Apologize, Apologize! (10 page)

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

A
FEW NIGHTS AFTER BINGO’S CELEBRATED RETURN FROM SAN
Francisco, some record company executive in Boston called to say he was having a party. I’d met him casually a couple of times. He was the older brother of some guy I went to school with at Andover. Bingo knew him through a stepbrother he’d shared a room with at Upper Canada College. With the big shiny presence of Peregrine Lowell uppermost in everyone’s minds, Bingo and I could get into anything—concerts, book launches, opening nights, parties.

“There’s going to be all kinds of people here,” he told Bingo over the phone. He was so loud, I could hear him from across the room. “Not just musicians, but writers, artists, journalists, editors, lawyers . . . There’s going to be lots of great conversation . . . you’ll enjoy it.”

“Hey, Coll, he says there’s going to be great conversation,” Bingo said in a clumsy attempt to get me to go with him.

Jesus, who did the guy think he was talking to? Sartre? I was flipping mindlessly through the pages of
Spin
magazine.

“Come on, Collie, let’s go,” Bingo was begging me. “Stevie Nicks might show up.”

“Oh, now who’s asking for a favor? Maybe I’ll just tell you to go pound salt the way you told me the other night on the beach when I asked you to slow down. And let’s not forget the way you left me to fend for myself at the Falcon’s party.”

“Can’t you take a joke? Come on. Let’s go.”

“Why is it so important that I go? Why don’t you go by yourself?” I asked him.

“Let’s go together,” he said. “It’ll be fun. I’m just gonna bug you till you say yes.”

What the hell? It occurred to me I had nothing better to do.

We got there, we were barely inside the door, and right away Bingo was ensnared by some woman with an enhanced prey drive—women of all ages went crazy for him, for reasons that generally eluded me. So there he was, trapped in a corner with an overweight feminist writer in her twenties, signaling me with his eyes to come rescue him.

His braless pursuer was wearing overalls and a pair of rubber boots, an outfit that I previously thought existed only in the minds of sitcom writers. She had a thick torso, and her hair was coarsely chopped off above the ears, with tiny bangs that formed a sparse, workmanlike hedge across her forehead, the centerpiece of a familiar banal landscape.

“The premenopausal power helmet,” Pop called it.

“It’s fucking torture to have to look at her, Collie,” Bingo whined during a rare reprieve.

“Man, you’re just like Pop,” I said. “Anyway, you can handle her. You’re the expert with women.”

“You handle her.”

“What’s wrong, Bing? Not enjoying the great conversation on offer? If you’ll excuse me, I think I’ll plumb the psychic depths of the redhead in the corner.”

I was enjoying the mess he’d got himself into and left him to his own devices while I continued fighting with a music critic who’d flown in from California, who said Mick Jagger was the best front man of all time. I was arguing for the sake of arguing on behalf of Robert Plant.

We were right in the middle of it when she walked in. Her name doesn’t matter. Believe me, you know her name, just another cinched waistline and diverting décolletage at the heart of a scandal. A twenty-eight-year-old juvenile delinquent, onetime beauty queen, wicked drunk, reluctant former heroin addict, she was a convicted drug dealer, desiccated groupie, and tawdry professional girlfriend.

She was out of jail after serving eighteen months in medium-security for her part in the drug-related death of the son of an internationally renowned rock singer. He was young, maybe eighteen or nineteen. She liked them young.

“Ooh, don’t tell me, let me guess, cold hands, warm heart,” she cooed, making a beeline for Bing, taking his hand in hers, undoing the top button of her blouse, holding his hand in her hand, and laying her other hand on top of his hand for just a moment longer than was necessary or even polite, long enough to cue his faulty wiring. He leaned into me for support. I could feel his knees buckle as we both watched her hip-check the feminist writer, who retaliated by loudly proclaiming her contempt for the cliché appeal of a cheap woman with a long neck and a short skirt.

The target of her scorn laughed. She knew. I knew. I knew more than she did. But Bingo didn’t have a clue. She had him and was aroused by his adolescent collaboration. It wasn’t complicated. She was a pro, able to open an artery without detection.

We left the party with her around midnight. What was I thinking? I was just going along with this thing, partly because of inertia and partly because it let me indulge all my worst thoughts about my brother. One half of me wanted to bear witness, the other half of me thought this was a journey he shouldn’t make alone.

I played chauffeur as Bingo clambered into the back next to her, and they were whispering and giggling and carrying on while I was trying to figure out how I could bring the evening to an early end.

Fifteen minutes later, we pulled up in front of a decaying, sunken low-rise whose only exterior illumination came from a streetlight. The front lawn was scuffed bare and littered with ripped and shredded green garbage bags whose rancid contents spilled out onto the sidewalk. A dry wind lifted the open end of one of the garbage bags. Rodent eyes stared out blindly from inside the bag. A poinsettia in a red plastic container sat on a downstairs window ledge.

The lobby’s interior was covered in graffiti, the walls were pockmarked, and the linoleum floor, orange and brown, was heaving.

“What apartment are you in?” I asked her.

“The third floor, apartment 306,” she said as we approached the elevator.

The doors struggled open to reveal an older guy—he had to be sixty—fondling a young girl—she may have been eighteen.

“You going up?” he growled. No teeth.

“We’ll take the stairs,” I said, eyeing the circle of vomit in the corner of the elevator.

“Holy shit,” I exclaimed, repulsed, as Bingo, captivated as a kid at the zoo, neatly navigated a pair of denim cutoffs abandoned on the bottom steps of the staircase.

Her place smelled of cat, the air stale as the indiscriminate crackle of TV noise. She asked us inside. I started to refuse, I’d had enough, but Bingo overruled me. I glared at him, but he just glared back, unmoved.

I was watching from a broken La-Z-Boy as she rooted through her cupboards, a consumptive gravel-voiced raconteur in a micro leather skirt.

“It was too bad. He was a nice guy,” she said insincerely about her notorious conviction, offering me a coffee, which I declined with thanks. Cracked CorningWare.

Bingo, on the sofa across from me, eagerly accepted what I rejected. I watched disapprovingly as he casually added spoonful after heaping spoonful of sugar to his cup.

“Don’t get too comfortable. We’re out of here in five,” I whispered as she left the living room to go into the bedroom. He made a face at me. I rolled my eyes in exasperation.

“Fuck off, Collie,” he said quietly but good-naturedly as she came back into the room and sat beside him. She was right next to him. Their shoulders were touching. She kicked off her shoe and rested her stocking foot on his running shoe. He was humming offhandedly. Singing softly to himself.

I recognized it. He was singing “Beat Out Da Rhythm on a Drum.” Pop had been singing that song for years. She didn’t notice. She was too busy simulating intercourse. He caught my eye. He was so pleased with himself, he might as well have been tingling. She started playing with his hair, winding it through her fingers as if it were long grass and she were an evening breeze. She was sending ripples through the long grass and out into the room.

He grinned over at me. He kept singing, full of mischief . . . I ignored him. He loved that.

“I admit I was an enthusiastic recruit,” she was acknowledging huskily, referring to her choice of work, knowing that to say no was to risk a lifetime behind a cash register.

“Initially, I slept with the guys in the band, who were happy to supply me with dope, then when they got bored with me, our roles were reversed. If I wanted to remain part of the entourage, I had to supply them. So that’s what I did.” She shrugged.

“How old were you?” I was asking all the questions.

“Sixteen. In retrospect, I think that I was a stupid, selfish girl, looking for trouble, craving a way of life I hadn’t earned but felt some entitlement to.” She had obviously availed herself of counseling in the Big House.

“I was mixed up, but they . . .” She inhaled lightly, exhaled deeply. “They were evil.”

I didn’t respond. I was thinking. I glanced over at Bingo. She ran her finger crudely along his pant leg, from his knee to the top of his inner thigh. “Just like you—”

“Let’s go, Bing,” I interrupted as he sank deeper into the fraying foam back of the sofa. “It’s late.” I reached for his arm, grabbed, and pulled him forward to emphasize my point.

“Hey,” she interjected, pulling him back down, abruptly beseeching Bingo, who was preparing to argue with me. “Can you loan me a hundred bucks? I’ll pay you back. I just really need it—like yesterday.”

Bing looked mildly surprised and hesitated before answering. She had nothing to worry about. All anybody had to do to get money from Bing was ask for it. She reached for her drink, impatiently crushing a cigarette into the puddle of coffee pooled in the bottom of her cup, and lashed out. “What do I have to do?” she demanded angrily, looking at him. “Fuck you, is that it? You want me to blow you? ’Cause that’s no problem.”

He caught his breath, the way you do when someone comes up behind you and shoves cold hands under your sweater. Then he looked at me and laughed. A real teenage boy’s guffaw, it had no nuance. No secrets, either, at least not from me.

I stood up, fingering the car keys in my pocket, their jingle a reassuring signal.

“Why don’t you go on ahead, Collie?” Bingo said, grinning up at me.

“No, we’re leaving.” I had this tight smile on my face.

“No thanks. I’m all right.” He turned away as she leered at him.

“Bingo . . . you can’t be serious. . . .” I shifted my weight from one foot to the other, my arms extended in a gesture of disbelief.

“Beat it, Coll.”

My first instinct was to knock him out, but I struggled for indifference, and almost instantly it enfolded me like a warm blanket.

“Fine,” I said, flush with self-satisfaction, convinced this was the last time I’d see him, and good riddance. “I really don’t give a shit how this love story ends.”

“So long, Coll.” He waved me away, the door closing on the sound of her boozy laughter.

By the time I got to the lobby, I knew I was going to hell if I didn’t go back for him. He was in way over his head. While I can’t say my first instinct wasn’t to let him get his ass kicked, fortunately I’m the prince of second thoughts.

I took the stairs, took two steps at once, gripped by a sudden bad feeling, afraid for him in a way that made my insides shake; I reached her apartment in record time, thumped on the door with my fists, my heart banging away in my throat. By now I was almost hyperventilating, thinking I was going to find him fried on the floor from an overdose of her and whatever she was peddling. I was hollering for her to open up or I’d break the door down—pretty corny stuff, but I wasn’t kidding.

Finally, the door opened a crack, I shoved my foot inside, shouldered her aside, and dragged him the hell out of there; she was screaming at me, whacked me on the head with a carton of milk she grabbed from the coffee table, sour milk spraying my hair, my face, the front and back of my shirt. He put up a fight, mildly swearing and digging in his heels, but it wasn’t that much of a fight.

On the way home, I was at the wheel and he was sitting slumped in the front seat next to me, silent and staring out the window. I kept looking over at him, willing him to say something. I like to know where I am. I always want to know what the other guy is thinking, and I couldn’t get a read on him. Finally, I kicked him in the ankle just to get his attention.

“Collie.”

“Yeah?”

“You’re an asshole.”

“You’re welcome.”

“Next time, wait ten minutes before barging in. . . .”

“Oh, here we go. . . . What do you mean, next time? I’m not a goddamn St. Bernard, Bingo.”

“Yeah, you are. I knew you’d come back for me.”

“Well, you knew more than I did, then.”

“Yeah, yeah . . .”

“Yeah, yeah, is right. I’m serious.”

He wasn’t listening. He leaned over and licked my cheek, like one of the old lady’s big, slobbery mutts. I was covered in sour milk and spit.

“Jesus Christ.” I used my jacket to wipe my face, grabbing for him, nailing him in the upper part of his leg, all the good it did. He was laughing.

I started laughing, too. We were laughing, and we could see no end in sight to the hilarity.

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

I
WOKE UP EARLY THE NEXT MORNING, COULDN’T SLEEP, ROLLED
over, and first thing I saw was the date on the wall calendar. It was June 7, 1983. Ma and Pop and Uncle Tom were still sleeping, wall-to-wall dogs snoring noisily in every room in the house. I stopped Bingo as he was heading out the door with Mambo.

It was eight o’clock.

“What are you up to today?” I asked him.

“Nothing. Taking the tour. See who’s around. Why?”

I had just finished speaking to Huntington “Rosie” Ferrell on the phone, my friend since we were little kids. I woke him up. His father was heir to a steel fortune and owned a summer home on the Vineyard. Their principal residence was near Boston. I told him I was bored. He was bored, too. We kind of made a profession of boredom in those days.

Overnight it had turned unseasonably cold, and we were looking for something to do. We put together a haphazard plan for a day trip to Dead Canary Wet Caves on the mainland, a poetically named system of river caves.

It was something we’d done before. It wasn’t a particularly challenging project, especially for a couple of young guys who weren’t overly preoccupied with details and had grown up around the ocean.

“You want to come?” I asked Bing, who cocked his head and raised his eyebrows. I was kind of surprised myself.

“You’re kidding, right? Is this a joke? You want me to go along with you and Rosie?”

“Why not? Look, if you don’t want to come . . .”

“Sure I want to come. I’m coming. Count me in. Let’s go.” Unlike me, Bingo was never bored. He was up for anything. He was already on the porch and heading for the car. “Hey, Coll, is this ’cause I gave you tongue last night?”

“Keep it up. I can always take back the invitation.”

“Sorry. You’re stuck with me now.”

“Don’t remind me.”

“Can he come?” Bing asked, casting a sympathetic glance back at Mambo, who was doing a series of jumping jacks off the porch, aching to be included.

“No way. Come on, Bing, just once can we do something that doesn’t involve a dog? You’ve got five minutes to get your shit together or else I’m gone.”

“Sorry, Mambo,” Bing apologized to him as he led him back into the kitchen, Mambo drooping and resistant and then watching from inside the house, through the screen door. Bingo reluctantly pulled shut the big wooden door, Mambo disappearing behind it—he’d gone through one too many screens in pursuit of the car.

“Poor Mambo,” Bing said as we headed toward the driveway, and then he stopped and, facing me, pulled on my elbow, focusing on me with those spooky eyes of his.

“He’ll live,” I said dismissively, unreasonably annoyed by his expressions of sympathy.

“This isn’t some kind of trick, is it? Are you trying to get back at me for last night? You and Rosie aren’t planning to drag me off somewhere just so you can leave me behind, are you?”

“You’re already starting to be a pain in the ass. If you don’t want to go . . .” I stopped in the middle of the driveway and threw up my hands, accidentally tossing my car keys into the air, Bingo lunging for them as they hit the damp sand, stained brown from an overnight rain.

“I want to go. I just don’t want to wind up stranded in the middle of nowhere again and you guys thinking it’s funny.” He stared at me meaningfully, fingering the keys, as I laughed at cherished memories of his recent abandonment at a gas station outside of Framingham after a concert.

“No . . . Jesus . . . come on . . . get over yourself. I’ve got better things to do than hose Bing Flanagan.”

He shrugged and let it go, light and easy, as if he were setting a kite adrift in the wind. I felt a tiny bit ashamed as I watched him, noisy and chattering, hop into the convertible, swinging his legs up and over without opening the passenger door.

I made a quiet deal with myself to do better, be a better brother. I was always trying to give him the brush-off. I was vowing to improve when my good intentions took a sudden detour.

“No way are you driving,” I said as he slid into the driver’s seat and inserted the keys into the ignition, the car rumbling to a start.

“Why not? To the ferry . . .”

“No. You’re not driving my car. Forget it.”

He hesitated, and I gave him a shot in the ribs. “Jesus,” he said, clutching his side, grimacing and laughing at the same time as I used the opportunity to shove him aside and into the passenger seat. He bent over and grabbed the remnants of a half-eaten doughnut on the floor, then turned around and whaled it at me, jelly dripping down the side of my face and sticking to my hair.

“You asshole,” I said, scraping the doughnut off my cheek and throwing it back at him, his hands held up defensively in front of his face, both of us laughing.

Before we cleared the driveway, I was already devising ways of giving him the slip.

“Hey,” Bingo said, touching me on the shoulder. “Listen.”

I pressed the brake. I heard a low keening sound coming from the house, mournful and sad. Mambo was crying.

Bingo shifted in his seat to face the house. “Collie, look at Mambo.”

Turning my head, I caught sight of Mambo standing on all fours on top of the kitchen table. He was staring after us, watching from the big kitchen window—it was an unsettling picture, an enormous, wolfish black-and-red dog, poised and unmoving, intense and straining for one final look, his amber eyes vanishing into his black face.

“Crazy dog,” I said, and then louder: “I’m so sick of crazy dogs and crazier people!”

“What the hell’s your problem?” Bingo asked. “You’re getting more like Ma every day.”

“What are you, nuts? If there’s one person in the world I’m not like, it’s Ma.”

“Whatever you say, Coll.” He burrowed into his seat, sand- encrusted running shoes up on the console. We bumped along the narrow gravel road, and he looked away from me and out over the sky and ocean, both a dark sable color, lines of division blurred as brown-and-gray waves rolled in only yards from the road.

I kept sneaking intermittent sideways glances, which he pretended to ignore as we swung onto the main road, canopy of trees blowing overhead, fishing boats rocking in the choppy bay, wind blowing back the hair on our foreheads.

“Hey, Coll, look out!” Bingo sat up suddenly and pointed to the side of the road as a giant snapping turtle made his way slowly across. I applied the brake, and even before the car screeched to a halt, the door opened and out he leapt, rushing to the turtle’s side. He picked him up, hands gripping either side of the banged-up shell, and stopped at my side of the car, pushing the turtle toward me, its mouth open and hissing, the overwhelming smell of stagnant water filling the car.

“For Christ’s sake, Bing,” I said, recoiling as he dashed across the remainder of the roadway, released the turtle into the water, and then jogged back to the car.

“Great, you stink worse than usual,” I complained as he reached over and wiped his hands on my shirt. “Fuck off. . . .” I stepped on the accelerator, the impetus jerking him backward as we zoomed down the road leading to Rosie’s place.

We were clipping along, the wind fresh and moist and vaguely fishy. The radio was cranked, it was too noisy to talk, so we settled back into our separate compartments, the silence between us punctuated by a smack here, a jab there, and the soundless thump of Bingo’s fingers on the leather seat, tapping in rhythm to the music.

The ferry crossing was cold and damp, and the water was rough. Once we were on the mainland, a sudden morning storm almost canceled the trip, but then the sun shone through, and because he was bugging me about it, we decided to go in Rosie’s new car, a Mustang convertible. I left my car parked in the driveway of Rosie’s “winter” house.

Twenty minutes down the road and Rosie’s new car got a flat.

We made Bingo fix it as we sat by the side of the road and issued profane instructions. Then we shoved him back into the cramped backseat, where we piled our stuff on top of him.

“Jesus, Coll, I can’t feel the lower half of my body,” he said. “Can we trade places for a while?”

“What? Are you kidding?” I said, taking one last bite of an apple before I tossed the half-eaten core behind me, beaning him on the temple.

He scrambled for it and mashed it on the top of my head. A thin stream of fruit juice ran down the side of my cheek. I lunged for him, and the car swerved. At 90 mph, you don’t want too many distractions.

“Hey, assholes, fuck off,” Rosie said, overcompensating, steering the car back onto a straight course, rattling my neck.

“Ouch,” Bingo said without much passion, hitting his head on something back there.

“Fuck you, Ferrell,” I said, grabbing Rosie’s Red Sox cap and tossing it into the wind and onto the road. It’s the kind of eloquent exchange that passed for polite interaction in the rustic world of young manhood, all three of us the knuckle-dragging, shiny-haired by-products of the best education privilege can buy.

“So I hear you met Collie’s girlfriend, Zan. What do you think?” Rosie said to Bingo as he turned the car down a long, narrow country road.

“She’s pretty. She’s smart.” He was staring out the window.

“Why does ‘smart’ always sound like a pejorative whenever you use it to describe a girl?” I said, looking back at him through the rearview mirror.

I shrugged as he turned back to Rosie. “She’s kind of WASPy.”

“She’s a Catholic. What the hell are you talking about?” I said.

“Um, I don’t know; she just seems kind of stuck-up or something.”

I snorted. “Any girl with a library card and clean hair is a WASP as far as you’re concerned.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“It means that you’re an idiot when it comes to girls.”

“And everything else, too, right, Collie?” He was leaning forward and directly behind Rosie, but I wouldn’t turn around to face him.

“Come on, you guys, don’t start,” Rosie said, intervening.

“Girls are more than a cup size,” I said, wanting the last word.

“Must be nice to always be morally superior to everyone else,” Bingo said, shooting me an accusing glance, which I caught out of the corner of my eye.

“Would you two shut the fuck up already?” Rosie had had it.

We rolled into a little hick-town gas station around ten o’clock and picked up breakfast—Gatorade and jelly beans—and waited around for Bingo to reappear.

“Where the hell did he go?” Rosie asked.

I swore. He was always vanishing. “Let’s give him five minutes and then we split,” I said, giving the whole matter about ten seconds’ thought.

“Hey! Wait! . . . You guys!” Bing broke into a run at the sound of the engine turning over, appearing from around the corner of the convenience store building, a smiling, dark-haired girl in a short black skirt behind him, his hand in her hand pulling her along.

“Holy shit!” Rosie said, eyeing them through his rearview mirror.

We exchanged annoyed glances. Bing, despite his field of freckles and wobbly intellect, got laid more than any guy I knew. It wasn’t as if he came on like Pepé Le Pew, either. Unlike the rest of us, who were running around with our tongues hanging out, panting for attention, all he ever had to do was show up.

“Not all relationships boil down to love in an elevator,” I told him, knowing I was delivering my lecture to an empty room. I once saw him emerging from a confessional at St. Basil’s with a cute girl and a big grin on his face.

“One for the road. I’m giving up sex for Lent,” he said.

“Jesus, Bing, that’s sacrilege.”

He laughed. “Not the way I do it,” he said. “The way I do it, it’s pure sacrament.”

“Can she come?” Bing said, dragging his new friend, Erica, by the shirtsleeve.

“Where will she sit?” I asked, smiling at Erica through clenched teeth.

He hopped into the constricted space and pulled her onto his lap, cheerfully making introductions.

“I love your car,” she said as Rosie nodded in courteous strained acknowledgment.

Just what we needed—another girl impressed by a car.

“You’re not exactly dressed to go caving,” I said by way of a hint.

“I just live down the road a mile or so. Bing said you wouldn’t mind if I ran in and got changed. . . . It’ll only take me a minute. Is that okay?”

“Sure it is,” Bingo said. “Collie and Rosie don’t mind a bit. Do you, guys?”

We exchanged a murderous glance, my fist clenching and unclenching.

“No problem,” Rosie said.

“Wow,” Erica said, taking in the whole picture, settling deeper into Bing’s lap, her arm around his neck. “Are you guys rich? It sure seems as if you are.”

“Oh yeah,” Bingo said. “Ain’t life grand?”

Rosie laughed. It was a classic Fantastic Flanagan remark. With his soft features, slight build, and breezy manner, Bing, upper-class inflections intact, looked and sounded as if he’d just stepped off a yacht docked for the social season on the Italian coastline.

I turned around and glared at him. He didn’t care. Only I knew there was more than a little of Pop, percolating like an alchemist’s blend of bargain-basement charm and a handful of cheap tricks, beneath that glistening surface.

As it turned out, Erica worked at the convenience store, was saving for college, was planning on becoming a physiotherapist, and was chatty and transparent as hell but pleasant enough. Nothing I liked better than being mad and exasperated with Bingo, so it suited my ongoing agenda to have her ruin our plans.

I glanced in the side mirror. She and Bing were making out. Nothing so graphic it would offend the Junior League, but just obnoxious enough to make me wait until she was out of earshot, tripping up the steps to her family’s nice little brick house, rushing to get changed, before I took the opportunity to smack him upside the head.

“Man, you’re such a puritan, Collie,” he said, rubbing his ear. “Pop told me it’s genetic. You’re a certain kind of Irish Catholic. . . .”

“That’s bullshit,” I said. “Typical Fantastic Flanagan horseshit.”

“Admit it. You are a bit of a puritan, Coll,” Rosie said. “So it’s not all horseshit.”