from sailor porno, magazine articles, and late evening hearsay. Maybe if you were a skinny drip you had to share your women with thick-witted, Mediterranean-looking method actors.
I wandered into the kitchen and found a bottle of Ronrico rum below the sink next to the Clorox. I’d never had rum before. It tasted like rubbing alcohol. I took off my shoes and sat in the couch and gulped the Ronrico Rubbing Alcohol Rum as the greedy flames of humiliation crackled over the tops of my desiccated eyes. PBS had gone off the air. I listened to the bedsprings squeak and the headboard bang against the wall. Bonnie called out her pleasure in a series of hoarse and escalating moans.
I was still lying red-eyed and barefoot on the couch when the lovers emerged from the bedroom the next morning.
“You’re still here?” said Bonnie wondrously.
“Where did you think I’d be?” I croaked.
Lance nodded and ran his fingers through his curly hair and yawned like the big lion after eating a whole zebra on a hot afternoon in the shade of a bimbo tree in Zimbabwe. The two lovers kissed sloppily at the door. Her hand lingered on his chest. He seemed irritated by her. She stood on her toes and breathed something light and hopeful in his ear. He mumbled and stumbled blankly out into the fiery, bright yellow sunlight.
Bonnie closed the door and clasped her hands behind her back. She looked wild and fearful and joyous all at the same time. Her hands fluttered to her lips. “I thought you would—” she moved toward me. She wore a dippy tight-smiled, quick-eyed, and helpful expression, a Helpful-Mom-With-A-Long-Brain-Surgery-Scar expression. Her hands flipped on her wrists like trouts ashore.
“Oh, Baby, what do you think of me now?” she said. “You must think I’m terrible.”
I moved past her to the bedroom to get my keys and pack my things. My foot was asleep, and I had a piercing pain in my left temple.
Bonnie followed me around the bedroom, jibbering. “It was just a one night thing,” she said. “I don’t know what happened.”
“That’s fine,” I said.
“You’re not leaving?”
“Of course I’m leaving.”
Bonnie gnawed the middle of a forefinger. “Are you coming back?”
“Not unless I die or something,” I said, ripping one of my shirts off its hanger. “Then I’ll come back to HAUNT you.”
“Oh, Baby, Baby, I’m so sorry. I’ve hurt you.”
“Get out of my way. And stop calling me Baby. I’m not a Baby.” I grabbed my car keys and headed for the door.
“I bought you a gift,” she called. “I was keeping it a surprise. I have it in the bedroom.”
I had to turn. “Is everything you say a lie?”
“No, of course not.”
“You were never in a convent,” I said. “You’re not an actress. You don’t know where Minnesota is. You don’t have a gift for me.”
“I was too in a convent,” she retorted. “We had ham and scalloped potatoes every Saturday night. And we had someone to love us who would never betray us.”
“Who?”
“Jesus, you stupid ass.”
I yanked open the front door. The sunlight was cold and startlingly bright and made my eyes ache. But it was something real anyway. The room behind me was not. The girl in it was not. I shut the door on the room and the girl that were not real, and all the ham and scalloped potatoes, and plodded numbly down the stairs. It was chilly out, the air copper-thin; nothing to filter the sunlight except for the smell of geraniums and a vapor of eucalyptus dust. I heard the door open behind me. She came to the rail and looked down at me imploringly, bosoms spilling, arms spread, her big, dark eyes like holes in the universe. “I didn’t mean to call you a stupid ass. I don’t want to be alone. I don’t love Lance anymore. Give me another chance,” she said. “I promise I’ll never do it again. Please.”
I stopped, which was a mistake, and felt sorry for her, which was a mistake, and believed her, which was another mistake, but as she had said, I was a nice guy. And the part about Jesus got me, even if she was making it up. And I had nowhere to go except back to Woodchuck and Goldie’s place to explain to their leering faces how I had lost my girl. And my dress shoes were still in her closet. And my alarm clock was on her bed stand. And a family-pack of breaded veal cutlets I had bought at the store only a day before lay yet unopened in her freezer.
I decided to give her another chance.
A WEEK LATER GOLDIE, WOODCHUCK, AND JEBETS FINALLY showed up at my door. I’d been waiting for them. “How did you find me?” I said, like the weary fugitive holding out his wrists to the FBI.
“We went to the hospital,” said Jebets. “The dyke nurse told us.”
When Bonnie came around the corner, she sprang to life. “Good afternoon, gentlemen,” she said. “Come in. Sit down. You didn’t tell me you had friends, Baby. And such handsome boys.”
They shuffled in self-consciously, their simpering expressions still articulating doubt about my ability to live with a woman, even a kidnapped geriatric held hostage in a wheelchair. I was the youngest of my group, the least physically mature, the least aggressive, the least athletic. I was the mascot. I was supposed to watch them succeed and clap exuberantly on the sidelines. I could tell they wanted to knock all the air out of my stomach with their elbows.
“Sit down anywhere,” I said.
Woodchuck and Goldie tumbled into the couch. Jebets folded himself into a sitting position, Japanese-style, before the coffee table.
I made introductions. Bonnie beamed. “Would you fellas like some wine?”
“Sure,” they all chimed. “I brought some dope,” added Goldie. “It’s Hawaiian.”
“Light it up, Sparky,” said Bonnie.
It was good pot and soon we were rendered useless. Bonnie flitted about the room, changing records, filling wine glasses, and dropping over at the waist to share her breasts like a tray of hors d’œuvres. “You boys hungry?” she said.
“Yeah, well OK.” They grinned at one another. What a party. With a girl and everything.
Smoked links were served.
“This is my kind of munchie,” Jebets announced, reminding me of the night the previous summer when he tossed off a pint of Four Roses whiskey in twenty-three seconds. (Just add alcohol, goes the saying). About twenty-three seconds later he was blowing long puddles of beans and wienies all over the kitchen floor, the miniature frankfurters perfectly intact.
“I’m a big wienie eater myself,” Bonnie agreed. “By that I mean to say I eat a lot of wienies. Not necessarily big wienies.” She smiled and squinted with her front teeth stuck out. “Though I like big wienies.”
My good friends laughed and gave me nervous side glances. Jebets, a devoted and outspoken breast man, stared unabashedly with the frustrated knit brow of the hound as Bonnie moved about the room. Eventually she was sitting on the floor next to him, their knees touching. She flirted with about as much subtlety as a Fifth Street prostitute.
When she checked over at me with that Aren’t I a Naughty Girl expression, I felt the tape of Lance began to replay. Slow-motion ruin. Dyspepsia. I lurched up, my face burning, and limped into the kitchen for more wine. On the counter a swarm of ants was plundering a clot of ketchup.
I heard Bonnie saying: “I had a small part in a movie with Eliot Gould. I have his autograph.”
“Really,” said Jebets. “Can I see it?”
“It’s at my mother’s house.”
“Where does your mother live? Maybe we could go over there.”
“Hey, do you want to go the store? We need some more wine.”
“I’m not old enough.”
“I am.”
“I’ll go,” shouted Woodchuck.
Bonnie grabbed Jebet’s hand. “No, sit down, Beaver. We’re gonna take my car. There’s only enough room for two.” She winked at me. “We’ll be back in a jiff.”
The door opened, blinding me with that patented Landis Street Heartbreaker Sunlight. Then they were gone. Woodchuck and Goldie sat on the couch staring at me sympathetically. An hour passed. “Well, we’d better go,” they said at last.
“You need a ride?”
“No, we got Goldie’s van.”
I saw my friends to the door. I watched Goldie’s orange Chevy van turn left out of the parking lot. Then I went into Bonnie’s bedroom, found her diary, broke the lock, and began to read. The handwriting was messy and purple with big juvenile loops and pitiful spelling. I sat on the bed and turned the pages. The name “Lance” appeared several hundred times, but my own was not mentioned once. There was not even an indirect reference to anyone who resembled me. I was not much, but to live with a woman twenty-four hours a day for more than a month and give her thousands of orgasms and not be mentioned once in her diary was unfathomable to me. She could’ve at least written: “I am living with a geek, I can’t remember his name, so I call him Baby,” but I was more anonymous than that. It was staggering to be such a nonentity. It was like being thrown down a time tunnel back into high school. I slammed the book shut and returned it broken-locked to its drawer. Then I repacked my Chiquita banana box, not forgetting my dress shoes and alarm clock this time, and drove down to the beach to spend a week or two with my best friend Dewy Daldorph, the devout Christian, who regardless of his phase—junior mafioso or tropical island smuggler—always treated me as if I were his brother.
Bonnie did not show up at Pine Manor the next day. I was braced for the embarrassment, the possible scene, but she never worked, as far as I know, in a hospital again. The head nurse, who had seemed appalled by my alliance with Bonnie Newton, appeared relieved to see her gone and said in effect, “Good riddance.” A few days later Goldie and Woodchuck came into the hospital and found me in Mr. Hollins’s room, tying him up in his wheelchair by the window. My visiting buddies usually wore humble and horrified expressions on their red-eyed faces as they negotiated the hospital aisles, as if old age and decrepitude could only happen to you by accidental contact. Today, however, they were buoyed and immunized by the titillation of my delightfully bad fortune.
“Did you hear the news, man?”
“No.”
Their eyes explored my face thoroughly. “Bonnie and Jebets are getting married.”
I laughed. I remember thinking how wonderful the sun was shining through the water spots on the window, how exquisite it was to be free.
I think they thought I was hurt and putting on an act.
IN THE MIDSUMMER OF 1973, MISSION BEACH WAS A NARROW, four-mile-long strip of hodgepodge cottages between the Pacific Ocean and Mission Bay. The foggy, rusting little beach community contained two small grocery stores, two liquor stores, a rental shop, a rickety old amusement park, a long, busy cement boardwalk with a three-foot seawall, an Italian sub shop called Toby’s, a couple of bars that changed hands every few months, and the usual lonesome hot-dog stand.
Dewy lived on the bayside on Redondo Court in a tiny, rough, brown bungalow filled with bamboo furniture and unread Time magazines. The interior walls were a smooth gray Edvard Munchian driftwood theme. Off to the right was a kitchen so small you had to use a short-handled spatula to turn your eggs. The seaweed-colored shag carpet offered up the aroma of wet dog, beach, and Dewy’s particularly pungent feet. Dewy had sold the dog. He should’ve sold his feet. I would’ve liked to have had the dog. The place was still infested with fleas. They leaped like little pogo-stick artists, PWINK! PWINK! across the floor.
I ended up staying with Dewy for more than a year. We rarely saw each other. He worked days, I worked nights. He was gone much of the time, visiting his girl, doing church projects, or absorbing fatherly advice from Al, his craps-and-racetrack-loving mafioso boss at Caruso’s, the downtown restaurant where he was the day manager. Tall and bearded with an athlete’s build, Dewy looked twenty-five, but he was eighteen going on fifteen, the age at which his family had fallen apart, father say onara, mother gone to sauce. My parents had rescued him. He lived with us until he finished high school. Dewy wanted the world to know he was grown up so he showed it manly things: hard work, big new trucks, Chinese food to go, not paying his parking tickets, and handguns. On my second night staying with him, he proudly produced his new .357 magnum, a chrome, walnut, and iron contraption he kept wrapped in tissue paper in a box under his bed. “It’s a beauty, isn’t it?”
“Yeah, gorgeous.”
“It’ll blow a door off its hinges,” he muttered reverently. “And take a guy’s leg clean off. He’ll bleed to death before the ambulance gets there.”
“Gracious sakes,” I said.
He shoved it at me. “Here, take it.”
“No, really.”
“Take it. I want you to have it.”
I accepted it awkwardly, turning it over in my hands. It was as cold and heavy as a corpse. I disliked guns. I handed it back. “Put it away.”
“Look,” he said, breaking the chamber open. He emptied the rounds, then inserted them again. “See? It’s just a tool. Evolution, man. You’ve got to adapt. You take this one. I’ve already got a .38 in the car.”
“What would I do with it?”
“Carry it, man. Guy up on the boardwalk got robbed two days ago.”
“Thanks anyway.”
“I mean, if somebody breaks in or something or tries to rob you, what are you going to do?”
“Blow their leg off and watch them bleed to death before the ambulance gets there?”
“You don’t need to shoot anyone,” he said. “Just show it.”
“Right,” I said, “and then shoot myself in the foot.”
“OK,” he said, putting it away with a sigh. “It’s there if you change your mind. Just remember to put it back in the box when you’re done with it...”
For many days, like a good little Pandora, I left that box alone, but one night, out of idleness and a Hawaii Five-O rerun I’d already seen seven times, I dragged the six-shooter out. It was beautiful, in a way, gleaming and obscene, a lamp unto fear. I turned it over in my hands, my index fingers enclosing the trigger like a baby’s legs reflexively encircling its mother’s waist. It took me a while to figure out how to break open the chamber. I slid the bullets in and out. The barrel was short, about four inches’ worth. I held the weapon along my hip and whipped it straight up and made some convincing gunshot sounds with my mouth. I sighted a picture on the wall. Then I sighted the lamp, pretending it was Jebets, which gave me more satisfaction than I expected. That night I carried the gun with me down the beach. I was as swollen as a tick with power. I was as intoxicated as a man with two penises. I waited for some guys just out of prison to fool with me. The world was surprisingly peaceful. But then some frustrated young man in a trench coat was shouting at his girlfriend up by the seawall, and I actually thought about walking up there and pointing the gun at him to straighten him out. That’s when I realized how easy it would be to kill someone for no good reason, and I went home and put the revolver back in its box under the bed where it belonged.
I WAS EMBARRASSED ABOUT HAVING MY ONE AND ONLY GIRL stolen out from under me, so I began taking out other nurse’s aides. Getting women, especially nurse’s aides, who were often lonely and outnumbered me twelve to one, was suddenly easy. I had inadvertently, with the long practice high school had given me, discovered the essential trick in capturing women’s interest, which was to ignore them entirely. Living with Bonnie probably had something to do with my success too. These curious little creatures had seen me with Bonnie and that somehow stamped me normal or perhaps even dangerous. Sex, though it was not half of what it had been promised to me by popular culture, had helped to cure my acne. I had some pretty girlfriends and some ugly ones too. The ugly ones were not always the best in bed, as the legend goes, and neither were they any more grateful. They were also harder to get rid of. I would always take the pretty ones down to the 7-11 in North Park to watch Bob writhe in jealous amazement.
In mid-December the first love letter arrived. My admirer was supposedly anonymous, but I recognized the leaky, purple, graceless hand. “I can’t live another day without you,” Bonnie wrote. “I guess you would say that I am obcesed.” I read the letter again, nonplussed. I knew that she didn’t love me. What could have possibly changed? A shred of curiosity remained, but it was overridden by a sense of unease. I didn’t want to encourage her. And she was married now. I threw the letter away.
More letters followed. They had the same mushy, lost, and disturbing tone as the Scrabble notes we had passed long ago on Landis Street. I stopped opening them after a while.
Then the phone rang one night. It was late February. Dewy was off with his Nazarene girlfriend. I answered on the first ring. “It’s me, Baby,” said the husky feminine voice.
“Who’s me?” I said.
“I need to talk to you,” she said.
“How did you get my number?”
“Can we talk?”
“Go ahead and talk.”
“I mean, can we meet somewhere?”
“Why?”
“Because I need your help.”
“What kind of help?”
“I’m the one who’s been writing the letters.”
“I know that.”
“Then you know you’re the only one who can help me.”
I agreed to meet her. I could watch her now with scientific detachment, laugh and leave whenever I pleased. I had turned eighteen long ago, in November, and I felt wise with loss and age.
We met on the B Street Pier. I parked and climbed into her little soup can of a horsehair-smelling MGB so I could leave when I wanted without her getting tangly on me. She looked better than I remembered. She wore a red low-cut sweater and a very short skirt and white knee stockings. I rolled down the window and lit a cigarette. The towering tuna boats were all nestled in for the night, bobbing and scraping gently against their rubber slips. One low, late-night barge scooted out along the light-rippled surface of the water. The air smelled hazily of creosote and diesel fuel.
“I don’t have long,” I said. “I’ve got some laundry I need to do.”
“I’m glad you came,” she said. “I feel so awful.”
“About what?”
“About, you know—Lance and Steve and everything.”
“Don’t,” I said, trying to stretch out my legs. “I’ve forgotten it. It was all so stupid.”
“Wasn’t it?”
“What did you want to talk to me about?”
“I’ve been seeing a psychiatrist,” she said, the flesh in the space between her eyes crimping suddenly. “He told me I was obsessed with you.”
“Obsessed,” I said.
“I told him about everything, Lance and everything, the big mistake I made . . . and do you know what he says?”
“That you should be admitted to a psychiatric hospital?”
“No, he says I should sleep with you.”
“The psychiatrist said that?”
“Yes. He says that an obsession is in the mind and once it is played out in reality it can no longer be an obsession.”
I wanted to ask her what it would be when it was no longer in the mind, but her skirt was shrinking. She mussed her hair and rustled in her seat and turned to face me, the skirt climbing up her legs. “Do you want to come talk to him?”
“Who? A psychiatrist?”
“Yes, he’d like you to come in. He wants to meet you.” She laughed nervously in her coffee-grinder voice. “I’ve talked so much about you.”
“Me? No. I don’t want to see a psychiatrist.”
She put her fingers lightly on my shoulder. “My marriage isn’t working, Baby. I made a mistake...”
I looked up the tall, green hull of a fishing boat called the Samurai Sunrise. “So what do you want me to do about it?”
She swatted me and smiled, squinting her eyes dreamily. “I want to sleep with you, Silly.”
“Sleep with me?” I said.
“I love you.”
“No, you don’t, Bonnie. I read your diary.”
“You shouldn’t have done that.”
“You shouldn’t have lied to me.”
“I keep my lives separate,” she said. “The diary was my dirty life.”
“I don’t believe you. Anyway, you’re married.”
“Just once,” she said. “I need it. He won’t know. He’s off at a bar. He’s seeing another woman. We’re getting a divorce. I need it, Baby. I need you...”
I took her back to Dewy’s beach bungalow. I didn’t care about her one way or the other—but I wanted revenge on Jebets for stealing her from me. And she looked good. Nature had built Bonnie for rolling in the sheets, that was it, and there was no sense wasting her. We stopped along the way and bought a bottle of strawberry wine. The streets were puddled in fog. The fog swept in from left to right in a cold steady flow .The streetlights glowed in lacy blobs like odd little suns in the mist.
We parked down by the Yacht Club, just past the old Santa Clara Hotel. The lot was nearly empty. A tiny, Asian-looking man was rummaging through a trashcan. Two hooded figures in black moved like phantoms down through the alley. Across the street the ocean riffled and roared with a babbling noise in the background like the laughter of nuns on a forbidden picnic.
“This is a nice little place,” she said, looking around and setting her purse on the bamboo couch. “A beach hut. It’s so romantic.”
A flea bounced spectacularly out of the carpet and receded again. “It’s not mine,” I said, pouring two glasses of the foamy, sweet Boone’s Farm Strawberry wine. I noticed she was shivering and lit the little wall furnace, filling the cottage with the smell of burnt lint and gas.
“I’ve got to get back pretty soon,” she said. “He’ll be looking for me.”
I turned off all the lights, and we kissed for a while. Her mouth tasted like brussels sprouts, and she seemed slightly heavier around the hips. “I want to do something for you,” she said, taking my wrist hungrily.
I followed her into the bedroom, flinging off my shirt and socks. Her skirt dropped to the floor. One of her crumpled stockings rocketed past my eyes. Our jaws met in a sliding, heated, teeth-clashing moan. I felt her hot flat thigh, and kissed her neck, and bit her tiny earrings.
“Put this pillow under me,” she said. “Oh, yes.”
Now someone was knocking on the door.
“Forget it,” Bonnie moaned.
I kissed the cup of her throat, the crease of her arm. The knocking insisted, louder with each series. Then a few very pronounced thumps and a familiar voice that boomed: “BONNIE! I know you’re in there!”
Bonnie leaped back against the wall. I fell and banged my forehead on her knee.
“It’s Steve,” she cried.
“Jebets,” I said, wild-eyed, rubbing my head.
“Let me in!” cried Jebets, with a few more slams on the door panel.
“How does he know you’re here?”
“He must’ve followed us. He must have been looking in the window.” She cowered in the corner, the sheet drawn up over her breasts.
“Hey, I know you’re in there,” bellowed Jebets, “and if you don’t let me in I’m going to break down the fucking door.”
“Don’t let him in,” gasped Bonnie.
I scrambled up and snapped on the lights. Clothes were everywhere, draped over the dresser, hanging from doorknobs. A pink sock dangled from the lamp shade. Bonnie crouched in her corner, a frozen Chihuahua grin on her face. I pulled on a pair of pants.
“You did this on purpose,” I said.
“He’ll kill us if you let him in,” she said.
A fist hit the door and the wood cracked. “Bonnie, you stinking two-timing whore—let me in there...”
“Just a minute!” I shouted amiably, reaching under the bed and sliding out the shoe box. Bonnie’s eyes bulged as the tissue paper fell away from the gleaming revolver. I made a quick expert check to see if it was loaded. It was.
Jebets drummed the door with his fist and pieces of wood began to fly.
“I’ll kick it in,” he announced.
“It isn’t my door,” I said.
“You little shitbird,” he said. “I’m gonna tear you to pieces.”
“I’ve got a gun,” I warned, standing two feet from the door, “and I’m poised to fire.”
Bonnie was behind me now, wrapped in a sheet. “Shoot him, Baby,” she said.
A huge stick of varnished wood came spinning out at me as he struck again. “Stop or I’ll shoot,” I said. “I swear to God, Jebets, I’ll shoot.”
“Shoot him, Baby.”
He struck the door again and I was so desperate and afraid for my life that I squeezed the trigger, aiming high on the door, hoping only to scare him, and then I was twisted around to the right, adjusted for the recoil, and tried to figure out why the gun hadn’t discharged. It was faulty equipment. No, I had forgotten to release the safety. Truth be known, I did not know what a safety was.
The door came toppling down. Bonnie screamed and ran for the bedroom, knocking over a glass of strawberry wine.
Jebets, scarlet with fury, a wood chip in his hair, lunged past me. “Come back here, you dumb little bitch.”
“I’m not going with you!” she cried.
I stared at the gun and shook it a couple of times. Then I watched the spreading wine stain in the carpet.
“Get your clothes, slut!” he shouted at her. “Where are your goddamn clothes?”
She began to sob.
I dropped the gun into the couch and found a cigarette.
“Let me get dressed,” she pleaded. “Please.”
“Do you want a beer?” I said to Jebets.
He shot me a furious, exasperated, and yet somehow sheepish glare. It was the only time we would ever share a particle of sympathy for each other, all made possible by Bonnie and her genius for scenes. “Yeah,” he said, his jaw muscles squirming like garter snakes.
“In the refrigerator,” I said. “Help yourself.”
Jebets stomped into the kitchen, yanked open the little icebox, ripped the cap off a bottle, and took a couple of angry swigs.
Bonnie dawdled. Jebets finally hauled her out by the arm, dragging her across the broken threshold, the sheet still wrapped around her.
Not long after this, Bonnie and Steve would have a child. While she was pregnant she would drink, smoke, and take many drugs, including methamphetamine and LSD. The child would not only turn out to be healthy and normal, but intelligent and beautiful. Jebets would divorce Bonnie after three years, develop a serious methamphetamine problem, chain smoke those awful Trues, spend all his free time at the topless bars, and then one day, frightened by a sudden starboard glimpse of that towering, dark archipelago called Death, he would steer down hard and straighten his course, quit the drugs, remarry a decent woman, and find some time for his twelve-year-old child. But it would be too late. He would die of a heart attack at the age of thirty-two.
Bonnie didn’t last long either. She disappeared shortly after the divorce, leaving her child behind. The last time I saw her was late at night in Mission Beach. I was returning from a long walk and she was standing by herself under a lamp by the seawall at Rockaway Court. A white fur coat was thrown around her neck and she wore beige Capri slacks that bulged at the hips. She stared at me forlornly. It was wintertime again. All along the boardwalk the cottages were dark. I thought she would follow me or call to me as I walked wordlessly away, but when I turned back around I was all alone under the stars.
