Dead Boys (28 page)
“Look, look, look,” James says when I get back. He holds up the new issue of the magazine they were taking pictures for that day.
He opens it, and there’s the stand, the models — Tina and what’s-her-name — but something’s wrong.
“At least you didn’t break the camera,” James says, pointing at the photos.
“That’s not me,” I reply, and I mean it. I’ve never seen that face before.
James ignores me, turning to show a customer. “Free publicity, right?”
The customer punches me in the arm. “Check you out.”
“That’s not me,” I repeat, but they don’t hear. I take a pack of Lucky Strikes from the cigarette display and step out to the curb to smoke. It was silly to quit in the first place, to torture myself like that, when waking up every day is painful enough.
I
USED TO
pick Lana up when she got off work at Jack in the Box because she hated riding the bus. She’d already wrecked two cars, her mom’s and the Nissan they bought her for graduation. We disagreed about what color things were, smells. I heard her tell a friend that I was a pervert. That’s what kind of bitch she could be.
I would have cut myself for her. I would have eaten shit. When she stopped answering the phone, I lost hope. The plans we’d made didn’t mean anything. I finally tracked her down, but whoever brainwashed her did a fantastic job. “Get over it,” she said. Suddenly I was the enemy. Her parents, the police. I backed off, but that wasn’t enough. She had to get vicious, with the gangsters and all.
A
KNOCK AT
this hour can be nothing but trouble. I grab the knife off the coffee table and stand with my back to the wall in case they shoot through the door. But it’s the actor, the phone salesman. Greg. He knocks again even after I tell him to go away.
“I’ve got something for you.”
My stomach twists and gurgles, and I taste ammonia. I open the door maybe three inches, stop it with my foot. Greg is alone. He’s barefoot and hasn’t shaved for days.
“Come on,” he says, pushing with his shoulder. “Let me in.”
I show him the knife. I stick it in his arm, just the tip.
He backs away and touches the blood.
“You make me sick,” I say.
“You sure were singing a different tune last time, trick.”
He throws an envelope at my face. The card it contains has a naked man on it. CHEER UP, Greg has written inside. I will kill him if I ever see him again.
T
HE PALM TREE
appears first out of the darkness, then the ocean and the sand. An alarm clock beeps somewhere, and pretty soon it’s noisy as hell as everyone in the building wakes up and starts to get ready for work. It used to give me a thrill to be part of it. I was convinced that I fit right in because I showered and dressed and ate breakfast like my neighbors. Anymore, though, all those radios tuned to all those different stations just sound messy to me. I get up from the stinking recliner where I’ve waited out the night and slam the window down.
There’s a sign above the register that says ONE DAY AT A TIME, and I guess that’s good advice, but I’ve got the creepy crawlies pretty bad this morning, and my left nostril is all stopped up. The night guy hasn’t done the candy again, which means he takes me for a chump. I smoke half a pack of cigarettes before noon. A car slams on its brakes to avoid a wino, and the screech makes me bite my tongue. The sky seethes. I don’t think I can handle rain.
A Vietnamese gangster sneaks up on me and buys a
Sports Illustrated,
then walks back across the street. He gets into a Jeep with another hard case, and they sit there, watching me. James keeps a starter pistol in a drawer under the register. He doesn’t believe in real guns. When Lana’s dad answers the phone, I lay it out for him: I’m on my way over, and I want Lana waiting in the front yard. The gangsters drive away. Message received. I call James and tell him I’m locking up.
The pistol rattles against the windshield if I lay it on the dash, so I move it to the passenger seat. It’s green lights all the way over there, the first time that’s happened. The sky is almost black now. People have their headlights on. The cops are in front of Lana’s house with their guns already drawn. I pull over a block away and walk toward them. The television antennas are screaming at the telephone poles. In the clipping Marty carries, there’s a picture of John Wayne sprawled dead on the floor. He looks ridiculous in his diaper and cowboy vest.
Here lies a man whose best wasn’t good enough. I bequeath my car to the parking lot attendant. Everything else, you can burn to ashes.
H
E NEEDS ME TO SAY YES. IT’S AN OLDIE BUT A GOODIE
: keep the affirmatives coming. I read an article, an undercover, “Secrets of a Car Salesman” thing, that had a list of ten tricks to watch out for, and that was one of them. I held on to the magazine the article was in, putting it with a bunch of other magazines containing information that would someday be of use, but when the pile got to be about four feet high, Louise said, “This is ridiculous,” and threw them all out. So now I’m at this guy’s, this Rodrigo’s, mercy.
“Do you like the color?” he asks.
“Yes,” I reply.
“Red, right?”
“Red.”
Rodrigo’s hair is slicked straight back, and he has a goatee. There’s a pack of Marlboros in the pocket of his shirt. He should stash them somewhere else, that’s my advice. If he wants to look professional. A van from a Mexican radio station is parked on the lot. They’re blasting music and handing out bumper stickers and T-shirts. I’m not sure about that either. It might scare away the white folks.
Rodrigo urges me aboard the SUV. The seat wraps itself around my body. “Special motors; they remember you,” Rodrigo says. This model has enough chrome for three regular cars. Fog lights, leather interior, six-CD changer. The dashboard gauges glow purple when I turn the key. Way up here you’d see trouble before you got to it. No more sitting in traffic, wondering.
A few other salesmen stand together outside the showroom. They’re smoking and watching two girls shake it to the music from the van. La Super Estrella. The boss comes out and says something, and the salesmen scatter. My fingertips are cold against my face when I adjust my glasses. The clouds look like skywriting that has just drifted into illegibility. I can’t find the sun.
“Let me ask you something,” Rodrigo says, putting one foot up on the running board. “If I could get you the price you wanted, would you write me a check today?”
“Come on, man,” I scoff. “You’d have to be a pimp to drive this thing. A teenage pimp.”
Rodrigo steps back and looks me over. Oh, he’d like to thump me. He’s probably on straight commission. I read an article about that, too. I apologize for wasting his time. I can’t afford a new car. Louise and I are saving for a house. I was just driving by and saw the balloons and heard the music. The Glendale Auto Mall. It seemed like a place where something was happening.
A
PACK OF
dogs trots through the intersection, all shapes and sizes, escapees and throwaways. The leader turns, a shaggy black beast, and gives me a look, flashing his teeth. I send him a mental message:
Car, dumbass. Me run you over.
The signal changes, and we continue toward LAX. Razor wire protects windowless bunkers and empty lots. It’s six in the morning. Night tilts toward day.
Louise picked up this shortcut from a shuttle driver. It’s useful at rush hour, but now — what’s the point? The freeway’s practically empty. You could keep it at seventy-five, no problem. Louise won’t let me go that way, though. We have to take the same route every time. There are her rituals, and then there are her phobias. She’s scared of birds, stairs, and electricity. No, really. She has a childhood memory of being struck by lightning. Her mother says it never happened, but Louise still uses her elbow to turn off the lights when nobody’s looking.
She’s okay with flying, though; a good thing, because her job involves a lot of it. She works for a company that publishes corporate training manuals, and two or three times a month she heads out to meet with clients in Chicago, Dallas, wherever. It’s killing her, she says, so next year she plans to quit and have a baby. Ha ha ha.
We have to stop at the same McDonald’s every time I drop her off, too. The sky is pearling as we walk across the parking lot. I recall a sunrise I saw on a beach in Hawaii. Something like that can save your life if you use it later, when you need it. A garbage truck pulls in, passing between us and the restaurant. It screams its guts out as it reaches for a Dumpster. Louise hurries into the restaurant, her hands pressed to her ears.
Everybody in line is wearing a uniform. There’s a cop, two flight attendants, a nurse, some guys in orange vests and hard hats, and a postman. It’s like a children’s book. I go to the counter while Louise finds a table. That’s how we always work it. I know her order by heart. The girl at the register has acne and a silver tooth. Her friend says something to her, and the girl asks, while handing me my change, “For real?” A button is missing from her shirt. I can see her belly.
Louise lifts the magazine she’s reading so there’s room for the tray on the table. It takes a minute to get everything arranged to her liking, and then she says, “There’s a quiz in here that tells you how long you’re going to live.”
“I don’t believe in that stuff,” I reply, unwrapping my McMuffin.
“It’s not a horoscope; it’s a series of health-related questions. You can’t not believe in it.”
“Then what I mean is, I don’t care.”
“Do you smoke? No.”
“I’m not cooperating.”
“It’s not like I can’t answer them all for you. Do you exercise? If so, how often?”
“Louise, who says I’m
ever
going to die?”
She puts down the magazine and opens her juice. “Forget it,” she says.
My coffee steams up my glasses. I wait for them to clear so I can read the newspaper. There’s an article about an earthquake in India. They interview the guy in charge of burning the bodies. “There will be many more ghosts after this,” he says. “But I won’t be afraid. I have met ghosts so many times by now that I think I’m one of them.”
Louise’s cell phone rings. It’s her boss, the one I think she’s fucking. A UPS guy comes in, and a real, live sailor. The girl with the silver tooth takes a break. She walks outside and sits on the curb, poking at something with the toe of her shoe. I had a dream last night that they brought back an old TV show, and it made everybody happy.
Y
OU CAN SMELL
the ocean at the airport, and seagulls plunder the trash. When you take off, you can look down and watch the waves crawl toward the shore. They seem like they’re barely moving from up that high. Louise is jittery. Maybe it’s the coffee. Her hand shakes when she twists the rearview mirror down to check her hair. She complains that my driving makes her nauseous. We fight the way people do in movies, always coming close but never landing a blow.
The streetlights go out as I pull up to the terminal. For an instant everything is hot pink. I pop the trunk and help Louise with her bag. She fits everything she needs into a single carry-on. That’s one of the things I love about her: She’s so practical despite her neuroses.
“Good-bye, husband,” she says.
“Good-bye, wife.”
A quick kiss, and she’s off. I watch her until she’s out of sight — my own ritual. I’m losing her. She slipped through my fingers somehow.
I
TOOK MY
cock out in the elevator once, coming back from lunch, just to do it. I unzipped my pants as soon as the doors closed and let it dangle until the bell rang for my floor. If the receptionist had looked up, she might have caught me getting myself together.
The corporate structure here is labyrinthian. They always reorganize when someone new gets to the top. My team is currently part of the production department. For the past two months we’ve been coordinating the development of a print campaign for a new brand of yogurt. There’s the team leader, then me, then three facilitators. They used to be called assistants.
The facilitators sit in cubicles outside my office. There’s talk that they’re going to move everyone into cubicles, to improve communication. I’ll quit if that happens. You can hear your neighbors sighing in those things, you can smell their perfume. If they catch a cold, you’re going to get it. People sneak up on you.
The company leases the entire tenth floor. My window faces north, floor to ceiling. In the winter I close the door, turn my chair around, and watch the storms blow in. When Malibu burns, I can see that, too. I once hired a guy who quit after two weeks. “I don’t know how you hack being in this box all day,” he said. He left to spend more time painting. You can’t rely on rich kids.
This morning I received a memo from the personnel department, regarding one of the VPs, Kress. His wife died, and he’s been out of the office for a month. The memo relayed his request that nobody mention his loss when he returns. We are not to hug him, console him, or otherwise say or do anything out of the ordinary. He would appreciate this very much.
One of the facilitators pokes her head in, Heidi, a skinny girl with moles.
“Donna will be late.”
“You’re kidding,” I reply, flatly.
Donna is our team leader. She’s often late. Her children are her excuse. No one questions it. This one’s sick, that one’s got the shits.
“She asked me to tell you.”
“Bless her heart.”
“Can you initial these layouts?”
If Donna goes, I have a feeling they’ll skip me and promote Heidi. She comes in early and stays past six; I air out my dick in the elevator. Her hair is a strange color, and I saw her crying in her car after the Christmas party. Someone said she’s religious.
The phone rings. It’s Adam, from accounting.
“What’s up with that Kress memo? What a narcissist.”
Adam keeps porno in his desk drawer. He smokes dope in the stairwell. We aren’t exactly friends — I wouldn’t loan him money, and he wouldn’t ask — but we cut each other some slack.
