Dead Boys (23 page)

T
HE SHOWER NEEDS
to be caulked and the faucet leaks. I should start a list. I dry off, then wipe the fog from the mirror with the edge of my hand. A good shave isn’t in the cards, though — my razor’s for shit. I wouldn’t say I’m vain, but the web of tiny wrinkles around my eyes depresses me. At least my gut’s holding up.

Pork chops for dinner. Milk gravy. Mom tells me about the movie. “It was sad, but good sad. He loved her so much. Boots cried and cried.” I’m doing calculations in my head, tearing down walls. I could turn this house into something sweet. Mom agrees to give me the money for paint and linoleum to fix up the bathroom. She grabs my hand and presses it to her chest. “You’ve been sad, too, haven’t you?” she says.

I’m embarrassed. I pull away. “I’m fine,” I say. “Don’t get all worked up.”

R
EED AND SUE
Richards of the Fantastic Four have a son named Franklin. Dr. Doom steals the kid, and they go to war. My mind wanders. I toss the comic and close my eyes. Someone once taught me a Buddhist chant to calm myself, but I forgot it a long time ago. I slide my hand down my pants. That’s a bust, too.

Mom’s asleep in front of the TV when I sneak out the door. I wait until I’m around the corner to light the joint. It’s been a while since I smoked. By the second hit, I could tell you everything you need to know about the neighbors simply by analyzing the cars in their driveways. It’s so obvious. The high intensifies, though, and turns creepy. A dog snarls at me. A Toyota makes a questionable left. And my heart. Man! It’s racing like a sonofabitch.

T
HE KICK CAME
out of nowhere, catching me square in the mouth. I almost swallowed my teeth. That’s what you get for fighting in bars. A few years had passed since that Christmas mess. Mom gave me a little attitude but finally said I could stay with her awhile. I had to get out of Hollywood; I didn’t want anyone to see me like that.

It shocked her. My nose was broken, too. She sent me to her doctor and her dentist. She was still teaching, so I had the house to myself for most of the day during my recuperation. I’d take fistfuls of pain pills and watch TV, drifting in and out. Commercials made me cry, and I’d see old friends gasping and clapping in studio audiences. I couldn’t stop running my tongue over my new front teeth.

Mom tried to lay down the law when she found my stash. I was ready to go anyway. A buddy had called with a remodeling job in Brentwood, and they were holding auditions for some reality show. I left a note on the kitchen table, not thanking her for anything, but promising repayment. I was always hopeful on my way out.

M
OM, BOOTS, AND
some of their friends enjoy helping those less fortunate than they are. Once a month they volunteer to chaperone a dance for the mentally retarded at the community center. Mom thinks it would be good for me to come along. I’m not so sure, but she won’t take no for an answer.

“Look nice,” she says. I put on a dress shirt and my black shoes. Boots drives us. There are two other women in the car. Everybody picks up where they left off last time. The conversations have been going on for years. I taste perfume and hair spray.

The woman who runs the thing is all business. She doesn’t even thank us for coming. Mom helps with the last-minute decorations, and I’m assigned to the refreshment table. I arrange my Styrofoam cups in neat rows. I stack my cookies. They have a deejay and everything. The lights go down, and the music starts. The kids arrive all at once.

They’re teenagers, I think. It’s a big deal for them. Most of the girls wear dresses, and the guys have on ties. The parents and chaperones have to pull them out on the dance floor and start them moving, but after a while they get the hang of it. The deejay yells, “Whoo whoo!” and all of them repeat it, lifting their hands in the air and jumping up and down.

One kid keeps coming over for punch every five minutes. Little bitty eyes, great big head. “I hope you’re not driving,” I say.

He purses his lips and wrinkles his nose. “Do you want to dance?” he asks.

“We’re not allowed to date customers,” I reply.

He laughs, but who knows why. A retarded girl moved into the neighborhood while I was growing up. Leah Leah Diarrhea. She used to French-kiss her dog. We conned her into taking off her clothes once. Her mother caught us in the alley. We were just boys, stupid boys, but the look on her mother’s face has never left me.

When it’s time for my break, I lock myself in a bathroom stall and suck on a roach I brought just in case. I can’t hear the music, but when I lean my head against the wall, the bass jiggles my eyeballs. I’m confused about what kind of person I am. Good or evil doesn’t get to the heart of it. Someone has carved a big squirting cock into the toilet paper dispenser. They’ve tried to paint it over, but I can still see it.

P
AUL KNOWS HIS
way around Home Depot. We’re in and out in half an hour. I can’t even pause to look at a plumbing display or the circular saw on sale without him saying, “Focus, dude, focus.” I don’t let it bug me, though; I’m used to being hurried along. It’s like I get hypnotized sometimes, by the bustle, by the crush.

There’s money left after paying for the stuff to fix up the bathroom. I make Paul stop at the hot dog cart in the parking lot. I want to treat him to lunch for bringing me here in his truck. Two cars get into a honk fight over a prime space, and I watch a girl smoke a cigarette and stare at the endless empty sky. The peppers I put on my dog burn my tongue.

“You like that, huh?” Paul says, talking about the girl.

“It’s her eyes. The shape, the color.”

“Right.”

Paul is going bald; I’m not. Funny. I wish he’d stand up straight. He eats with his hand over his mouth, too, like Mom says our father did.

“Hey, I might have found a car for you,” he says. “Can you scrape together eight hundred dollars?”

I loved that Honda they repoed. Leather seats, sun roof. It’s just as well they took it back, though. It was dragging me down. To make the payments I had to tap the till at the shoe store where I was working.

T
HE BATHROOM KEEPS
me busy for a week. I rip up the old linoleum and lay down new stuff. I paint the walls pale pink. I even replace the shower curtain. It tires me out. There’s no time for cravings or regret. I dream about drinking once but wake up feeling guilty.

T
HE LAST TIME
I was here, Mom wasn’t around. I made sure of that. I climbed in through a window I knew about that wouldn’t latch. A bad guy was after me because of some money he claimed I owed him, and I was behind on rent. The idea was to make it look like a stranger had done it.

I went through her jewelry box, her dresser, her closet. I looked under her mattress. The house creaked and groaned in protest. Everything made me jump. I unplugged the TV and the microwave. There was also a clock radio by her bed. Sweat ran down my face and dripped on the floor, and I wondered if that’s how the cops would catch me.

And then I put everything back. Every bit of it. I crawled out the window empty-handed and got in my car and drove away. We were in the midst of a heat wave. As usual, poor people and animals suffered most. I passed sweaty families playing minigolf and crazy bastards crouched in the shadows of telephone poles. The sun beat down on all of us like it had a monstrous grudge. Riverside, California.

M
OM LOANS ME
her car to drive to a comic book store that I find in the phone book. It’s in a strip mall past the railroad tracks. The kid behind the counter perks up when he starts looking through my box. He pulls out a price guide and says it’s going to take a while.

There’s a doughnut shop next door. I order coffee and sit by the window. I used to envy guys like me, relaxing in the middle of the day, reading the paper.
And me busting my ass,
I’d think. Christ, things get away from you.

The kid tries to hide his excitement when I return to the store. He has the comics stacked on the counter in various piles. His T-shirt has a picture of a fist on it and the name of a band. I thought metal died out years ago.

“I can give you six hundred dollars for everything,” he says. “There’s good stuff here.”

“Like what, for instance?”

He points. “
Amazing Spider-Man
129. The Punisher’s first appearance. It’s near mint, so we’ll go one hundred.”

I pick it up, thumb through it. One hundred dollars! My lucky charm. “I’ll hang on to this one,” I say. “The rest are yours.”

I stop by Paul’s place and give him the money. He agrees to float me a loan for the three hundred more it’ll take to buy the car. Maybe we could have been friends, if we hadn’t been brothers. I hug him when I leave, just to watch him flinch.

W
E HAVE A
party to celebrate the new bathroom. Mom makes cupcakes for it. Boots stops by, but Paul and Kelly have other plans. The fixtures sparkle, the tile shines. Boots wants to know how much I’d charge to remodel her kitchen. We drink hot chocolate and play hearts. Mom loves cards. Poker, canasta, bridge. “It takes a certain kind of mind,” she says. I don’t have it. I lose every time.

The storm they’ve been talking about for days is fast approaching. A black roil of clouds bears down on us, and the trees twist in the wind, as if they want to run away. Boots cuts the game short. She doesn’t like to drive in the rain. Mom and I step out onto the porch to wave. The first fat drops whisper in the grass.

We get ready for the news, Mom in her recliner, me on the couch. Her constant sniping is getting on my nerves — the dead girl was stupid for hitchhiking; the corrupt politician looks like a rat fink. I go into the kitchen for a glass of Pepsi.

Dad drank. That’s why Mom can’t stand drinkers now. He hit her once, when I was a baby. Divorce never came up, though. She says they were made for each other. What do you call that? Love? It’s pouring outside. The wind flings rain against the window. I rinse my glass, dry it, and put it in the cupboard.

Mom is staring at the TV. There’s a magazine in her lap,
People
. She runs her finger over the face of the movie star on the cover and says, “I actually believed I’d see you here someday.”

“Don’t count me out yet.”

“Come on, kiddo.”

I shrug. Who knows? What I can say for certain is that Whatever needs to happen next isn’t going to happen here.

L
ET’S JUST SAY
a woman was involved. She wasn’t the only reason I pissed everything away this time, but she was there at the start and not at the end, and it killed me that I couldn’t keep her. Jenny Pool, Jenny Pool, Jenny Pool. We did our best, right?

I’d pulled myself together and was doing the job thing and the exercise thing and the early to bed, early to rise thing. I got a callback for a play — a small role, but a good one — and went out to celebrate. Jenny was the hostess at the restaurant. My buddy knew the owner, and we closed the place. The staff joined us at the bar. Jenny told me a joke I didn’t get. She danced with a lonely Guatemalan dishwasher and brought tears to my eyes. By morning I was convinced that she was the missing piece of the puzzle.

Her dad was an actor, so she swore she’d never date one. Of course that’s all she dated. We both went into it like it was our last chance. It was a moony, miserable teenage kind of whirl. I said things like, “I wish I could crawl inside you,” and, “How many lives did it take us to get here?” She bought me a puppy that my landlord wouldn’t let me keep. I snuck it to the pound and told her it ran away.

I got the part, but the play fizzled in rehearsals. This made me a little introspective. Jenny took it as something else. She had abandonment issues, Whatever that means. All of a sudden we didn’t see eye to eye on anything. Picking out fruit at the supermarket was a goddamn prizefight. Someone said she’s in Sedona now. The love of my life, quite possibly.

T
HE ROUTE TO
Paul’s house passes by my high school and the burger stand where I got my first job. Mom says a Korean family owns it now. Change upsets her, but I couldn’t care less. Last night’s storm has left the street a mess. I step over fallen palm fronds that resemble dried sea creatures. The clouds have blown away, and the sky is as blue as it gets.

Paul’s at work. On a Saturday? An emergency call. Kelly asks if I want to come in. I sit on the couch. A picture of them on their wedding day hangs over the fireplace.

“Where’d you guys get married?” I ask.

“Maui.”

“I’ve got to get over there someday.”

She stands in the doorway to the kitchen, holding the phone. The baby is coming soon. Every little twinge inside probably stops her in her tracks. Her friends have told her how much it’s going to hurt. She’s waiting for me to explain why I’m here.

“I need to ask you a favor,” I say. “I want you to make sure Paul visits our mom more often.”

“Shouldn’t you talk to him about that?”

“I need you to work on him, too. She had that party the other day, and it was nothing, but you guys didn’t even stop by.”

“We had things to do,” she says. “We’ve invited her here plenty of times, you don’t know.”

“She’s getting old. Look in on her once a week or so. No biggie.”

“You should hear her. She’s not exactly nice to me.”

I raise my hand. “Once a week or so.”

Kelly has more to say, but I’m done. No need to go in circles about it. She gives up and walks into the kitchen. I watch HBO until Paul gets home. His face is dirty, and he seems tired. I don’t have the heart to start in on him. I pretend I dropped by to see what’s up with the car.

T
HE BACK DOOR
sticks. I fix that and clean out the rain gutters. Mom is angry with me. She thinks my leaving so soon is a mistake. I tell her she can come visit when I get settled, make sure I’m on the straight and narrow. We eat a silent dinner. I notice she’s having trouble with her fingers, uncurling them, but she won’t answer my questions about it.

I lie awake in the dark, trying to see the future. I’ll find a job, get an apartment. Something good will finally happen. The silence is broken by sobs. I pull on some pants and hurry to Mom’s room. She sits up at the sound of my voice but looks right through me. Tears shine on her cheeks.