Squirrel Eyes (7 page)

10

      I woke up early (for me, anyway) the next morning, riding on about three hours of sleep – a snooze of epic length, considering the way I'd been sleeping lately. I felt pretty good for that ten-second window between muddled awakening and sudden recall of
Oh yeah – this is my life
. 

Mom wanted to feed me another epicurean feast of sausage and all the trimmings, but I begged off, having already eaten more since I arrived in Albuquerque than I had in the last two weeks combined. Despite what had become a familiar sense of dread, I forced myself to take a shower and sure as shit, after standing under the water for a couple of minutes, the tears began to flow. The melancholia of the freshly scrubbed. 

      Weeping and bathing out of the way, I decided it was time to make that phone call – which meant, of course, that I did Mom's dishes, swept the kitchen floor, poked around outside for awhile, dusted the TV screen, and watched most of an episode of
Gunsmoke
before I came anywhere near the phone, and even then I called my friend Nathan in LA first and asked him if I had received any exciting-looking mail (no). After suffering an excruciatingly long and fruitless attempt on my part to make some sort of conversation, Nathan tossed off a hasty "Late-for-a-meeting-gotta-go" and hung up. 

      It was time to make good on this thing. Kendra's phone number, scrawled on a scrap of paper, seemed almost to throb with ominous significance.

      So why did I suddenly want, more desperately than I can possibly make clear, just to
hold Alison?
I didn't care anymore about sleeping with Kelli or the Tiki Waitress or that hot chick on CNN (Natalie Allen, if you're keeping score), and I didn't want to be in Albuquerque, didn't want to make this fucking phone call. The sheer
hopelessness
of it all, the feelings of detachment and gloom, were more profound than I'd ever experienced over the course of my many years of feeling such things. If there had ever been a time when I was broken-hearted enough to seriously consider eating that borrowed shotgun, it was at that moment. It was as if the swirling, murky cloud of self-loathing and self-pity that had obscured my vision for the last six months suddenly cleared – but only just enough to reveal how vacant my future actually was. 

My rapidly eroding ability to persuade myself that I would eventually make a living as a filmmaker suddenly broke from the cliff face and tumbled into the churning sea below, and for the first time
ever
, I really felt as if I had nothing – I mean, absolutely fucking
nothing
– to cling to. I'd spent a lifetime in this foolish pursuit of
The
Dream
– the shit-heaped, cliche-ridden foundation that movies are
built on
, for Christ's sake – waiting for the music-swelling, girlfriend-smooching, crowd-pleasing
Gonna-Fly-Now
triumph that I was promised (
promised!
) as a reward for putting in all that goddamn
work
and
faith
even when it all seemed so pointless, through all the deals that suddenly, inexplicably fell through and the lies and bullshit and aggravation and periods of crushing near-defeat – and instead it had led me to the utterly terrifying and achingly lonely understanding that my whole life was completely meaningless.

      
Welcome to my world
, some might say, while others might reply with a not-unfounded
Pull your head out of your ass and man the hell up
, but bear with me on this one: my brother, asshole though he may be, provided a
service
– everybody has to drive a car, right? Daniel kept those cars running. The french-fry guy at McDonalds? Serves you food (and if you don't think that means anything, try making your own french fries for a few weeks). 

But what the hell does the aspiring filmmaker offer society? I can tell you who wrote
Shriek of the Mutilated
(Ed Adlum and Ed Kelleher) or the name of the actor who played Romero in
Escape From New York
(Frank Doubleday) or that Dustin Hoffman was certain he blew the audition for
The Graduate
, and a million other tidbits of trivia – but is any of that going to make the slightest damn bit of difference in your day? Unless you've made some kind of asinine bet with a co-worker over whether or not Roddy McDowall played Cornelius in
Beneath the Planet of the Apes
(no, it was David Watson that time), I'm the last guy you'd want to invite to a dinner party. 

      
But what the fuck was the answer?
I'd finally, explosively, identified the problem (it had only been heartily chewing at my ass for the last six months, after all), but now what? I felt as if I'd been endlessly driving down a deserted two-lane road only to just now discover that I'd taken a wrong turn as I left my driveway. 

      It was in this near-deranged state that I dialed Kendra's number. I had rehearsed my snappy patter a million times in my head, but distracted as I was, I let my fingers do the walking without fully preparing myself. In fact, as the phone was ringing, I experienced the momentary flash of terror that accompanies the inability to remember whom one has just called.

      "Hello?" The pleasant female voice snapped me out of my stupefaction, but did nothing to restore my cool. 

      "I – uh, um ..." I babbled, struggling to recall my well-rehearsed script. Then chunks of it started coming back, but unfortunately the pages were out of order. "I used to, uh – "
Jesus, get a hold of yourself
. "Is this Kendra?" I finally managed. 

      "She's not in," the woman on the other end said, a slight tone of suspicion in her voice – and who can blame her after an opening like that? "Can I take a message?"

      
Yeah, tell her I'd like to fuck her sister and thereby correct my meaningless life
.
Please
. "Uh, yeah...." I said, once again shuffling pages in my head. "My name's Alvin, and, uh ... I used to go out with her sister Kelli ... maybe you could just ask Kendra to call me?"

      There was a stunningly long pause, during which I considered hanging up the phone and running down the street. 

Then: "Alvin?" 

      Now it was my turn to hesitate. "Yeah, that's it," I said. 

      "Waitaminnit –
Alvin Bandy?
"

      "Yeah...."

      "This is Kelli," she said, letting out a disbelieving laugh. 

      Holy jumping shitcakes. I hadn't even considered the possibility of something like
this
happening. My script was useless now.

      "I can't believe it," she said, sounding, amazingly enough, kind of pleased. "God, it's been – "

      "Fourteen years," I interrupted; then, in an attempt to seem less like I'd been obsessing about it, added "I
think
– isn't that about right?" 

      "Where have you been? What have you been doing?" she asked. 

There was no doubt about it: she sounded happy to hear from me. This whole thing might be easier than I thought.

      "Jeez Louise, where do I start?" I said, trying to think of the fastest way to get to the point. How do you tell a girl you haven't spoken to in a decade and a half that you need to get into her pants as soon as possible? 

      "Mmm, I'll bet we both have long stories," Kelli said knowingly, as if I'd made some clever comment rather than simply blurted out the first thing that popped into my head. My courage was further bolstered by the manner in which she spoke – making it obvious she wanted to
share
those stories. 

I was already beginning to feel like I was on my way to a brighter future.

11

      There wasn't an ounce of fat on her.

      After a blessedly brief spurt of further babbling on my part, Kelli and I agreed to meet for dinner. I made a rather unsubtle and stunningly awkward attempt to discover whether or not she was married ("So, I guess, uh, you can bring your husband along – if there is one," were my exact words), but much to my relief, she wasn't
that
, either. Fuck you, Taylor.

      I showed up way too early (a nervous habit of mine) and sat at the bar nursing a glass of root beer. Kelli, much to my chagrin, had chosen Don Vincenzo's as our meeting place. Don't get me wrong — the food and everything were fine, but it just happened to be where Alison had been working when we met. After spending twenty minutes explaining to one of her former co-workers why we were no longer an item, I was a little frazzled when Kelli walked through the door. Although she had to survey the place a couple times before she realized who I was, I recognized her instantly. 

Her face was striking – in an unusual manner, certainly, but I couldn't count the times I had jerked off while thinking about her thick, chewy lips and her almost muzzle-like snout (along with several other notable parts, of course). Her stringy blonde hair, shorter now than she used to wear it, still hung in her eyes so you could never get a good look at them; she once told me she was embarrassed by her eyes. I
liked
them, but they were weird as hell and I could understand her insecurity. Her irises were overlarge, making it seem as if her eyes were almost entirely a soft, glittering brown – the only white visible a tiny ring, nearly hidden by her eyelids. Stringy flecks of green and yellow were spattered across the surface, like one of those rubber superballs you get out of bubblegum machines. When we were teenagers, Taylor had once described Kelli as having squirrel eyes, sending me into a laughing, snorting frenzy. Now, looking at her standing in the restaurant's doorway – the walking embodiment (or so I hoped) of my salvation – it just made me feel ashamed. 

And, as I said, she was not fat. 

She was, however, a
mom
.

When Kelli saw me – on her second pass of the room – she grinned the best grin I've ever seen in my life. 

"Alvin," she purred. 

As I left my barstool and we exchanged a long, warm hug, I momentarily forgot about Alison and how miserable I was, swept away on Kelli's smell and the way her body felt in my arms. It was difficult to believe it had been fourteen years since we'd last seen one another. We ordered food and drinks (I was sticking with root beer to avoid any alcohol-fueled mishaps) and found a table. As we settled in, Kelli folded her hands and shot me that grin again. It was the first time in more than six months that I felt like somebody was genuinely pleased to see me.

Which is why it may be unforgivable that I felt a twinge of distress when Kelli mentioned how tough it was to find a decent sitter. 

It wasn't her hardship in finding a trustworthy teenage girl to keep on eye on the kid that got me down; if that had been the case I would've been proud of myself for my ability to empathize with a situation I knew nothing about. It was the very idea of her having a child in the first place. My mind was instantly overrun with the numerous obstacles a youngster in the mix would no doubt place before me on the path to Kelli's bed. Not that her parental status came as any kind of shock, mind you – in fact, I think I would've been more surprised to discover that she
hadn't
gone and pupped. I just didn't want to be bothered by this particular detail, to have my extraordinary progress in making my Grand Plan a reality slowed by some whining tyke.

"Kendra usually watches her for me," Kelli said. "I don't go out that much, really, so it's not a big deal, but she had tickets to some concert tonight." 

"So you've got a little girl?" I asked, maintaining not only a crippled smile but a certain amount of self-loathing for feeling the way I did.

Kelli nodded, and from the way she did it, the look on her face, I could tell how much she adored her daughter. I was the worst human being on the planet. 

"Her name's Lydia," she said. "She's six." 

I did the math in my head embarrassingly slowly. Kelli was out having babies at twenty-six while I had been a twenty-eight-year-old clerk at a video store, earning minimum wage. 

"I'm really spooky about hiring somebody I don't know to watch her. You know how it is." 

"Oh,
yeah
," I concurred heartily, having no fucking clue how it is at all. I began to realize, however, that what I had initially perceived as a six-year-old cock-blocker hadn't made a difference in Kelli's desire to see me or the fact that she was actually here with me now, even when it required extra effort on her part. I felt like I should've apologized for being an asshole, excused myself, then walked into the alley to politely finish myself off with a broken beer bottle.

"So what'd you do?" I asked. "You didn't leave her in the car, did you?"

"Shh," Kelli hissed. She leaned across the table, glancing around like a member of the French Resistance in a bad war movie. "I had to wrap her in duct tape so she couldn't beat on the trunk lid." 

I almost offered to lick her feet again right then and there. 

"She has a very sweet grandmother," Kelli said. "I keep some of Lydia's stuff over there so she can spend the night – if I should, you know, stay out real late."

      Despite a lifetime of being warned otherwise, I was beginning to count my proverbial chickens. There was only one thing she could've meant by
stay out real late
– wasn't there? With Kendra at a concert and the little girl with her grandmother, I couldn't help but feel I'd be waking up a new man in the morning.

Kelli went on to explain that she and her daughter had moved in with Kendra when things fell apart with Lydia's dad. 

"It wasn't as if he was a wife-beating child-hater or anything dramatic like that," she insisted. "We just didn't like each other much. After three years of intense frustration, we called it quits." 

Kelli was working a pretty good job doing data processing (another subject I knew not a damn thing about – the "pretty good job" part, I mean), but still, money was tight and she had let the guy slide without having to pay any child support just to be rid of him. 

"Foolishly," she added. 

Our food arrived and I immediately cut my lip on the crispy focaccia bread that defended the meat of my sandwich. As I blotted at the gore speckling my mouth, Kelli plucked the anchovy from her Caesar salad and flung it onto my plate.

"So what about you?" Kelli asked, eyeing me in a way that made me feel she already knew the answer to whatever was coming. "I'm guessing you don't have any kids."

I had wreaked vengeance upon my sandwich and was masticating a struggling mouthful. "Why do you say that?" I mumbled.

"I dunno," she said. "You don't seem very ...
fatherly
." 

"I gave myself a vasectomy," I explained. Chewing slowly, I wondered why Kelli's observation made me bristle the way it did. "Why do you say that?" I stupidly asked once again, sounding like a defective parrot. 

      "You're still bleeding there." She pointed at my wounded lip. "It's just that you still seem so much like a kid yourself." 

      It had taken her all of about seventeen minutes to see through me. 

"That's just residual image because you haven't seen me for so long," I bluffed. "I'm all man, baby."

      "I don't mean anything by it," she said, no doubt lying through her lovely teeth. "I think it's great that you've managed to maintain that ..." (insert painfully long pause here) "... enthusiasm."

      "
Enthusiasm?
" I scoffed. Her Leonard Nimoy-esque search for the word wasn't lost on me. "As opposed to growing up, settling down, and finding gainful employment?"

      "You've had a movie made from one of your scripts – that's something you've always dreamed of," she said with a certain enthusiasm of her own. 

I'd sort of glossed over the details of my Hollywood career when we were on the phone, and I
really
didn't want to talk about it now – for instance, I hadn't told her I'd only been paid $2000 for that script, and the resulting movie was not only unwatchable, but I felt certain that no one had ever
attempted
to watch it. Fortunately for the world at large, it seemed my filmmaking abilities would never darken its collective doorstep again.

      "
Terror Town
," I murmured, invoking the movie's title as if it were the name of a dread demon. "I'm sure you remember its unprecedented Oscar sweep." 

      Kelli laughed. "C'mon, it can't be
that
bad," she said, ever the optimist.

      "Don't make me prove it," I warned. 

      That outstanding grin of hers smacked me in the chops again. "Maybe it's because you didn't direct it."

      "Yeah, that must be it."

      "Well, I'd like to see it." 

      "Uh-uh, not a chance." This wasn't an attempt at self-deprecating, shy flirtatiousness; much like Doctor Frankenstein relentlessly trying to destroy his monster, I felt it was my sacred duty to protect innocents from falling prey to the misery of
Terror Town
. 

      "Aw," Kelli griped.

      "So you've got no curfew tonight, huh?" I asked, deftly changing the subject in an attempt to better assess my potential for landing in some flesh.

      "Well, I've gotta work tomorrow, so it would be nice to get home with enough time to take a shower before I get in the car," Kelli said.

      Was that a signal? I was pretty sure it was, but being the sort of guy who needs a woman to lie on her back and point at her crotch before I knew if the coast was clear enough to make my move, I felt it best to proceed with caution.

      We continued to make pleasant small talk; Kelli wanted to know how Taylor was doing, and in the course of explaining his situation I let slip that he was the scoundrel who had left the dog turd in the swimming pool during a late-night commando raid on Gina's house. Fortunately, Kelli thought it was funny as hell but made me tell her why we had been on that raid in the first place (I mean, what did she
think
?). When I said we had hoped to steal a glimpse of her and Gina in their skivvies, she cackled hysterically for several moments, leaving me nervously glancing around at our fellow diners as if to assure them that my date was not in need of the Heimlich maneuver.

      "Hell, all you guys had to do was
ask
," she said.

      I just stared at her, stunned. If that was the case, then how much other great stuff had we missed out on by simply
not asking?
What a thing to tell a guy. 

      When we finished eating, Kelli and I went for a walk along Central Avenue. That's when I realized how late it was; most of the stores were already closed. Suddenly, I became obsessed with learning the time. I didn't wear a watch because I usually had no reason to be anywhere at a specific time, but I was surprised that Kelli didn't wear one – a mom, after all, with a real job and real life, should have some sort of schedule to keep. Even more aggravating was the apparent lack of timepieces owned by the citizens of Albuquerque, since no one passing on the street could help out. To be honest, I was concerned only with the idea that my valuable pants-getting-into time was slipping away, and desperately wanted some notion of my remaining window of opportunity.

      "What should we do with ourselves now?" Kelli asked.

      "Maybe one of us should buy a watch," I suggested, knowing
exactly
what we should do with ourselves. When I tried to think of some sort of decorous activity we could partake of (only so that I could ease Kelli into the debauchery that would follow), I found myself at a loss. Going for coffee didn't hold much appeal, considering we had just gorged ourselves on Italian food. A movie held even less; it would eat up too much time, and I could already feel the minutes ticking away like a death-row inmate waiting for his last walk. What did people do on dates? And did this even
count
as a date? 

      "I've got a watch at home," Kelli said, "If you want to come look at it. There's nothing I can think of to do except go to a bar or something, and at least at my place we can hear each other talk."

      She was making this way too easy.