Love May Fail (9 page)

“Chuck, we need you. Get up here!” the beefy bartender calls from the front.

“To be continued.” Chuck gives two sets of devil horns to Tommy, sticks out his tongue like Gene Simmons, and then says, “Dude, you totally rocked.”

“You rocked too, Uncle Chuck.” Tommy returns the devil horns before Chuck jogs back to the front bar and yells something at a blonde, who smiles as Chuck points me out.

The blonde delivers two bottles of Budweiser to our table and says, “From Chuck. If you break his heart, I’ll kill you.”

“Easy, Lisa,” Danielle says.

“I’m serious.” Lisa holds my gaze for an uncomfortable beat and then walks away.

I look to Danielle for an explanation and she says, “Lisa and Chuck have worked together for years. She acts like his mother. What can I say? It’s weird.”

“Okay.”

Several people come over to our booth to congratulate Tommy, and Danielle keeps telling them that it’s not necessary to give Tommy tips, which seems strange to me because—from what I’ve gathered so far—she could certainly use the money.

Chicken wings and tuna melts arrive as Tommy colors with crayons in a blank notebook and Danielle tells me all about the Oaklyn public school system and how Tommy is “special” and “gifted” when it comes to performing, but those skills aren’t appreciated in towns like Oaklyn and Collingswood and Westmont and Haddon Township.

I’m tempted to point out that her kid just got a standing ovation for performing right here at the Manor in Oaklyn. The people here at the bar seemed to appreciate the hell out of Tommy. But I know from experience that you should never disagree with a woman when
she is speaking about her children. Women lose their objectivity when they give birth. There is no reasoning with a mother when it comes to her child, especially her firstborn.

“It’s an okay school, but I mean, it’s not Faddonfield,” Danielle says, referring to Haddonfield, the wealthiest town in the area—the one that always seems to outperform the rest of us no matter how hard we try, proving that money and contacts help a whole bunch in America.

“Fuck Faddonfield,” I say. “You want your kids to grow up snotty and entitled?”

“Portia!” Danielle says, and gestures to her son with her eyes and head. “Yo!”

“Sorry. I’m not used to being around kids.”

Tommy is drawing what looks to be Guns N’ Roses’
Appetite for Destruction
album cover—a cross with the skulls of the band members decorating it.

Her five-year-old knows that album, which features an illustration of a raped-and-left-for-dead-in-an-alley woman with her underwear around her ankles on the inside flap AND uses the word
fuck
multiple times on different tracks, and Danielle’s worried about my using profanity in front of him?

“Do you want kids?” she asks.

“No.”

“Oh,” Danielle says in a surprised way, trying to mask her disappointment. Or maybe it’s disapproval.

I don’t elaborate on the many reasons I don’t want children. I know it will win me no points tonight.

I always think of Philip Larkin’s poem “This Be the Verse” whenever someone asks when I’ll have children. My mom fucked me up, and I don’t want to pass that on. Imagine if I had children with Ken the misogynistic porno king? Khaleesi and company would
have hurt much more than my pride. But I also don’t want to be like Danielle, who seems to live solely for—or through—her kid. I want
my
life to count. And I’ve seen how so many women have kids as a way of contributing when they no longer feel as though they are contributing. Their college dreams and hopes are crushed by the world, so they fall back into the traditional role of motherhood, where they will be praised for simply taking a man’s seed into their bodies and then allowing it to grow. They become livestock, really. The simple fact that they’ve reproduced makes them palatable to society. A woman could be the worst mother in the world, but if she is holding a baby in public, everyone will smile at her with admiration usually reserved for saints and deities. She’s not just some woman anymore, but a life giver, a Mother Mary. That’s how they trick us into going through the pain of childbirth and all the rest. Just reproduce, and people throw you parties and buy you gifts and sympathize with you. You enjoy a sense of belonging and achievement simply because you had sex successfully. And who can resist that?

I guess I can.

My own mother had sex with a stranger and gave birth to me, and I’m sure people congratulated her for it along the way, but she was a criminally bad mother, who I must now take care of for the rest of my life or suffer extreme guilt. Motherhood is no bulletproof plan for happily ever after, that’s certain. But will anyone say that openly? Not even I have the stomach for that.

“Portia?” Danielle says. “Where are you?”

I shake my head and blink a few times. “Must be the beer.”

Danielle looks at my full bottle of Budweiser and raises her eyebrows. “Do you want to come over to my apartment? Once I tuck in Jon Bon Jovi here, we can talk about Mr. Vernon if you want. That’s why you came, right? I didn’t bring it up before because”—
she shields her mouth with her hand and whispers—“it’s not a story for kids
.
”

I nod, and it occurs to me once again that Tommy is a strange little boy. I mean, he gets up in front of strangers and performs but then says nothing during dinner. Come to think of it, he didn’t even eat anything. He just colored in his blank notebook. “Sure,” I answer.

I’m tired and can see that Danielle and I have little in common, but I want to know what happened to Mr. Vernon.

I reach into my purse, which sits next to me on the booth, and finger the little Official Member of the Human Race card, digging the sharp corners into the soft flesh under my fingernail for as long as I can take the pain.

I try to pay, but Danielle explains it’s not necessary since Chuck works here. “One of the very few perks,” she explains. “We eat and drink for free at the Manor.”

Outside we cross the intersection diagonally, little Tommy holding his mother’s hand and yawning now, appearing absolutely exhausted before nine, which is strange for a Saturday night, I think, but then again, he’s a unique kid.

Their apartment is tiny.

A small TV is set up on what looks like a card table. I take in the dusty dorm-room-style metal frame futon, three wooden chairs that look like they are from three different 1950s-era dining room sets, probably all trash-picked, I think. Plastic crates of records—real old-school vinyl—are stacked next to an old record player with huge faux-wood box speakers that appear to predate the Jimmy Carter administration.

When she sees me looking at her collection, Danielle says, “Tommy gets one bedtime song. We rock out every Saturday night. What are you going to pick, Tommy?”

He doesn’t answer, but runs into another room and returns wearing a disturbing mask that looks like it was made from papier-mâché and then spray-painted silver. There are two rectangular eyeholes slanted downward, a ridge for the nose, dozens of holes the size of pinheads where the mouth should be and straps that run around the back of the head.

When Tommy pulls Quiet Riot’s
Metal Health
album from a crate, I realize that the mask is a damn good representation of the one on the cover we all loved in—was it fifth or sixth grade when that record came out?

Danielle helps him put the record on the turntable. “Do you still love Quiet Riot, Portia?”

“Hell yeah!” I say, forgetting that you aren’t supposed to curse in front of elementary-school kids. “And I bet I know what song you’re going to pick too!”

When I hear the snare and bass drum alternating, I know I’m right.

Tommy’s doing a new show now, with the mask on, which strikes me as more than a little icky—not just this kid’s need for attention, but the fact that he’s wearing a Hannibal Lecter mask and singing about getting wild, wild, wild.

“
Girls rock your boys
,” Danielle sings as she jumps around the room like we did when we were just a little older than Tommy, back when “Cum On Feel the Noize” was being blasted on MTV and every radio station in the country, back in hair metal’s commercial heyday.

And before I know it, I’m jumping around the room too, getting wild, wild, wild, because how can you not jump and sing along with “Cum On Feel the Noize”? That song is genius, a litmus test for your love of life. If you aren’t banging your head to the beat of that tune, you suck.

Suddenly we are all doing the guitar solo—Tommy on the futon,
Danielle with one foot on a chair, me kneeling on the floor, because I rock hard—and I think about the pre-Ken poor-metalhead-from–South Jersey days, that hopeful young Portia who hadn’t yet been touched and tarnished by a misogynistic porn king. I existed free and clean of Ken Humes before, back when hair metal ruled, and so maybe I can again.

They call this nostalgia, Portia
, I tell myself, banging my head to the beat,
and it feels great. Like being a kid again.

Tommy probably gets his ass kicked every day at school for liking this old music, instead of Flo Rida or Ke$ha or Justin Bieber or whoever, but I see why Danielle shares it with him.

She gets her ass kicked every day at the diner too, no doubt—just because she’s a woman and poor.

My tongue is out as I switch from air guitar to air drums, which is perfectly acceptable when you are rocking out with friends and their children to metal.

I think about Gloria Steinem and how metal objectifies women constantly as we all chant, “Girls rock your boys!”

But I also catch my reflection in the mirror—me in the old white jean jacket with my mane of hair rising and falling to my head banging, nose scrunched, eyes squinted in some sort of “cool face”—and I tell myself just to rock.

Even though he is wearing a mask, I can tell Tommy is smiling, and Danielle is too as she sings into her invisible microphone.

This is what these people have.

All they have.

And right now, it’s what I have too.

The song ends, and we give ourselves a round of applause.

“Did you feel it?” Tommy says to me as he pulls off his Quiet Riot mask. “The noize
?
”

I nod and even tousle the kid’s hair.

What the hell was that? I’m never affectionate with children.

“Time for bed. You can show Ms. Kane your bedroom, and then it’s lights out, mister!”

“Uncle Chuck made this when he was little.” Tommy hands me the mask.

I look at the inside and read these words:

               
C
h
uck Bass

Quiet Riot Rocks!

1983

“I turned twelve in 1983,” I say absentmindedly.

“So did I, remember?” Danielle answers.

“The mask keeps the bad dreams away.” Tommy snatches it out of my hands. “Uncle Chuck promised. And it’s true!”

Danielle smiles at me, and we follow Tommy into his bedroom. He jumps up on his bed and hangs the mask on a nail over the headboard, just like in the old music video where the kid wakes up, his room is shaking, and the band finally breaks through the walls.

I think about Chuck being a boy himself, watching that video on MTV just like Danielle and I did, back in the day.

“Uncle Chuck made the mask. He sleeps over there.” Tommy points to the single bed on the other side of the room. Over the headboard hangs a collection of everyday objects painted in bright colors on little four-by-four-inch canvases: a cell phone, a TV remote, a coffee filter. Weird.

“This is actually Chuck’s place,” Danielle says. “We’re temporary guests.”

“I like living with Uncle Chuck!” Tommy says as he slides into his bed.

“You better scrub those pearly whites!” Danielle says and begins to tickle Tommy. “I don’t kiss boys with rotten teeth!”

When Tommy runs into the bathroom, I return to the futon and wait for Danielle.

I wonder why Tommy sleeps in Chuck’s room and not Danielle’s.

A few minutes later Tommy comes out in PJs to give me a kiss on the cheek, says, “Keep rocking, Ms. Kane,” gives me the devil horns, which I return twofold, and runs back into his bedroom. I hear Danielle reading a book to him—something about a shark who wants to be a librarian and makes books out of shells and seaweed so that she can teach fish to read, because literate fish “taste better,” which seems like a very creepy children’s book. Danielle seems to be rushing the story a little, like she’d rather be out here with me.

As I wait, I start to think about Mr. Vernon again, and I wonder if he’s dead. Could the news be that dramatic? I mean, it’s been more than twenty years.

Danielle returns. “Jack on the rocks?”

“Hell, yes.” I join her in the kitchen, which is just the left side of the living room really.

She puts ice into two small plastic cups and pours the Jack liberally.

My cup is from a fast food restaurant and advertises an Iron Man movie starring Robert Downey Jr. in a robot suit. I remember when Robert Downey Jr. was just doing regular roles about regular men.

I also think about the Baccarat crystal glasses Ken and I drank from nightly in Tampa and wonder how many hours working at the diner it would take Danielle to earn enough money for just one of those. An entire week’s worth of pay and tips, maybe more.

“To good ol’ Haddon Township High School,” Danielle says.

“To rock and roll,” I say.

We touch plastic and sip.

The burn is the same, but whiskey definitely tastes better out of fine crystal, no matter what your roots happen to be.

That’s the problem with money—it changes your tastes. You can never go back to liking some things, like drinking alcohol from plastic cups, as much.

We return to the futon, and Danielle puts on Mötley Crüe’s first album
Too Fast for Love
with the volume much lower than when we listened to Quiet Riot.

“You have this on vinyl?” I say.

“Original pressing,” Danielle says proudly as Vince Neil sings “Live Wire.” “It’s Chuck’s. He has quite a collection. Tells Tommy it’s his when Chuck dies.”

“Cool uncle.”

“Did you fuck Mr. Vernon back in high school?”