I Just Want My Pants Back (9 page)

“Sometimes when you’re high it feels amazing to stretch,” she said, arms held straight over her head.

“Really?” I put the Diet Coke down and bent over to stretch my hammies. I wasn’t very flexible, I couldn’t even touch my toes. I hung over my feet, breathing slowly. I heard her laugh and I looked up.

“I just made that up,” she said, giggling. “Sorry.” She walked over to my stereo. “Music! How do I work this?”

I grabbed the remote off the coffee table and turned it on. The Ramones’
Rocket to Russia
began to play.

“Lobotomy! Lobotomy!”

“Too aggressive?” I asked, turning it down a bit.

“Oh no, I like the Ramones,” she said, bouncing on her toes a little. “I used to know Joey a bit, you know.”

“No shit, really?”

“Yeah. Well, I used to have a good friend, Shelly, who bartended at CB’s.” Patty moved back over to the couch and sat down. “I’d try to go there on Tuesdays and hang out with her, because the other nights she’d be too busy to spend any time with me. Tuesdays were the slowest nights, and that place could get rowdy. It was all kids in there; you have to remember, the drinking age was only eighteen back then, so there’d be a lot of drunk high school kids, and I was too old for that shit.” She reached into her pants pocket, pulled out a cigarette, and held it between her teeth as she jammed both hands back into her pockets searching for a lighter. “The Ramones used to play on Tuesdays a lot before they got popular, I mean, nobody was really there except Shelly and me, and whatever other bands were waiting to play. Their whole shtick was really funny, you couldn’t understand a word they were saying because they were so damn loud, but you could just tell they had something. When they were done playing sometimes they used to hang out; Shelly would slip them some free beers.” She spotted the lighter on the table, lit the cigarette, and took a puff. She exhaled. “Joey was always very polite, very nice. Even after they became stars I’d still see him around town and he’d wave and say hi. It was a shame he died so young.” She gestured at me with her cigarette. “Hey, how old were you then? This was seventy-five I think.”

“I was zero,” I said. I paced over to the window and looked outside. It was dark now. Another day gone. I looked back at Patty, who was playing with her fingers, cig dangling from her mouth. “You okay, Patty?” I asked.

“Yeah. It’s just…sometimes, I don’t know how I got so old.” She looked up at me and smiled. “Time flies, right?”

I felt bad. “Totally, it totally flies,” I babbled. “Like this whole week flew by, I can’t even remember what I did. I went to work Monday morning and the next thing I knew it was Friday night, and I was at some bar drinking and saying, ‘Hey man, I’m so glad it’s Friday,’ to a bunch of strangers. It’s like I went to sleep one night and I woke up and the week was over.”

Patty puffed on her cigarette. “I got news for you. You know how your week flew past? Well, when you get to be my age, that’s how the years go. You wake up one morning and it’s the next year.” She inhaled, held, and then blew a smoke ring. It floated out at me on an angle. “I told you, I can be a bit of a buzzkill,” she laughed. Her laugh turned into a cough, the same kind I had heard the other day. A bronchitis cough. I felt like a wet stuffed animal was going to come flying out.

“Do you need the Heimlich?” I joked.

“No, no it’s okay, allergies is all.” She wheezed. “Spring is hard for me.” She caught her breath, stubbed out her cigarette, and smoothed her hair. “Could you be a dear and get me a glass of water?”

I washed out a glass, filled it, and gave it to her. “Sheena Is a Punk Rocker” came on, my favorite Ramones song. So I said, “Hey, this is my favorite Ramones song. Did you ever see them play it?”

She finished a sip of the water. “Oh, yes, I must’ve. I might not have been paying attention, but probably. I don’t really remember. Another great part of getting older, Jason, is you forget stuff.”

“But just think, you forget all the really bad stuff too, so maybe it’s a benefit,” I said.

“That’s true. But here’s the thing. When you get older, one day you’ll catch yourself looking in the mirror wondering, ‘What have I been doing again?’ I mean, maybe you’re just trying to remember something, like right now I’m trying to remember the Ramones, or maybe you’re being deep, thinking back across the years, but it’ll hit you. The game is for keeps. That’s why you see a lot of gray-haired guys in Porsches, they had a moment and were like ‘Hey, I don’t want to miss out on this, I’m doing it now!’ If you live in America and you’re not some religious nut and you believe in free will and all, you have no one to blame or congratulate on how you lived except yourself. It’s sort of a tough day, to be truthful. It was for me. I think even if you’re president or really successful or whatever, it’s still a tough one.” She stared into the corner, where my computer was sitting on my tiny desk. “That for work?”

“Nah, it’s left over from college, just for e-mailing and playing around online,” I said.

“Oh. Wait, what is it you do for work again?”

I scratched at an itch on my neck. “I have this bullshit job at a casting company. It’s very small, just four of us. We cast for like TV shows and commercials and stuff. I’m like the general assistant, you know, whatever they need, I basically do. It’s temporary.”

She laughed. “That sounds fun! Meet any stars?”

“Nah, it’s not like that at all. It’s really just for bit parts and extras. Like if a sci-fi movie needs a hundred female warriors, and they all need to be blond and over six feet tall, they’d call us. It’s goofy.”

“So, are you going to be a director or screenwriter or something?”

I poured the last of the Diet Coke into my glass and put the bottle in the sink. “To tell you the truth, Patty, I have no idea. I found the job through this temp agency. It’s, you know, fine. I don’t need to shave or dress up, and it pays the bills. Eventually, I’d like to do something music-related.” I thought about the e-mail I had just received from Langford. “I mean, I think.”

Patty took off her flannel; a gray long-sleeve T-shirt was underneath. “That sounds like a good gig for now, then. No hassles, enough money to live and get your footing. It’s just a job. You’ll have oodles of them.”

I was somewhat shocked by the positive response. If I had said anything like that to one of my peers, nine out of ten would’ve just smiled and said, “Great,” while inside they were thinking, “Loser.” At least that’s what their expressions would look like, as if they were trying to put on a brave face as I told them my cat had died. “Yeah, it’s okay, I suppose. A little boring, but whatever.”

Patty stood up. “I’m starving. Do you want to come over? I have all these vegetables from the farmers’ market, and I have some rice, we could make a stir-fry.”

“Sure, okay.” I felt in my pocket for my keys and grabbed my wallet off the coffee table. “Should I run out and get some beers or something?”

Patty put her flannel back on. “First you can help me chop the veggies, then while I cook you can run out for some. Let’s be efficient!”

We headed for the door. “Oh, the stereo,” I remembered, and walked back across the room to turn it off. As I turned I saw Patty skipping out of my apartment and into the hall like a hyper five-year-old on too much soda. I hustled out behind her to get to chopping.

 * * * * * 

P
atty arranged quite a cornucopia of vegetables on her countertop. There were some normal ones—carrots, snow peas, and such—and then there were some scary-looking root vegetables that I could not have named if I was on a game show and the prize for doing so was a car. Patty was using a cleaver to chop and was whistling some unknown tune. I washed the odd vegetables and peeled them over the sink, using a paper towel as a low-rent drain screen. I was getting into it; the repetitive motion and the revealing of bright, wet flesh underneath dirty peel was incredibly satisfying to my stoned self. It was a little quiet, so I asked, “Patty, can we put on a little cooking music?”

She held the cleaver in mid-chop and said, “Absolutely. Go in the living room, you’ll see the stereo, just put on whatever. But something upbeat.”

Oh my God oh my God and then it happened, I was out of the kitchen and in the living room, the never-before-seen inner sanctum, and I was both alone and high. Yes. It was the mirror image of my apartment in shape, but it was far more cluttered. There was a lifetime of “maybe I should hold on to this” in there. She had an old cracked brown leather sofa; on it were two throw pillows with crocheted images of dogs. Her coffee table was a steamer trunk with a giant ashtray on top, a stack of mail and a fan of books next to it. The walls, as much as I could see of them, were a pale yellow. They were covered with framed and unframed paintings, photographs, and illustrations. A giant one, it must have been five feet diagonally, was of the Jackson Pollock school and took up almost the whole wall above her fireplace. In front of it, on her mantel, was a garish gold trophy. On the third and top tier of this was a male statuette with his hands held above his head. Carefully balanced on his hands was a still-packaged Twinkie. It was the sight of this that assured me my generation did not invent irony, as much as we may have thought so. I checked out some of the photographs crowded onto the narrow floor-to-ceiling strip of wall in between her windows. There were shots of Patty with friends or maybe family from a while back. In one black-and-white shot, she was holding a cigarette and leaning against a brick wall in what looked like Chinatown. Her other hand, by her side, was giving the photographer the finger. She must’ve been my age, maybe a little younger. She was pretty; she reminded me of what some of the girls looked like when you saw photographs of Lou Reed in Max’s Kansas City in old magazines. Her bangs hung in her eyes, a small smile was screwed on lopsided. In this shot at least, she had it, that look of cool and youth that never went out of style: She just didn’t give a fuck.

I started to feel like maybe I was snooping a bit too long, so I moved to the stereo, which was like the one I had growing up, an all-in-one Fisher with a record player on top. Next to the stereo, on a tall bookcase, were stacks and stacks of vinyl, hundreds of old LPs. I was giddy just staring at it. I thumbed through a few on top and found a rare one in a simple all-white sleeve, maybe even a bootleg, a live recording of Bob Dylan and Johnny Cash. I put it on the turntable and lowered the needle. It crackled to life. A song called “Mountain Dew” started up. Dylan sang in his nasal, country voice, “My Uncle Mort, he’s sawed off and short, he measure about four foot two…” When the chorus came, Johnny and Bob harmonized in an odd but beautiful way. “They call it that good ol’ mountain dew, and those who refuse it are few.” With the warmth of the analog sound and the needle pops I felt like maybe I had flicked a switch and sent myself back in time. I was considering turning on Patty’s TV to see if the Vietnam War was still under way; the set definitely looked like it dated from that time period, and I was thinking maybe it was so old it could only tune in the seventies. Anchormen would smoke Lucky Strikes and Johnny Carson would make jokes about hippies while sporting an Indian headdress.

“Good choice,” Patty yelled from the kitchen. “Dylan is my absolute favorite!” I hurried back toward the kitchen but something stopped me. I saw words in small writing low on the wall, just above the molding. I got on my knee and saw it was a tiny diagram with arrows. The one pointing toward my apartment said “Jason.” One pointing down said “Robert,” and another pointing up said “Rachel.”

Patty had finished the chopping, so I headed out to grab some beers while she “seasoned” the wok. I went into the deli; Bobby wasn’t there yet. I was disappointed for a moment because I was excited to see him when I was sober. But then I realized that even if I hadn’t had a drink, technically being high as shit didn’t really qualify as sober to most people. The guy working the register was absolutely blasting Madonna, which was just about the funniest thing I had ever seen, an empty bodega, lit bright by fluorescents, tended by a balding, middle-aged Indian humming along to “Holiday.” I moved to the beat over to the beers, smiling, and tried to decide on one. I wanted to go with our Asian theme. The closest they had was Pacifico, and since the Pacific was on the way to Asia, that was that was that. I also grabbed a pint of Ben and Jerry’s Phish Food. I could take or leave that band’s jammy music, but they sure inspired a damn good ice cream. I brought the items to the counter, paid, and left the man and his Madonna in peace, hoping that maybe later, he might vogue.

When I got back to Patty’s she was cooking with a fury. It smelled pretty good too. I snuck the ice cream into the freezer and cracked open a couple of beers for us. “So Patty,” I said, watching her work the overfilled wok, “those are some great pictures of you in the other room. The one in Chinatown is awesome.”

“You think?” she said without looking up, focused on moving the sizzling vegetables around. “Thanks. That was a while ago. I don’t give people the finger nearly as much now,” she laughed. “Hey, are you hungry? Because I think we might’ve been too high when estimating how much we needed.”

“I’m still high…”

“Me too!” she slipped in.

“…so I’m pretty hungry. Don’t worry. Better to have too much than too little.”

“That’s my philosophy on food too.” She stopped working the wooden spoon and looked up at me. “My arm is killing me. Time for you to take over. It’s almost done.”

I took the spoon and made with the stirring. The veggies crackled and smoked in the oil. “Hey, can I ask you something? Like, back when that picture was taken, what were you doing in life?”

Patty was pulling plates from her cupboard. “Then I was working at this store that made custom leather pants for rock people and folk singers. They were all the rage. People wore them every day, and once they started to stretch they’d come back and we’d readjust them. It was on Sixth Avenue, above a bagel place a couple of blocks from Washington Square. It was fun. The store was by appointment only so we didn’t really work that much. It was cheaper in New York then, you didn’t have to kill yourself.”