Naked (22 page)

“Where’s the King?” Curly asked, kneeling down to have his face licked. “Here he is! You’re the King, aren’t you? The King
man, the King of beers. Who’s the King of beers? Who is he? Where did he go?” He affectionately batted the dog’s head with
his cuffed fists before saying, “All right now, enough play. Go on, King. Scoot.”

As he was fitting the key into the door, the dog returned to worry its head against the jamb, eager to get inside. “Motherfucker,
I said NO.” Curly kicked the dog with his sharp-toed boots, and the animal retreated into the yard. “Didn’t I tell you no?
Didn’t I say we’d had enough play?” He knelt then, and his voice became soft and sweet. “King man. Where’s my King of beers,
King of the road, King man? Where did he run off to? The King ran off and left his crown laying in the dust. Who wants his
crown back? Where did my King go? Who is the rightful owner of this crown?”

The dog advanced, kneeling before Curly, who grabbed him by the collar and kicked him several times in the rear before releasing
him. “It’s just a game we play,” he said, wiping his hands on his trousers. “He likes it rough.”

It was the extreme heat combined with a low, foul odor that suggested Curly’s was not a happy home. The smell was of every
filthy thing you could think of and dozens more that a decent person could never imagine. The door opened onto a living room,
the walls paneled in imitation walnut and hung with framed prints dedicated to the theme of simpler times, when barefoot boys
snitched apples off the vendor’s cart. Sofas and chairs were upholstered in red velveteen and protected by plastic jackets
tailored for a snug fit. The gold-flecked coffee table supported an ornate cigarette lighter and several copies of
Oregonian
magazine arranged into the shape of a fan. Plump cherubs gamboled at the base of every lamp, and the royal blue carpet was
crossed with a network of runners. It wasn’t dirty or even messy, just incredibly stinky, as if the trailer itself had once
been a living, breathing thing but had died about six months before, left to decompose without a proper burial.

“Mother? Are you decent? The number-one son is home.” He opened a door at the end of the hallway, and I saw a thin, shriveled
stalk of a woman lift herself from the toilet. I turned my head then, pretending to examine a picture of a spry granddad,
spreading his arms wide to indicate the length of the one that got away.

“I thought you were one of those Taylor boys,” the woman said. “I thought you were coming for that big crate of franks. Their
father dropped them off, a whole big crate of them. I called and said, ‘I don’t know what a person would do with so many franks.
Send your boy out after them.’”

Curly lowered his voice. I could not catch the words, but the tone was one of impatience.

“No, sir, I do not want you to get the stick,” I heard the woman say. “I want those wienies out of my closet is what I want.
Call that Taylor boy on the phone and see if he can’t come get them.”

I heard her protest as she was lifted, heard the toilet flush and the sound of water running in the sink. “I don’t have the
buns for franks like that. Call them up and see won’t they come.”

Curly opened the door and emerged with his mother in tow, leading her past the kitchen and into a room I knew I did not want
to enter. This was one of those times I literally kicked myself for never having learned to drive. What with the money I’d
made picking apples, I had enough cash beneath my mattress for a secondhand model. With my own car, I could have made up some
excuse and cleared out with no problem. I could have taken
his
car if only I knew how to turn it on and drive it. While I might
stay
in a trailer, it was clear that Curly actually
lived
in one; and it horrified me that he might have mistaken me for one of his own. Was it my clothing? The pallor of my skin?
My tendency to let my mouth hang open while bored? People in trailers were canned and labeled much like the apple juice down
at the plant, stamped with ingredients for all the world to see: chicken-fried steak, overcooked vegetables, no working knowledge
of any major Italian movie directors — the list went on and on.

“Boy, is she tired or what?” Curly said, shaking his head in disbelief as he left the bedroom. “Sometimes she’s just like
a clock, if you know what I mean. Cuckoo. Cuckoo.” He rotated his index finger against the side of his head. “You know how
it is with mothers. Can’t live with them, can’t fit them into a burlap bag. Hey, did I say that?” He pressed a finger to the
tip of his nose as if it were a button labeled REWIND. “Did we come here to relax or what?” He stepped into the kitchen and
returned with a six-pack of beer, explaining that we should probably retire to his bedroom, as his mother was a light sleeper.
“She can be, oh boy, a regular three-headed monster when she doesn’t get her shut-eye,” he said. “You’re not like that, are
you? Are you a cranky old werewolf when you wake up in the morning? I sure hope not, because I’m askaird of monsters.” He
chewed his nails and buckled his trembling knees. “I’m askaird. I’m afwaid.”

Whatever Curly’s theatrical fear, it could not begin to match my genuine horror as he opened the door to his bed-room, which
served as a showplace for his vast collection of artificial penises. They hung from the walls, jutted from plaques, and stood
upright, neatly spaced upon shelves and tabletops. Duplicated in wood, plastic, or fleshy rubber, what they had in common
was their substantial size. Some were detailed to include veins and curly-haired testicles, while others existed as a minimal
idea. Black or white, buffed aluminum or flesh-tone, electric or manual, the message was the same.

“So what do you think?” Curly said, lowering himself onto the waterbed.

“That’s really some… bedspread you’ve got there,” I said, hoping to focus the attention toward the color scheme. “It’s a real…
orange
orange, isn’t it?”

“I guess you could say that,” he said, reaching over to stroke something that closely resembled a thermos. “What do you think
of my toy collection? I figured you’d appreciate it more than anyone else I know. First time I saw you, I said to myself,
‘There’s a boy who needs a playmate.’ So what do you say, Charlie Brown, you ready to play?”

“Oh, gosh,” I said. “That’s really nice of you to ask… Curly. It’s just that, well, seeing that we work together…”

“That’s all the more reason to play together,” he said. “Come on now, Einstein, don’t pull that shit on me. Here, you’ve got
me worked up like a freight train.” He ran the zipper of his jeans up and down the track of his fly. “You’ve been coming on
too strong to back off now. Don’t play that game with me.”

“Oh, I’m not,” I said. “It’s just that I’ve got… these… damned crabs.” I itched myself fiercely, silently congratulating myself
on my cunning. “They’re a real devil to shake, and I wouldn’t want you to catch them.”

“Won’t be the first time,” he said. “Come on now, get your ass in this bed. Curly will find those mean old crabs and spank
the shit out of them.”

“That sounds… really… fun,” I said. “Not for the crabs though, I mean… it’ll be bad news for
them,
won’t it.” I excused myself to visit the toilet. Curly had taken my coat earlier, and I groped around the dark closet looking
for it. When I heard him call my name, I grabbed the down jacket and fled out the front door, running down the driveway and
onto the dark road.

It wasn’t until I reached a streetlight that I realized I was wearing a ladies’ jacket. It was down, like my own, but this
one was pink and the pockets were stuffed with wadded Kleenex. A car pulled around the corner and came speeding toward me.
Just before passing, the driver veered off the road and onto the shoulder, and I fell back into a ditch. A beer can landed
near my head and I heard the sound of laughter and loud music fade into the distance.

In terms of a warm, safe place, the ditch wasn’t so bad. Huddled there among the decaying leaves and stray scraps of paper,
I asked myself how I could have been so wrong about Curly. I’d always figured he was single because he couldn’t find a woman
desperate enough to put up with his juvenile personality. Would things have been any different if I’d found him attractive?
If he looked like, say, William Holden in the movie
Picnic,
would I have put up with his overheated trailer and hokey stories? I recalled his collection of artificial penises and understood
that the answer was definitely no. After taking on one of those monsters, the next step would involve sitting upon a greased
fire hydrant. Before I knew it, I’d turn into one of those middle-aged men who wore diapers and walked with a limp. I knew
that I’d worked my final shift at the packing plant. It wasn’t really Curly’s fault, but it’s always nice having someone to
blame. If anything, I should be thanking him for giving me a good excuse to quit. It suddenly seemed like a good idea to pack
it in and leave town. First, though, I’d just lie in this ditch for a while, wrapped tight in a ladies’ jacket and wondering
where I’d gone wrong.

With the Mexicans gone, Hobbs’s orchard had become a desolate place. I limped back to my trailer just after sunrise and stared
out the window at the barren trees. The problem with leaving one town was that sooner or later you’d have to arrive in another.
I told myself I’d head to someplace exotic, Portland maybe, or Tacoma, Washington, but deep down I knew that once my bags
were packed, I’d return to North Carolina. If I could just stay here a little longer, perhaps I could form the emotional calluses
people needed to leave their pasts behind them and begin new lives for themselves. It was like waiting for a fever to break,
a few more weeks and I might have come out of it. Nothing, it seemed, could break one’s resolve quite like spending the night
in a ditch.

I hitchhiked into Hood River to turn in my library books, stopping off at the plant to explain I wouldn’t be needing my job
anymore.

“Yale,” I shouted to the foreman over the noise of the generator. “I have to head back East because they want me to teach
at Yale.”

“You what?” he shouted. “Who’s going to jail?”

“No, YALE.”

“All right then, just make sure you don’t bend over to pick any soap off the shower floor. We’ll see you when you get out.”

“It looks like I’ll be heading back home,” I whispered to the librarian, handing in my battered, overdue copies of
Valley of the Dolls
and
Rosemary’s Baby.
“They want me to teach a couple of classes at Yale, and seeing as picking season is over, I thought, why not?”

“I guess it’s that or starve,” the woman sighed.

I don’t know why I felt the need to present any excuse at all. Except for the original owner of my pink jacket, my leaving
affected no one. I’d spent several months there and they had added up to nothing. Seeing as I was not the type of person to
make
things happen, my only option was to
let
things happen. I expected opportunity to present itself to me and it had, in the way of a union card and three dozen artificial
penises. Things wouldn’t be any different in North Carolina than they’d been in Oregon. I thought of those people on the bus,
going from one shitty place to the next, expecting nothing to change but the landscape. Soon I’d be sitting beside them, sharing
my potato chips and thinking of them as my kind of crowd.

I was heading back to Odell when I got a ride in a station wagon driven by a man who introduced himself as Jonathan Combs,
C.O.G.

I asked what the letters stood for, and he asked me to guess. He appeared to be in his midfifties, a doughy, square-faced
man with heavy black-framed glasses and a silver crew cut.

“Go on, guess,” he said.
Cousin of Godzilla?
I thought.
Chunky old geezer? Capable of genocide?

“I can’t begin to imagine,” I said.

“Child of God,” he said. “You’re one, too! Here you had this glorious title, and you didn’t even know it! I even had it put
on my checks. Now if the man upstairs would only start cashing them, I’d be in business. HA!” He addressed the roof of his
car. “Just teasing, Lord.”

Jon said he could take me into Odell, but first he needed to drop by the studio. I asked what he did there, and he said “I’m
an artist,
that
’s what I do there. Ever met an artist before? We might sometimes act a little strange, but don’t worry, kid, I’ve had my
shots and I’ve never been known to bite.”

He pulled onto a residential street and parked before a house decorated with the remnants of Halloween. Soggy ghosts hung
from the trees, bloated from the morning rain, and the jack-o’-lantern had withered, its once merry face now resembling that
of a toothless, sunburned mummy. “These kind people are members of my church,” he explained. “I told them I was looking for
a studio, and they handed me the keys to their basement. Just like that.” He smiled, shaking his head at the thought of his
good fortune. “You’ll meet the greatest people in the world living right here in this very town,” he said. “Well, I guess
I don’t need to remind
you
of that. You’ve already met one of them.”

“Who?”

“Me, ya idiot!” He reached for the two aluminum canes lying beside him and used them to support his weight as he stepped out
of the car. I followed along, pretending to ignore the unmistakable sounds emanating from his trousers. Either he was suffering
a terrible case of gas or he had a pint-size child practicing the trumpet in his back pocket. “You ready to see something
amazing?” he asked. “You’d better hold on to your socks because I’m just about to knock them off.” He opened the door to a
basement equipped with a washer and dryer. In the far corner of the room sat several large, dingy machines of an indeterminate
nature. He turned on the overhead lights and made his way toward a boulder that sat in a tray of rust-colored water. “Taa-daa!
How are those socks treating you?” he asked.

I got the distinct feeling I was missing something intended to be obvious.