Magnificent Vibration (11 page)

No movement from Goliath.

“You can take the credit card but its already in receivership and has about a 17,000 dollar deficit attached to it so you’d actually be
losing
money on that one.”

Still no sign we have reached an agreement.

I begin to review the single karate class I took as a teenager when my father suggested I stand up to Steve the Jock and stop being such a goddamn pussy. Let’s see, there was the stance—both feet together, fists at attention. Nope. That won’t help. There was the step-forward-and-punch-the-air-while-yelling-“Kiai,” or some such verbiage. Pretty sure that wouldn’t be a terribly intimidating move at this juncture considering our differences in size and mass. Skip that one. And then there was the respectful bow at the end and I think the word “Osu” was uttered with an accent on the sibilant “ssss.” This move is a distinct possibility, in that Goliath would understand that I am bowing to his superior brawn, might, and mastery, he will feel sympathy, and pity me for having to degrade myself in front of my woman and be obliged to let us pass unmolested.

I settle for, “We’re just walking to our car.”

He moves a step closer. We move two steps back.

“What’s going on?” says the behemoth.

I’m confused. Is he making idle chitchat at two o’clock in the morning on this deserted avenue? So I answer as casually as I can.

“Not much, my man. What’s goin’ on with you?”

This immediately feels like the wrong response.

His breathing is labored and heavy.

“What does it mean?” That’s what he says to us. “What does it mean?”

Silence from me. Finally I squeak out a response.

“What does
what
mean?” I answer, even though we all know my mother said you should never answer a question with a question.

Is he going to eat us? My mind is in flight-or-flight mode (“fight” is pretty much off the table at this point), trying to figure out how best to extricate us from this bad and possibly cannibalistic situation.

“I was at the coffee bar. I saw you. I overheard the two of you talking,” he blurts out, and it suddenly hits me that he’s the big guy I momentarily locked eyes with over coffee. Okay, so this is now a stalker thing. Who’s he stalking? Obviously my bewitching companion.

“Dude, we just want to get home, okay?” I try. I feel I may not be winning chivalry points with Alice.

The behemoth reaches his right hand inside his long coat. Shit!! He’s got a gun! He’s going to shoot us! I push Alice away and dive onto this big freak, driving us both to the pavement. Even as I do it my whole being is screaming,

“Have you lost your fucking mind?! Good-bye, Charlie!” I can almost hear the muffled “pop, pop, pop” and smell the burned cordite, feel the warm, wet, sticky ooze as my life leaks out of me through the hot bullet holes while the city lights go dim and Alice weeps. “Just another true-life story from the City of Angels! Coming soon to a theater near you!” This is Hollywood, after all.

Goliath fights back . . . but not with the energy or conviction I would have expected from an insane, carnivorous serial killer bent
on adding two more innocent notches to his long list of beautiful and tasty victims.

“Get off me!” he actually shouts.

“Give me the gun!!!” I scream, because I heard it once in a movie and it sounded really good.

“I don’t have a gun, dipshit,” is the very unexpected reply. We continue to wrestle on the ground.

Mindful of “my girl,” I yell back, “I am light years from being a dipshit, my friend!!!” Not really apropos, but I am in a highly stressed condition. The giant finally pushes me off him so easily that I feel like a two-year-old wrestling with his dad.

I jump to my feet. Goliath struggles to his. Probably due to the handicap of the extra poundage. Should I kick him in the balls, grab Alice and run? It’s such a violent move, and I guess I’m not one of those tough guys who kicks first and asks questions later. I’m more the “I think we need to talk” type of person. Maybe it comes from idolizing an older sister.

By the time all this has run through my brain, he’s back on his feet and in his former advantageous position as the threatening stranger. Fuckit!!! I grab Alice’s hand, dodge, weave, and dodge again then take off to the other side of the street, figuring if he doesn’t have a gun, we can at least outrun the fat beast.

“Stop!!! Please!!!! Pleeease!!!!” he moans almost pathetically.

And we actually stop . . . and look on in wonder.

“What’s he want?” I ask under my breath. This has been a most unusual night, so why should it stop now?

“What do you want?” It’s Alice this time, voicing my sotto voce mutterings aloud.

Again Goliath reaches inside his coat with his right hand.

Gallantly (since he’s already claimed he doesn’t have a weapon) I jump in front of Alice. She pushes me to the side so I don’t block her view of this dangerous giant.

“He already said he doesn’t have a gun,” she remarks somewhat disingenuously.

We look on as the colossal anthropoid speaks and his sonorous voice echoes off the brick buildings around us.

“Help me to understand,” is all he says as he produces something from the folds of his long coat. He holds it up at arm’s length so the streetlight hits it. It’s quite dramatic. And, again, it could only happen in Hollywood.

“Holy shit,” I say under my breath as light reflects off the raised object.

We both recognize it instantly.
Magnificent Vibration.
The third one I’ve seen today. This must be the best-selling book of all time, because everyone I run into seems to have a friggin’ copy.

“Mine has a phone number written on the inside, too,” says Goliath.

I
t’s late Friday morning. Both of my parents are at work and I’ve blown off school, after a shouting match with my mother, of course, who has stormed out of the house yelling back at me (and to the whole neighborhood) that, at seventeen, I am already a LOSER. Which I most certainly am not, having just bought myself my first electric guitar! My head is currently filled with visions of famous billionaire musicians who dropped out of school because the pull of the music was so strong. And how they struggled and fought, persevered and climbed until they finally reached the top of the mountain, where they plugged in and played their songs for all the world to hear, adore, and throw money as a result. At this moment I can play a C chord. Not well. And it hurts my fingers.

I can hear Mrs. Whiting reading to Josie. She is actually doing a pretty good job of caring for my girl. My sister’s hair is no longer matted, her nightdresses are clean, and she seems pretty oblivious as the Reverend’s wife sits with her and reads her page after page after page from the Bible. Although I still consider myself Josie’s main caregiver, Mrs. Whiting has lightened the load a little and I have begrudgingly accepted her. She is a wispy, almost ethereal woman with ivory skin, flaxen hair, and modest clothes that all have a hand-scrubbed, ultra-sanitary look about them. She seldom talks and almost never to me but when she does, although she may be looking toward me, her pale blue eyes have a downcast aspect.

It’s now early afternoon and I have frittered half the day away as we adolescents who have forever to burn tend to do. I am still lying in bed, daydreaming of the possible rock-star future that could very well become real once I get beyond this single, extremely difficult and pain-inducing
C chord. The voice of the Reverend’s wife drifts in and out of my periphery as she delivers God’s word to what could only charitably be described as a captive audience. I am about to get up and give my sister a break from the holy bombardment when the words drifting in from her bedroom suddenly take shape. Mrs. Whiting is reading:

“Yet she increased her whorings, remembering the days of her youth, when she played the whore in the land of Egypt and lusted after her paramours there, whose members were like those of donkeys and whose emissions were like those of stallions . . .”

What the hell? What is this? How come her husband never reads
that
stuff in church?

This gets my and Woody’s attention—I’m lying half-naked in my bed as this ecclesial wife talks dirty just down the hall. I don’t even begin to wonder why it turns me on, but it does. I rise and head to the communal bathroom to start my day with a little healthy self-stimulation accompanied by confused and disjointed mental images of naked Egyptian priestesses mounting donkey-dicked men.

None of us has any idea why the things that turn us on do turn us on, and in our teen years we are mere puppets of the powerful sexual forces that will drive us into adulthood and consequently ruin our marriages and our lives but provide hours and hours of crazy, freaky shit to masturbate to.

So I am standing there, perched up on my toes over the bathroom sink, jammies around my ankles, vertical Woody in hand, when the bathroom door (which I am sure I have locked) bursts open. Jesus save me, it’s the Reverend’s wife!

We both stand there frozen for a second in what I assume is abject shock for her as much as for me. Neither of us moves. Though there are no train tracks anywhere near our house, I believe I hear a train whistle
honk mournfully in the distance . . . a cold coyote calls . . . a cricket chirps . . .

“Who’s watching my sister?” I ask feebly. It’s all I can come up with, dick in hand.

Her colorless face is suddenly flushed and her eyes are pinpricks of blue fire. She moves aggressively toward me and I flinch and hunker down, ready for the righteous blow I am sure is coming, already conjuring up explanations for the rather compromising position in which she has stumbled upon me. But the wallop does not come. Instead, my eyes still squeezed shut against impending doom and/or severe embarrassment, I feel, for the first time in my life, a hand other than my own wrap itself around poor, shunned Woody and start stroking the little guy for all he is worth. Her hot and labored breath is on my neck as she works her unexpected magic, and although he hardly produces the emission of stallions, Woody makes me proud by shooting his meager load into the sink and I shiver with pleasure, confusion and, yes horror. I look down just to make sure I’m not imagining things, and it is indeed the Reverend’s wife’s hand swaddling my quickly deflating member. Without a word from either of us, she turns and bolts from the bathroom, slamming the door shut, and I am left there with a mixture of nakedness, shock, guilt, wonderment, fear, euphoria, shame, distress, joy, chagrin, confusion, excitement, insecurity, virility, daring, defeat, triumph, awkwardness, self-consciousness . . . did I mention joy? I feel usurped, stunned, in peril, and completely at a frigging loss to explain what has just happened. I actually say under my breath, “ ’the fuck was that?” I stand there for a few minutes trying to decide the next best course of action, pajama pants still around my feet, shrunken wanger hanging limply against the cold sink. That was nuts! Did that really just happen? I can’t pull all the disparate pieces together to make any kind of sense
of this unlikely equation. ME: a kid/jerk that no girl seems interested in and whose only sexual release has been self-stimulation of the old beanpole + SHE: Adult woman, churchgoing, pious, a mature member of the real world = HER HAND on my little Woodland Hills whitesnake, stroking it into ecstasy.

In a fog, I pull up my pants and bolt from the bathroom to my bedroom to get back into bed so I can think about this and try to process it. Does this mean I am no longer a virgin? I’m pretty sure it means something along those lines, and I punch the air in a salute to my newfound manhood. Then comes the guilt. I begin, mentally, to go through the screaming matches as the Reverend and I face off over the attentions of this suddenly desirable and comely woman. I hear my mother crying and berating me for the destruction of her church. I fear the inevitable condemnation by God. She is, after all, the wife of one of His servants. Could I actually go to hell for this? I see newspaper headlines spinning at me with that cheesy effect the old TV cop shows used to use—

HORATIO “BOBBY” COTTON: PUBLIC DEGENERATE NUMBER ONE!

GEEKY KID MAKES CHURCH LADY WHACK HIS MOLE!

HE SAW, HE CONQUERED, HE CAME. THE DEBAUCHED LIFE OF BOB COTTON!!

Oh Jesus!! I try to breathe through it to calm myself and then begin conjuring up possible explanations to everyone peripherally involved as to how this could have happened in the first place. Could I possibly explain it as an accident? She rushed in, seriously in need of the restroom, stumbled, tripped, mistakenly grabbing my wiener on her way to the
floor; I tried to pull away, which only applied more friction to the aforementioned wiener, thus resulting in a “finishing move” and subsequent loss of manly bodily fluids. We were both shocked and embarrassed and apologized to each other profusely, she backing out in tears, me damning my manhood to a lifetime of abstinence and myself to a commitment of service to the Church for the rest of my existence, Hallelujah, we are all saved, and no harm, no foul.