Sam McCain - 05 - Everybody's Somebody's Fool (7 page)

allow. They all say “For mature readers only” somewhere near the title. The only place you can buy them in Black River Falls is down at the Union cigar store along the river.

You tell the guy what your favorite brand of literature is and he always winks at you and says, “Okay, you like them there zippy books, do ya?” He always says “zippy.” He’s some kind of immigrant, just nobody has ever figured out what kind. Then he stoops low, lifts up a cardboard box, and gives you time alone to look through the various titles.

The covers Kenny had on his wall now all seemed to share a certain theme.

Tryst for Triples

Three-way Thrust

Thrills for Three

He handed me a Pepsi—Kenny drinks

booze even less than I do—z I said, “What happened to lesbians?”

“They’re sorta out right now. M@enage @a trois is in.”

“Ah,” I said.

“The French publishers started it.”

“Ah, the French.”

“Hell, in Denmark they’re doing bestiality with bondage.”

“Ah, the Dens.”

“I wish the missionary position would come back.

It’s a lot easier to write. I get a headache thinking up all this stuff. I’ve never done a three-way, have you?”

“Several times.”

I’ve always wanted to use the word “agape.”

And that’s just how Kenny looked. Agape. “You have?”

“We went all night.”

“No shit?”

“No shit. We would’ve gone longer except the one sheep got tired out.”

“You asshole.”

“I’m from Black River Falls, Kenny.

People from Black River Falls don’t have three-ways.”

“I’ll bet they do. They just don’t talk about it.” He frowned at his typewriter as if it were deeply disappointing to even gaze upon. “I gotta come up with some pages here. I’ve got four three-way scenes to write and the rules are each one has to be at least fifteen

hundred words. That’s a lot of three-wayin’.”

“Occupational hazard, I suppose.” I paused, “Mind if I pick up that stale sandwich and sit on the chair?”

“Oh, yeah, I guess I haven’t had much time to clean the old place up. I just got back last night.”

“Where’d you go?”

“Berkeley. It’s really wild out there. It’s like this one big huge enclave of beats. Lots of chicks, too. No bras, either. You can see their breasts swinging under their sweaters and blouses. It’s like one of my books coming true.”

“You get laid?”

He shrugged. “I came close.”

“Well, that’s better than nothing. And you’re doing better than I am.”

“No nookie, huh?”

I shook my head. “I’m a virgin again.”

“Don’t tell anybody I went

to Berkeley and didn’t get laid, okay?”

“That wouldn’t be good for the old reputation, I guess. Especially for a pornographer. “He couldn’t get laid even in Berkeley.” Wow, that’d be some epitaph.”

“Please, McCain. I’ve told you, I

don’t write pornography.”

“I’m sorry, I forgot. For a “writer of erotica.””

He leaned back in his writing chair and picked up his pack of Kools.

“I still don’t know how you can smoke menthols,”

I said. “It’s like lighting up a box of cough drops.”

“Yeah, but as much as I smoke, I tend to get sore throats.”

Two ashtrays overflowing. And a dead beer can with a cigarette filter sticking out of it. I guess I saw his point.

“I got back at six last night and went right to work. I’ve done seventeen thousand words.

That’s nearly a third of a book.”

“How many orgasms you figure in seventeen thousand words?”

He smiled. “Plenty. But the only time you look me up is when you want some

scuttlebutt, McCain. So let’s get to it.

I want to get back to work here. I’m trying to hit twenty-five thousand words in twenty-four hours. That’d be a personal record.”

“You told me once you did thirty thousand words in twenty-four hours.”

“Yeah, but I was lying. This would be for real.”

“You really should think of running for political office, Kenny. You lie so well.”

You could hear all those Kools in his sharp, scratchy laugh. I don’t expect my voice sounds any better.

I said, “Brenda Carlyle.”

“I’d like to see her breasts swinging free underneath a sweater.”

“I hear David Egan has had that

privilege.”

“That’s an old story.”

Kenny had always known all the gossip in town.

Even with all his traveling these days, he still knew more about the private lives of our little burg than anybody else, including the three ministers, the priest, all four beauty parlors, and Cliffie’s police force combined. A lot of these stories found their way, disguised of course, into Kenny’s books. He’d written me into a couple of them as a short private eye named “Bullets McGee,” a name I think he

stole from Raymond Chandler but I’m not sure.

“Could you elaborate a little?” I said.

Kenny took a hit from his Kool. I could taste that menthol crap even over here. “He did lawn work for her husband, Mike. It was pure D. H. Lawrence. Brenda and Mike haven’t gotten along in years. She starts talking to Egan—and nobody can sling the lady bullshit like that kid—and there you go.”

“Instant paperback novel.”

“You bet.”

“Still going on?”

“On and off. You know Egan’s problem. When he’s with one girl, he wants to be with another girl. I’ll bet he could get laid if he went to Berkeley.”

“I’ll bet he could get laid just walking down the street.”

He grinned. “I always wanted to be handsome.”

“I always wanted to be tall and handsome.”

“Well, I always wanted to be tall and handsome and rich. And have a schlong out to here.”

I laughed. “You pretty much covered the bases.” Then, “Then there’s always Sara Griffin.”

“Sad case.”

“Man, I guess.”

“They covered it up by saying she went to England on some kind of foreign exchange thing.”

“Yeah,” I said. “She went to the nuthouse.

How’d you find out?”

He inhaled deeply of his box of burning cough drops. “This nurse I interviewed for Nympho Nurses. I put it in a

nuthouse, figured that’d be a different angle.

And that way I could put transvestites and ax murderers and people who rip out their own eyeballs all in the same novel.”

“Didn’t Fitzgerald do something like that right after Gatsby?”

“Very funny.”

“So this nurse …?”

“This nurse told me about this time this girl managed to sneak away from the nuthouse and meet her lover in this nearby motel.”

“Her lover?” New information. “How old was she?”

“Let’s see, Sara probably would’ve been fifteen, probably.”

“This nurse tell you who her lover was?”

“They never found out. All they know is that it was some older man. His forties maybe. This is what they got from the motel guy, anyway.”

“What happened to Sara?”

“More shock treatment. Kept her a month longer than they’d originally planned.”

“Then she came back here?”

“Finished high school. And met your client David Egan. Which wasn’t exactly what her folks wanted. They’d spent a lot of time and laid out a lot of jack keeping her away from this older man, and then she picks up with Egan. For her it was strictly friendship. For him, he went gaga. That’s why he dropped out of high school.

He was so brokenhearted over her, he couldn’t concentrate. But what can you expect from somebody who came from his background? He’s had a rough life.”

“That’s crap, Kenny,” I said, more sharply than I needed to. “A lot of killers come from wealthy families and a lot of very good, hard-working, moral people come from the slums.”

“Wow, sounds like you’re going over to the other side. You going to that Dick Nixon rally tomorrow night? I plan to go. I hear his wife is going to wear a bikini.”

“Asshole,” I said. “It’s just that half the criminals I represent give me the same story. They have bad lives so they want to make sure other people have bad lives, too. I get tired of it. David could at least be honest with these girls.”

“Tell him, not me.”

“I plan to.”

I stood up.

“You reading anything good these days?” Kenny said.

“A lot of Gil Brewer.” Brewer was a good Gold Medal writer, whose paperbacks with the luridly swanky covers I always buy and that seem to distress nearly everybody in town. They think I should be reading great literature—which I do, actually—even though they themselves haven’t read a novel since the teacher threw them to the floor and jammed Silas Marner down their throats.

“Yeah, he’s great. Got that melancholy down. Always about a woman. He can break your heart. One of these days I’m gonna write a Gold Medal.”

“I wish you would, Kenny. You’re a good writer.” He was. Amid all that writhing and gasping and groaning you found some eminently sound social observation and some very nicely turned sentences in Kenny’s books.

“Thanks for thinking so, McCain. But everytime I sit down to write a Gold Medal—I just freeze up. I just think I’m not good enough to pull it off.”

“Just pretend you’re writing your usual stuff.

Your books aren’t all that far from Gold Medal, anyway. Kind of sneak up on yourself.”

“Yeah, the way I did when I slept with Sandy Mitchell.”

“You slept with Sandy Mitchell?”

“Yeah, didn’t I ever tell you?”

“You slept with the homecoming queen and you didn’t tell me?”

“It’s a long story.”

“I’ll bet.”

Most guys couldn’t have gotten close to Sandy Mitchell with a bag of diamonds and a submachine gun. And here was the merry pornographer sleeping with her.

“We happened to be on a picnic with some other people on that little island—Tule Island—ou on the river. Anyway, they all went back in the big boat and asked if we’d take the

rowboat back. It was a rental. And then this storm came. And we sort of got marooned there on the island. With all this leftover beer and stuff. And you know how it goes, we were both drunk and one thing led to another, that sort of thing.

But right when it was really getting serious, I thought what if I can’t do it? What if I can’t perform with the homecoming queen? What am I doing with a homecoming queen? I mean, she hadn’t been homecoming queen for a while—th was just a couple of years ago—and she wasn’t wearing her crown or anything. But still and all, the idea of me with a homecoming queen was pretty intimidating. Here she was offering herself to me and what if I couldn’t do anything? It’d be all over town. I could write all the jokes myself. He can write it but he can’t do it. I just didn’t have any right to be with a homecoming queen.”

“I don’t either.”

“Exactly. You don’t either. Few do, in fact, when you think about it. Very few do.

Anyway, what I did was pretend she was this girl I dated the summer I worked at the fair.

With the blackheads and the stuff on her teeth?”

“I always felt sorry for her,” I said.

“So did I but it didn’t make it any easier. Anyway, once I put her face on Sandy’s face, I didn’t have any trouble at all. I was batting in my own league again and everything was fine.”

“And then she went and married Nick Dixon.”

He smiled. “The coolest kid in high school. And if you don’t believe me, just ask him.”

“Yeah, excessive modesty wasn’t

exactly a problem he had.”

“So now that’s two things you’re not going to tell anybody about, right, McCain?”

“Two? What else besides Berkeley?”

“That I was afraid I couldn’t do it with a homecoming queen.”

Sandy Mitchell. He was one lucky

pornographer, he was.

In my high school days I always tried to have a date on Saturday nights. Tried, but usually failed. So I cruised the streets with some buddies who were every bit as hard up as I

was. The bowling alley; the pizza joint; the Y, where they had mixers; all the usual places where guys went to find the girls who didn’t want to have anything to do with them.

The last resort was the Dx station, which the custom cars and street rods used as their home base. They only came out at night, like vampires, shined, chromed, sculpted masterpieces that even the drunkest biker—who always made clear that he thought that street rod owners were femmy—pd awe and respect. You could tell this because they didn’t stove-in the street rod doors or smash in the windshield.

The custom car crowd didn’t like us any more than they liked the bikers. We were just pimply kids who couldn’t even get chicks on Saturday nights—the custom boys always had plenty of good-looking chicks—and so when we asked them our dopey questions, their answers were short on information and long on contempt.

But there they’d be on the drive, six or seven of the finest mechanical animals rubes like us had ever seen. Andfora while it was enough in the accompanying blare of Chuck Berry and Little Richard to walk around and around these beasts and take in as much of their beauty as we could handle without fainting dead away.

The lone car on the drive tonight was David Egan’s chopped and channeled black Merc.

David leaned against it, cigarette hanging at an angle from the corner of his mouth, his James Dean uniform natty as always. I don’t mean to imply he never changed his clothes. I was pretty sure he did. He didn’t smell, anyway. But his wardrobe seemed to consist of interchangeable James Dean duds, so that even when he changed red nylon jackets, snowy white Tshirts, and jeans, his clothes looked exactly the same.

The smells of gasoline, cigarettes, and oil were pleasant on the Saturday night air as I pulled in.

Dean had taken him over completely tonight, giving me that little two-finger salute while he watched me walk toward him with squinched-up eyes. I always wondered if old folks secretly wanted to imitate Lawrence Welk.

I said, “No girl on Saturday night?”

“I could ask you the same question.”

“Yeah. But I have an excuse. I’m short and stupid.”

He smiled. “I don’t know why you’re always putting yourself down.”

“I do,” I said. Then, “It’d be nice if you’d write a condolence note to the Griffins.”