Extreme Elvin (8 page)

I had stopped, stared at the bag, and nearly wept, knowing what was in there. Two Underwood chicken spread sandwiches on oatmeal bread, the oil of one of them making a glorious clear stain on the side of the bag like the pioneers’ windows that were made of paper that they would then smear with—

“I said are you finished with that?” He was an impatient businessman when you didn’t keep up with him.

“Sorry,” I had said, handing over the bag. “I was daydreaming. Just checking, but, it would be futile to resist, right?”

He’d looked concerned for me. “Yes. And possibly dangerous.”

So, really, this would be our first chat, but it felt like we’d known each other for a long time.

“When we heard, me and the guys were all sayin’ that if we were going to bet on something like this, you would have been probably the second or third last—maybe the fourth if you lost a few pounds—but anyway close to the last guy we ever would’ve figured.”

It seemed that needing to know what he was talking about was not as important as going with the flow. I shrugged. “Me too. Goes to show you never can tell, huh?”

“You never can.”

He leaned close, put a fatherly arm around my shoulders. “So hats off to you, guy. Who gave you the VD?”

Ah-ha.

Well this was certainly a type of popularity I never figured into the bargain.

“You know!”

He laughed. A most insulting laugh, actually. “Of course I know. I’m
me.”

“Wow,” I said, and meant it. “That’s kind of shocking, that you can know everything, about everybody. And so quick. Like the FBI.”

“Whoa,” he said modestly. “Not everything, of course. I don’t know, like, what your grades are, or when your birthday is, ’cause I don’t give a shit. And I wouldn’t know if, say, a guy got sweat socks in the mail from his grandma for his birthday...”

My god. Did it mean he controlled the U.S. Postal Service, or my gran?

“But VD? You don’t get VD around here without me knowing about it. That’s like, my thing.”

Such a lovely thing. And now it had brought me and Darth together.

“VD killed George Washington,” Darth shared. “And Al Capone. Did you know that?”

There you go. Another fine community I’d gotten myself into.

“I didn’t. Thanks.”

“But you don’t want to die.”

“Uh-uh,” I agreed. “Not today, anyway.”

Darth scanned the crowd in all directions, looking for authority figures who outranked him, like maybe the Pope. Then he pulled a little something out of his sock. Under the table he slipped it into my hand.

It was a tube, like toothpaste only smaller, more metallic, stiffer and colder. I brought it up to the table-top to get a better look, but he slapped my hand so I lowered it again.

I squinted, craned my neck, stretched, stretched. Must have looked like I was eating lunch out of my own lap.

I giggled with a thought. From my position there with my face in my groin, I shared the thought with my new friend. “Hey, if I knew I could do this I never would have gotten myself into trouble in the first place.”

He slapped the back of my head. I jocked myself with my own chin. Another first.

Finally I could read it.

EXTREME UNCTION
.

I popped my head up, not knowing what to say. I took a shot. “Cool.”

“It is, it’s very cool. Minty, even. Like Vicks VapoRub, only better. And very special rare stuff. Imported. Not available elsewhere.”

“Great. So what’s it for?”

“It’s for your problem.”

“My...?”

“Your pecker problem.”

“Ah, yes. Of course. What then, a teaspoonful a day?”

He slapped me on the back, laughing. “You’re funny. We gotta keep you alive for a while, I think.”

“That’d be good.”

“Ya, so what you do is, whenever Mr. Fizzy starts feeling like he’s gonna fall right off—and believe me, you’re gonna feel like you wanna let him—you just slather some of this stuff on it, and the fire will go out. Clears up some o’ the crust too.”

Crust? Oi.

I spoke more softly now. Not to be more secretive, but kind of like when one guy gets kicked below the belt and the whole group talks funny for a while in sympathy. “This is the cure, then?”

“Nah. It’s better, though. The doc’ll give ya pills to cure it. This’ll just make ya
feel
good through the rough times. Some o’ the guys put this stuff on even when they don’t got anything wrong with ’em, that’s how good it is.”

Wheels turned.

“So it’s not, you know, disease-specific? It’s more of a general... salve?”

“Ya, that’s it. Salve-ation, right?”

“And I could put it on, say, a cut, or... a rash, or something...”

“You mean your ’rhoids? Sure.”

Is
nothing
sacred?

I curled back up into snail position. “Thanks. ’Preciate it. See ya ’round.”

He smirked. A smirk of disbelief. Showed me his big hairy palm. Yes, hair growing in the palm. “And it’s only gonna cost ya two things,” he said way kindly, which was way scary.

“Only two?”

“Yup. The first is fifty dollars.”

“F—? Darth, I don’t have fifty—” I stared down at the tube of
EXTREME UNCTION
. There was nothing written on the label other than the name. And
that
looked like it was hand-lettered.

“You can’t get this in any stores,” he said, sounding like a Ginsu salesman on TV.

He was gently waving both hands now to ease my fears (which was of course
fanning
my fears). He’d gone from brotherly to fatherly to grandfatherly in short order. I was sinking fast.

“You don’t have to pay me right now. It’s your good fortune that I also finance.”

Does it sound to you as if “No, thank you anyway, Darth” was an option? Nah, me neither.

“Thank you, Darth,” I said as weakly as possible.

“And the second thing is even simpler,” he said brightly. “All you need to do is give us your solemn-oath confirmation that this girl—her name is Sally, if I’m not mistaken—did in fact give you this problem.”

Oh. Oh my. That was the
simple
part then? A quick calculation left me with the options of either lying and dragging another person through the mud with me, or—gasp—disappointing Darth.

Now, while our friendship was still kind of new, it did trouble me greatly to think of disappointing him.

And who was “us”? How did Darth become multiple all of a sudden?

What to say?

My disease had made me popular. I’d get a badly needed reputation, one I’d never be able to actually earn on my own. And I’d get to keep my lunches. Anyway, maybe I didn’t have to lie. How did he put it? Did Sally in fact give me the problem? Well, sure, the whole thing with the hands. Scabies, VD, psoriasis, what’s the difference, really?

Just one bit of clarification, and I could get through this. “Now, solemn oath means exactly what here?”

Darth sighed. Breaking me in was wearying him. “You will find, Elvin, that in dealing with me, you are playing on the field of honor. Honor is all that matters. Trust. I trust people not to let me down. When you do that, people tend to
not
let you down. The honor system is the best system.”

Ah, that again. I’ve worked with that system before.

“Yes,” I said. “Sally gave me my problem.”

By the time the words had left me, my stomach was doing flips, my mouth had gone dry. It had seemed, when Darth presented it, so simple. And then, it was so not.

Darth stood up. “Enjoy the ointment,” he said, walking away from me as if I had a disease or something. Does it seem to you that I just did something bad?

I
FELT BETTER JUST
holding it in my hand.

The ointment, ya pervert.

It was like a magical thing, like inside this small, obscenely expensive tube, was the gel that controlled my popularity. Everybody wanted a piece of me now.

“I cannot believe,” Frank said, “that after all this time with my nose up that guy’s ass...”

Is it just because I was oversensitive to the issue at this point, or did people generally make ass references way too often?

“... he turns around and buddies up with
you.”

“Do you have to say it like that?”

“What? Say what?”

“You.
The way you said
you,
meaning
me,
was like I was something stuck on the tip of your finger.”

“Sorry.” He seemed to mean it. “Can I be your friend?”

Sigh. “You’ve been my friend for a long time, Frank.”

“Ya, but now I want to
tell
people.”

This time the sigh was out loud, and unintentional. “Sure, Franko, you can tell people. Why did I think popularity was going to be more fun than this? Why does it look so good on you? Is it like a suit, or a nice fabric like silk or something, that it just hangs better on one person than it does on another?”

Then, after a pause, Frankie sighed back at me. Which was something. He doesn’t pause before speaking, as a rule. And he does not sigh publicly. “Okay, El, listen to me. This is what I want you to do. Ready? Don’t pay attention to what popularity looks like on me. In fact, don’t pay too much notice to what I look like at all.”

“What are you talking about? I thought you were showing me how great it was to be like you?”

“That was before Darth. Okay? Darth is, like, not a nice guy, you know?”

“I don’t know,” I said, the old nerves acting up as we got too near to serious. “He has a certain—”

“El,” Frank snapped. “Popularity can be expensive.”

He wasn’t talking about the fifty-dollar unction. I was this close to joking my way right out of this conversation. If I had not known how much Frankie had endured to make his way into the inner circle, I would have.

“Okay,” I said. “Thanks, I got it.”

We were heading out the door at the end of that long and trying day, when I was stopped. Another one of my new fans.

“Hi there Mr. Ferlinghetti,” I said queasily.

“Well good afternoon, Elvin,” he said. He was acting all cool, like this was just a casual accidental meeting even though he had himself planted in front of the main exit, and he was without a book.

“See ya, friend,” Frankie said. “Can’t help you with this one.”

Ferlinghetti led me silently up the stairs into the detention room, where there were four other detainees already there policing themselves.

“Go on, get out,” he said to them as we walked in.

They sat there, stunned.

“I mean it,” he said. “You’re free to go. Emancipation Day, 1863. Go on before I change my mind.”

Say this for the boring old crock: He was never at a loss for a mind-numbing historical reference to suit any occasion and send ’em heading for the aisles.

“Now you,” he said to the only “you” in the room, me. And he said it just like Frankie had.

“How many million days of detention are you going to give me, Mr. Ferlinghetti?”

“None. You’ve already sentenced yourself. Cowardice is its own hell.”

So was this. It’s a hard word, isn’t it? Cowardice. Made me flinch when he said it. Made me retreat.

“Me? Oh I see. You think I was running away from a fight there on Friday. But that wasn’t it at all. I wasn’t running
from
a fight, I was running
toward
love. And it paid off. Guess what happened to me later on? Go on, guess.”

He stared down at me like one great carved stone leader of many armies, many nations. A figure so sure of himself in his bravery and wisdom and true-blueness as to be the complete inverse of myself. He didn’t even care about my big news.

“A coward dies a thousand deaths,” he thundered, in a voice that would bring god to his knees. He pointed me toward the door.

There was no retreat from it this time, though. The word, the
concept
seemed to have my name embedded in it. And it couldn’t really have all that much to do with Metzger, could it?

I was off my balance here, off my game. I could handle an exchange like this normally, but something was wrong.

“That’s it?” I asked. What did I want? I was getting off easy. Wasn’t getting off easy a
good
thing? Wasn’t it, in fact, the focus of my life until recently?

Yes, until recently.

I needed a real, tangible punishment for fleeing, one that would clear my conscience and let me get on with my simple little existence. “Come on, Mr. Ferlinghetti, is that really it?”

“A thousand deaths isn’t enough for you, son?”

“No, I mean, I can go? You’re finished with me? There will be no further punishment for running out like I did?” There should be, if you ask me.

He stared hard at me, growled, then got all revved up for one last blow.

“Be a man. A coward dies a thou—”

“I’m going, I’m going,” I said, scurrying for the door before he shook out the beams and the building collapsed and left me with only 999.

But really, the only thing I was escaping was the building.

“You’ve
gotten awfully popular all of a sudden,” Ma said when I finally came in after school. “You’ve gotten a whole slew of phone calls this afternoon.”

“Me? A whole slew? How many’s a slew?”

“Two. But one of them was a
girl.”
She giggled the word “girl.” Like this was some kind of big deal. As if I didn’t get calls from girls all the time.

“A
girl?”
I gasped. Back off, Elvin, back off. Be cool. “I mean, oh, a girl. That’s nice. Who else called?”

“Somebody named Metzger.”

I wondered how long a thousand deaths take.

“And the girl’s name?”

“Sally.”

“Really? That’s the girl from the dance.” I fingered my tube in my pocket. “Did she leave her number?”

Ma started frowning. About the VD thing, I figured. “I didn’t realize it was
that
girl. She didn’t sound diseased over the phone.”

“Mother?”

“Don’t call me
Mother.”

“Fine. Medusa?” I asked. “Did Sally leave her number?”

“Why don’t you call Metzger back first. He seemed more anxious to talk to you anyway.”

“I bet he did. Where’s the number, Ma?”