Thrust (3 page)

Now the ladies gaping with distaste and loathing, the husbands ready to beat the goddamn shit out of him.

In the end, Chase had to be hustled off by Shake, the rage coming up so strong that he was nearly howling by then.
 
Timmy vaulted the bar.
 
Jez
stubbed out her cigarette and faded into the consuming blackness.
 

He wildly reached for her as they took him over backwards.

The pair of ivory girls in front went "
Hee
hee
," and smiled brightly.
 
Sure, why not.
 
He chewed up his tongue trying to stem the tide of his words as he hit the floor.
 
Shake clasped one of those powerful hands over Chase's mouth until he couldn't breathe.
 
Blood poured out between dark fingers.
 
The applause was deafening.

S
hake
Sunshine Jr. told people he lived in Harlem but he'd never been above 34th Street in his life.
 
Even when they were releasing him from the Garden Falls psychiatric facility out on Long Island he wouldn't let the driver go over the
Queensboro
Bridge at 59th.
 

He threw such a bad scene in the van that they thought about turning around and taking him back to the hospital.
 
They finally assented and came through the Midtown Tunnel instead, but they made Shake pay the toll himself.
 
It pacified him, and he wrote a series of loving poems to the attendants.
 
Odes to George & Jeff
.

In Shake's apartment on Fourth Street, around the block from the Narrative Bone Palace, Chase washed his mouth out at the sink and stared into the mirror, eyeing the reflection of a bottle of JD on top of the refrigerator.
 
That awful tickle was back in the center of his chest, and only liquor or the hardcore mood equalizer meds could burn it out.
 

He wanted to fall into the old pattern because it gave him some kind of structure, a way of moving from one point to another.
 
After six years of college, five teaching high school English, two months in a mental hospital, and a year and a half in the can, Chase still wasn't sure which institution had come closer to doing him in.

Shake's place was decorated in a retro-70s, pseudo-mock-black militant style that was a holdover from when he used to perform in a beret and hold up banners of Chi and Eldridge Cleaver.
 

Before that phase he'd been caught up in this African ancestry thing and wore a dashiki and turban and called himself
Babawanda
Mugwanda
.
 
There was still a snakeskin drum and a kudu antelope horn in the corner that Chase would hang out the window and blow when he was drunk.
  

On the walls were photos of Shake's grandparents, a black light poster of Hendrix, the check from his first poetry sale—$1.33—and a centerfold of Jennifer Jackson, the first black Playmate from back in '65.
 
He'd bought that one off eBay for thirty bucks and considered it a part of his personal history.
 

You found your love wherever you could.
 
You made it up as you went along if you had to, pulled it in from the outside.
 
Somehow Shake had made peace with all his own various facets and aspects.
 
It was a trick he just couldn't teach Chase.

Shake glanced over, plucking at his chin.
 
He was angry but nobody would know it by looking at him.
 
He showed no emotion as he sat on his busted couch, expressionless but steaming.
 
Fluff from a torn cushion wafted through the air and caught in the thick hair on his arms.
 
The prongs of his beard had started to droop a bit.

Okay, so here it comes.
 

Plant yourself, get ready.

"What're you going on about Garden Falls again for, man?" Shake asked.
 
His voice was calm, low, and perfectly even.
  
You'd never guess he was loaded with the kind of phobias they didn't even have names for yet.
 
Really ridiculous shit you couldn't make up.
 

Like an irrational fear of
poofy
linen pirate shirts, Irish guys named Connor, chickens with only one leg, fingernails longer than two inches, Rod
Serling
impersonators (but not Rod
Serling
), the last inch of Mayonnaise at the bottom of the jar, kids in diagonally striped pink shirts and shorts so that they looked like peppermint twists.
 
Gum. Cotton balls.
 

They were such outrageous hang-ups that you'd never know anything was wrong unless you saw him go catatonic while staring at Errol Flynn in
Captain Blood
, the
poofy
shirt completely flinging him out of his mind.
 
You never asked him to make you a tuna sandwich in case he didn't have a fresh jar of Mayo on hand.
 
You were always checking the crowds to see if some
mick
named Connor might be heading your way. Chase could count off about thirty of Shake's phobias and figured he still didn't know at least half of them. You never knew what might set him off, send him into a fugue state.

"Listen—"

"Don't give me listen," Shake said.
 
"These
whitebread
kids and aging yuppies don't pay to deal with that sort of senseless display."

"You sure about that?" Chase asked.
 
"What, you didn't hear them screeching for an encore?"

"They're easily amused," Shake admitted.
 

"Then be happy.
 
We gave them a show."

"It wasn't the show I wanted them to have."

"It's not your choice.
 
Not only yours anyway."

That stopped him.
 
Shake sometimes forgot they were partners.
 
He'd become so successful and stable it was easy to leave Chase and his different brand of craziness behind.
 

"Saying what you've got to say so you can deal with the world is one thing, Gray.
 
But all that shrieking and peculiarity, man, talking about blood, biting up your own tongue.
 
Haven't you had enough of that yet?"

Chase thought about it seriously for a minute.
 
"I ask myself that same question all the time."

"Have you ever answered it?"

"I'm working up to that."

"Strive harder."

"Hey—"

"There isn't any hey—"

They hit the same impasse as always.
 
Shake had been in the Falls with Chase for about six weeks of overlap, but he didn't have nearly as rough a time of it and didn't believe the stories Chase told him about
Arlo
Barrack and the fourth floor.
 
He figured they were just hallucinations and Chase didn't want to argue.
 
Besides, he wasn't so sure himself anymore.

"How much did you drink tonight?" Shake asked.

"Nothing."

"The truth."

"Nothing.
 
I'm not lying."

"Then what is going on with you?
 
I do my part, I'm here to listen."
 
He kept staring at the centerfold on the wall, still wanting to get his hands on Jennifer Jackson's melon-sized tits.
 
"But you've got to talk to me.
 
I thought you were beyond all this."

"That's just a foolish statement, my friend."
 
It was, really, when you got down to it.
 
Like Shake could handle some of those long fingernails coming at him?
 
The really lengthy ones, the Halloween ones, that started to curl?
 

"You say that as if you're proud."

Chase rubbed the tip of his tongue against the back of his front teeth, squeezing out a drop of blood.
 
The bitter taste matched his mood.
 
You took your conceits and grabbed your self-esteem wherever you could find it.
 
"Proud enough."
 
Shake tended to get a little judgmental at times.
 
"How about you?"

It got Shake so riled that he threw some heat into his words.
 
"Well, you explain it to me then.
 
Now what's going on?
 
You been out of the hospital for five years, out of prison for nearly three and a half, and you're acting more reckless and runaway than when you were inside."

"I have an addictive personality."

"You've got a whack's personality."

"Hey," Chase said, "that's just being mean now."

"Talking about your father and babies again?"
 
Shake dug into his beard, pulling, petting.
 
It was something he did when he got uptight but was still trying hard to keep hold of his chocolaty cool.
  
"He didn't kill any baby, Gray."

"No?"

"His battery was dead and he went next door to Mrs. Godfrey's home and borrowed her car.
 
Do you remember that?"

"
Hm
," Chase said.
 
He wasn't sure.

"She came and stayed with you while he drove the babysitter to the hospital.
 
Darlena
."

"
Doreena
."

"Yes,
Doreena
, that's her.
 
She was a college freshman, married, you know, to her high school sweetheart.
 
She wasn't retarded the way you sometimes think, man.
 
She was a chemistry major.
 
Your father took her to the hospital and she had a baby boy.
 
Do you remember any of that?"

"Hm."

Mrs. Godfrey.
 
She had pink hair and used a walker topped by two silver roosters in each corner.
 
She made gingerbread cookies and read Dr. Seuss books aloud.
 
Doing all the weird character voices.
Fox in Socks.
 
The
Lorax
.
 
Mrs. Godfrey babysat except for when her bursitis was acting up.
 
Then Dad called
Doreena
, who was married to a guy named Phil.
 
Both of them were in college, that's right.
 
Doreena
stayed with him, doing her homework.
 
Quantum Chemistry and Molecular Spectroscopy.
 
Calculus.
 
She showed him the Cosine buttons on her calculator.
 
Played the stereo low listening to baroque classics.
 
While he watched television, hearing the violins crying in the background.

"I saw
Jez
in the crowd," he said.

Shake snapped forward as if somebody had kicked him in the kidneys.
 
"What's this now?"

"She was there.
 
Walked into the Palace right as I hit the stage."

"That's not possible, man."
 
Looking a bit sad, like he might be inching toward the phone, call George and Jeff up to come carry Chase off.
 
"You know it's not."

"I saw her.
 
She still has great legs."

"She's dead, Gray.
 
She died in the fire."

"Yeah, but—"

"You sure you didn't take a sip of gin?
 
You're acting out, man.
 
You got to let it go."

He knew that but it didn't change anything.
 
He knew what he'd seen.
 
Nurse
Jez
had wandered in to take a peek at him, see how he was doing.
 
"She wasn't wearing any stockings."

"What're you saying?
 
She couldn't have been there.
 
Nurse
Jez
is dead.
 
She's been dead for five years."

"Maybe not."

"The hell.
 
You're deranged again.
 
For serious."

This is when things could get dicey.
 
Two lunatics staring each other down, trying to find reality in the middle of their delusions.
 
Chase felt like jogging up the block, buying a box of cotton balls at the corner store, coming back and showering Shake with them.
 
Watch him blank out for five or six hours.
 
Who the fuck was he calling deranged?

Sometimes you had to start with the idea that you were insane and work your way backward from there.
 
It gave you plenty of room to move.

To try to carry out what you couldn't do normally, to become capable. You might build a hell of a lot of confidence that way, knowing you were the craziest bastard in the building.