Dead Boys (11 page)

O
H, MAN, YOU
really want to get into that mess? It makes me look stupid. Like a real idiot. But okay. Me and this fucker Edgar I used to hang with, we were heavy into downers. I was staying away from smack, but anything else, bring it on. This was in OKC, before the bomb and whatnot, and Edgar knew this guy who knew this guy who . . . well, if you were a serious pill popper and you got to thinking, “Hey, where do they keep all the drugs in this town?” you might come up with this, too — the hospital, right? So Edgar tells me about this buddy of his who shot himself in the hand with a twenty-two, then went to the hospital and told them it happened while he was cleaning the gun, and they set him up with a nice, fat scrip for Percodan or Darvon or some such wonder. We’re thinking right on, right. Voilà! You’ve got to be in pain to get painkillers! Neither of us had the balls to take a bullet, but we worked it out where we’d toss a coin and the winner would hit the loser in the head with a piece of pipe just hard enough to cut him and lump it up so it’d look like maybe he fell off a ladder, which is what we’d tell the doctor.

A few beers later, we do the toss, and I lose. Edgar gets the pipe from under his mattress and I sit at the kitchen table and he fuckin’ nails me. I mean, he knocks me the fuck OUT! I wake up on the floor, blood gushing, my ears ringing, and Edgar zips me over to the emergency. Well, first off they shave half my head to stitch me up, then there’s all kinds of X-rays and Y-rays and Z-rays. I must have been in there four or five hours, crying this hurts and that hurts and doc, you got to help me, and after all that, do you know what I walked out with? Tylenol. Fucking Tylenol. Long story short, we drive to this dealer’s house and bust down his door and steal his stash. He ratted us out, saying we took his TV, and me being on probation already for some other rinky-dink beef, that was that. Your little brother hit the big time.

T
HE MCDONALD’S IS
all plastic and chrome and perfect and horrible. Karl lifts the bun of his hamburger to remove the pickles. He’s tattooed the letters of his name on the fingers of one hand, a sloppy, homemade job, the ink already faded to green. The one thing I see of myself in his face is its only imperfection, the bulbous tip of his nose. We can thank our father for that.

“How long’s it been?” Karl asks.

“Oh, hell, what, twenty-five years maybe. He dropped by on his way to Vegas once, when he still lived out here. He was with your mother then. She was pregnant with you, as a matter of fact. We’ve talked on the phone a few times since.”

“You never missed having a daddy?”

“My mom kept trying. There were always men around.”

“But not your daddy.”

I shift in my seat and fight off the exasperation his earnestness provokes in me.

“We never had pets, either. Should I feel bad about that, too?”

“You got an answer for everything,” Karl says, his smile a bit too knowing.

“So what’s your story?” I ask.

He shrugs, dips a fry in ketchup. “How old were you when he bailed?”

“Three.”

“I was barely a year.” His voice takes on a harsher tone, as if something inside him has suddenly cinched up tight and he has to force his words around it.

“Momma did her best, but it was hard in Texas. Different from here, the people and all, how they treated us. Especially her family. They were too cruel half the time, too kind the rest. By the time I was fourteen, she’d had enough, so she gave herself up to cancer. And I’m glad, you know, because look at me.”

He strikes himself in the chest with his fist and would do worse, I know — tear his guts out, take an ice pick to his skull. It’s the kind of self-immolating rage that drives men to decisive, if reckless, even destructive, acts, and I have often envied it in others, as the dead must surely envy the living.

I sip my coffee and watch him seethe. He closes his eyes and exhales loudly, then rotates his head from side to side, his neck cracking and popping.

“He had a house on a golf course out there in Florida, a boat in the driveway. A girl answered the door, looked like us, and there was a boy, too. Daddy wouldn’t let me in, though, didn’t want to upset his family, like I was somebody, I don’t know, nobody. So we walked out to the garage. What did I want, he wanted to know. I said, ‘Just to see you. You’re my daddy.’ ‘Are you sure?’ he asks. Are you sure? Can you believe that? I lost it. I got him by the throat and took him down to his knees.”

“I’ve dreamed this,” I say. “I’ve killed the fucker in my dreams.”

Karl pauses, derailed momentarily by my interruption — shocked, if that’s possible. He swirls his straw in his cup.

“I had a pistol,” he continues, “but it’s when I reached for it, when my fingers touched it, that I lost my nerve. I slapped his ass around until he gave up your name and that you were in California and all, and then I got the fuck out of Dodge. ‘Son,’ he called after me. ‘Son.’ But I didn’t look back. He put another notch on his going-to-hell belt that day, that’s for sure. And me, I haven’t had a mean spell since.”

Even if it had gone differently, if he’d confessed to murder, I don’t think I would have rejected him. He is everything I could have been, everything I am, except a coward.

He wrestles his anger back into its cell, and a wry sweetness returns to his eyes. There’s something of an eager child about him as he takes a bite of his burger.

“What did you do with the gun?” I ask.

“Pawned it. For traveling money.”

A black girl screams at the old Mexican man behind the counter. “I told you no tartar sauce, you motherfucker, and what is this?” She throws her fish sandwich at him and stands with her hands on her hips while a stray dog that has somehow slipped inside laps at a puddle of spilled Coke.

“I can’t help you,” I say.

Karl purses his lips and draws his head back. “I ask for anything?”

“I mean spiritually, philosophically.”

“I understand.”

“Something happens, you live through it, and then another thing happens. That’s all I can say.”

Karl grins. “You’re full of shit, bro.”

“Let’s go get your stuff.”

“I don’t want to ruin your Christmas.”

“It’s not a big deal. Really.”

I
CALL THEM
the gray men, my coworkers, though there are a few women in the bunch. We sit side by side in the basement of the building, ten of us, in shoulder-high cubicles the size of barnyard stalls. The others have decorated their workspaces with comic strips clipped from the newspaper and maps and photos of their cats, but not me. Except for my company-issued lamp, desk, and chair, my cubicle is empty. I’m ready to walk away at any time.

The gray men think I’m a snob because I make fun of the detective novels and spy thrillers they pass along to one another with rave reviews. Little do they know I haven’t read a book in years. I stopped because nobody was writing about me. For a while I had my screenplay to keep me occupied when I went home at night. It was about a man who killed his boss and got away with it. I let a friend read it, and he said I was crazy. “Don’t you understand the good guy has to win?” he asked. Now I watch old Westerns and dream of moving to the desert, and I’m not talking about Vegas, I’m talking about some lawless spot where it’s just me and rocks and the bluest blue sky. I will go months without hating my face in a mirror. I will learn to shoot a gun, set a trap, the art of ambush. My legend will deepen and spread. When I was a boy, I thought I would grow up to be some sort of poet. Now, when it’s ridiculous, my heroes are bank robbers and vengeful desperados. “Don’t be surprised if you wake up one morning and I’m gone,” I tell Judy. “If I just disappear.” God, does that make her laugh.

K
ARL STANDS IN
front of our living room window, watching the sun set. I point out the landmarks — the Hollywood sign, the observatory, Capitol Records. It’s a view I like best at night, when, with a squint, I can transform the lights of the city into stars.

“If you stretch, and it’s not too smoggy, you can even see the ocean,” I say.

“No shit?” Karl asks with genuine wonderment. His duffel bag is on the couch, everything he owns in a bundle small enough to be carried under one arm. I do my best to get past the envy that triggers in me.

The downstairs neighbors are throwing a party; the nose ring and platform sneaker crowd. Their music seeps right up through the floor, and every time someone slams the front door, the whole building shakes. This place will come down in the next earthquake. And I will be here. Still.

In the kitchen Judy is taking stock of the refrigerator. We eat like birds when it’s just the two of us. The look she gives me when I reach around her for a beer lets me know I’d better step lightly.

“It’s only for a couple of days,” I say. “I’ll do the cooking and everything.”

“Turkey and all the fixings, huh?”

“The cleaning, Whatever.”

“You’d better pick up a tree, too, and some decorations.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Do you want a beer, Karl?” she calls out.

“Thanks, but I’m on the program.”

I make a horrified face, and this gets a smile out of her. We’ve been together for ten years now. It’s hard to believe. I never planned on knowing anyone as well as I know her. You get so comfortable after a while. You start to wonder if you could make it on your own. She grabs the beer out of my hand, snaps it open, and takes a sip, then goes back to writing the grocery list.

Karl is studying the old photos of Judy’s relatives that hang on the living room wall. He touches the faces with a tattooed finger.

“These were taken in Poland, before the war,” I say. I move up beside him. “This little girl, her uncle here, her great-grandmother — all of them died in the camps.”

“Hitler, you mean?”

I nod.

“I never was down with the Nazis. They kept at me in the joint.”

“Hey, I’ve got something to show you. Hold on.”

I go into the extra bedroom we call the office and dig out a photo of my grandfather from my desk drawer.

“My mom gave me this. It’s our dad’s dad when he was about twenty or so.”

Karl rests the photograph in the palm of his hand. It shows a young man in a hat and suit, smiling and squinting into the sun. Behind him, a dusty plain stretches to the horizon. I’ve always imagined that he’s come back to West Texas for a visit, that the suit is new and worn to impress the folks. He’s been to Dallas, Kansas City, Chicago, which is where he picked up the camera and the radio he’s brought for his mom and pop and little sister.

“All I really know about him is that his name was Karl, like yours, and that he used to box a little and make his own wine. I never met him. I think he came from Germany or maybe Ireland.”

Karl smiles and strokes his chin. “Well, you got his fucked-up nose,” he says.

“So did you.”

“And I guess that’ll do for history.”

The party downstairs is raging. The drugs must be kicking in. Someone yells, “I drink Dr. Pepper and I’m proud!” Judy comes in and asks Karl what he’d like for dinner. He ducks his head shyly and says anything’s okay.

Night falls so quickly in winter. The sun has barely dropped out of the sky. We sit together watching television, the three of us, nobody speaking. Karl is perched gingerly on the edge of the couch, like he’s afraid he’ll be asked to leave at any moment. He finally clears his throat and says almost too loudly, “I’ve been to prison. He tell you?”

“Yes,” Judy replies.

“So we’re cool, then?”

“We’re cool.”

Karl leans forward and rests his forearms on his thighs and stares out the window. At what? Thinking what? I’m joyfully at a loss.

H
ER NAME WAS
Tiffany, and I knew from the start we were gonna fuck this up. Most of the dancers you meet, you get them outside the club, and it becomes pretty clear pretty quick that it isn’t really just a job, no matter what they want to believe. At least Tiffany was honest with herself. She’d been diddled by her stepdad, okay, and was born with one leg shorter than the other, which gave her a limp that made her feel ugly. There are reasons for everything, right?

I was doing a lot of speed back then but not having much fun. In fact, I was pretty desperate to crawl out of the hole I’d dug myself. Along comes Tiffany and her boy, and I don’t know what I was thinking when I thought,
Hey, I can do this.
He was about six, Jack, a cute little guy, tougher than shit. I’d let him punch me in the shoulder sometimes, and it fucking hurt! I got my act together, took a job as a mechanic, and she let me move into her condo, which was in a real decent part of town. You felt like a citizen there. Our neighbor was a chiropractor. The sprinklers were all on timers. I worked in the day and watched the kid while she danced at night. We had dinners, man, Kentucky Fried Chicken, went to the park and Little League on weekends. You want something like that to work out. You really do.

Our problem was Ed Landers, this old, rich bastard with a red Seville who started hanging around the club. Big, fat, white-haired fucker. Big tipper. Tiffany swears to me nothing’s going on, but it’s always Eddie, Eddie, Eddie. I’m a jealous man, I’ll admit it, and the whole thing started to wind me up after a while, soured all my good intentions. She invited Ed to supper one night so I could see what it was, but the two of them, I mean, what were they thinking? That they could play me like that? We were drinking some, and he was holding the kid in his lap, telling him to call him Uncle Eddie and shit, and I just couldn’t take it anymore. I went off on him right there in the living room. Broken glass, the kid crying, a real fucking mess.

Needless to say, I was out on my ass with the clothes on my back and some righteously bruised knuckles. No good-bye, nothing. You know, sometimes what we call love is something else, but it’s just that there aren’t enough words for all the kinds of wanting in the world, and people, bro, people are fucking lazy.

W
E HAVE A
good time at the supermarket, even though it’s so crowded with people shopping for the holidays I can barely squeeze the cart down the aisles. I read the items off Judy’s list, and Karl retrieves them from the shelves. He’s wearing a red tasseled hat trimmed in fake white fur that he picked up from a display at the front of the store. “Here comes Santa Con,” I sing, and, “Santa Con is coming to town.”