Tales of the Madman Underground (11 page)

“You got any possible customers?”

“Fair question, bub. You know that this weekend they’re going to reopen the Ox? You must’ve noticed all the fixing up going on next door.”

The Oxford Theater had closed when I was in sixth grade, after a long time when they just ran second-run movies and kiddy matinees. Lightsburg hadn’t had a movie theater since.

“Unh hunh. And so?”

“So the new owners happen to eat lunch here a lot. It’s a young married couple, Todd and Mary Urlenstein. They’re English profs over at Plantagenet College. They have decided to bring culture to the benighted masses of Lightsburg.”

“Aren’t they going to show movies?”

“Oh, no. Not from what they tell me. They are going to show
films
. If anyone shows a movie in there, they will wash the screen afterwards. They are going to make it a
re-per-tor-y ci-ne-ma
.”

“Foreign movies?”

“Foreign movies, and old movies that are supposed to be classics, and I kinda suspect, now and then, artsy dirty movies, which is what will make any actual money, if any actual money gets made.
If
they can square it with the churchies.”

“Good luck on
that
. How long you figure they’ll be open?”

“Well, I’ve done lots of talking with Todd. He comes in here for lunch and coffee while he frets over how they’re fixing it up. I
know
they’re undercapitalized. I’d guess that they probably have four months of mortgage payments for that place in the bank, but operating costs’re gonna get’em before then. Movies cost money, you know, even old ones and foreign ones. On the other hand there isn’t much to do in this town, and the nearest competing ‘repertory cinema’—Christ I can’t do that phony accent he puts on when he says that—is up in Toledo.” He stared up at the ceiling a second; Philbin usually seemed to find the God of Business Analysis in an old spot of water damage just above the cash register. “Figure, hmm, they’ll get some draw from Gist County, anyway—college kids from Vinville, at least the artsy ones and the students who need to suck up to their profs, and probably some people from Delos, Arthur, and Lincoln Bridge.

“Plus one good thing, Mary’s picking the movies, and she’s smart enough to start off with some popular oldies. Just a weekend double feature till about Christmas, and then add a Wednesday-Thursday show if that goes. Anyway, this Friday night they open with
Casablanca
and
The Maltese Falcon
, which are good movies but you can see them on TV a couple times a year if you hop around the channels a little and you don’t mind big scenes getting interrupted with hemorrhoid commercials.”

“Hunh. Friday is the football season opener and a home game,” I pointed out. “They’ll get all three Lights-burgers that wish they were artistic, plus their own students and friends from Vinville.”

“ ’Fraid so. But, anyway, here’s the thought I have. For the few months they’ll be open, they will have a crowd getting out around ten thirty on weekend nights, when the only thing open in town is Pietro’s, which is on the other side of town, and the Dairy Queen, where the grill closes at nine. Michelson, that owns that Pongo’s Monkey Burger, has already told me he ain’t gonna change his hours. Now, if people coming out of the theater smell some burgers grilling and maybe some fresh pie baking . . . you see?”

One reason why I liked talking to Philbin, he was always looking for some way that the drugstore could make money and grow. That kind of stuff was way more interesting than school crap that you talked about with teachers, or “say, fella, how’s your football team doin’?” that regular town people would try and make conversation with, and way-way-
way
more interesting than flying saucers and astrology and Nixon, like Mom and the super super ladies talked about.

It was kind of funny—and a shame, though, since I did really like to hear about business and making money and stuff—that in the whole town, the guy who talked about business best was a doomed loser.

Philbin thought real good about what might make money, or lose it, for anybody else’s business, but he managed to never quite see that his own shop was stuck behind the eight ball. If it had been anyone else’s he’d have laid it out, neat and clean as an isosceles triangle of pie on a plate with a sphere of ice cream beside it, but instead he was always trying to think of the magic formula to turn his dusty old dump of a drugstore into a gold mine. Somehow whenever he thought about his own place, he stopped seeing the FOR SALE signs and boarded-up stores around it, and failed to notice that he had empty seats at the height of his lunch rush.

But I wasn’t going to point that out. I just said, “So you’d need someone on counter this Friday and Saturday?”

“Yeah, weekend nights for as long as the Oxford stays open. I’ll cook, Mrs. P will bake. That will put us ahead on homemade desserts for Monday lunch when we always need a lot and usually have to switch to storeboughts, so it won’t be a total loss even if no one comes in. But I’ll need someone on the front, and Angie has taken up with a drug-crazed hippie biker—”

“Pop, he
just
has a
motorcycle
!”

“—and will want her weekend evenings free. Now—”

“He has a good job. At a bank.”

“I’m sure he’s just casing the joint. Karl, I’m not going to pretend it’s all that promising. I don’t know how long the job will last, and it would just be Friday and Saturday nights, waiter’s minimum plus tips, and you know, like your dad used to say, Lightsburg is the Buckle on the Cheap Bastard Belt; I swear we have the chintziest tippers on the planet. But all that said, the Oxford
should
last till Thanksgiving even if it doesn’t work out, and I’m guessing we’ll get some decent trade some nights, so at least you’d make some extra gift money for Christmas or something, eh?”

“Well, yeah, I’d be
very
interested. Show up Friday at—”

“Say six P.M. Got to do the tax paperwork and all, maybe get you outfitted with a spiffy new apron or something.”

“Will do.” We shook on it.

I ALWAYS LIKED that time of day, when people were shutting up their shops, putting the town to bed for the night, going home to do normal stuff with their normal families. I wondered if they got to enjoy being normal, to know just how terrific it was, or whether it was just invisible to them like air? Sometimes I got so pissed off at how easy the normal people had it that I just wanted to walk down the street shaking them and screaming into their squishy self-satisfied faces.

In those first few weeks of school, still really summer, it stayed hot till past six. The radiated heat from the redbrick walls could practically give you a sunburn, and the cloudless sky was more gray than blue, as if the heat had baked the color right out of it.

Mom and me and all those fucking cats lived on MacReady Avenue, in what Dad had said was gonna be their starter place back before I was born. Turned out it was his finisher place, too.

MacReady was like every other street in that part of town. The houses, once all Norman Rockwell-y frames and shingles and clapboards, were now your basic Do It Yourself Duct Tape White Trash Shithole, with all kinds of new cheap crappy stuff stuck on—white aluminum siding, rusty iron wire fences on green steel posts, big glider davenports from Sears to replace the porch swing, sheet metal sheds out back with the doors never put on.

I’d been trying to keep our house up. Dad had left me a list, month by month and week by week, when to do all the stuff he’d shown me how to do. I couldn’t always keep up with it, between Mom and the cats. I knew it would all fall to shit the minute I left for the army. Still, mostly, I kept it up. Nights when I couldn’t sleep, I’d just turn on my desk lamp, point it at the wall, and read that list to myself till I knew where I was in the world again.

As I trotted up our front walk, a voice wheezed from next door. “Karl, your place don’t look too bad.” It was Wilson, this real old guy with no teeth who liked to watch me work while he sat out on his porch, smoked Camels, drank animal beer, and talked to anybody passing by.

I leaned over his fence and said, “Well, the window-sills want scraped and painted before winter, and I gotta start on storms this weekend.”

He coughed real hard. When he’d finally forced all the ashes, tar, and goop out of his filthy old lungs, and sucked in what air he could, he wheezed, “Goddam doctors!” Then he set up his favorite joke. “You’re good with your hands, bub, it’s a shame you have such a hard time keeping up.”

I played along—he was a nice old fart. “Well, it’s hard to make myself fix stuff at home for free, when I can do the same thing for other people for money.”

“Shoemaker’s kids always go barefoot.” Maybe he was just slapping his knee due to the coughing fit that laughing at his own joke had sent him into. I hoped so. He finished with a long
hraaak!
and leaned sideways to slobber over the side of his lawn chair. “Goddam doctors.”

I bet they kept trying to tell him he needed to stop smoking, the mad fools.

I opened the door. Forest, Loveheart, and Sunnyjoy ran out. “Have fun, kitties, there’s a lot of nice tires to go under just up the street,” I said.

I scooped the mail up from the floor in front of the slot—just the electric bill, which I pigeonholed, and a BankAmericard thing that I buried in the trash so Mom wouldn’t see it and apply.

I looked at the clock. Mom would be at Mister Peepers at least another hour and a half. I dialed Kathy’s number, and she picked up on the first ring. “Just checking in and letting you know I’ll be there tonight,” I said.

“I saw you coming out of Dad’s place. How is he?”

“Exactly the same as ever,” I said. “He’s adding an evening shift Fridays and Saturdays because some new people are reopening the Ox. And Angie has a new boyfriend, a banker that rides a motorcycle.”

“Hey, tell her to give me a call and tell me all about it, ’kay?”

“Absolutely,” I said.

“Have a quiet evening, Karl. You take care.”

“You, too.”

Funny the way people could be. From the day Kathy, Philbin’s older daughter, had bought the franchise for the McDonald’s out by the interstate, old Philbin had refused to speak to her. But he’d offered, before she did it, to mortgage the drugstore to give her a stake to launch her own downtown burger stand. He wasn’t mad that she was competing with him—it was that it was McDonald’s.

Everyone in town always told Philbin, to his face, that his hamburgers were better than McDonald’s. They were, too, bigger and greasier and with buns from some bakery up in Toledo, and the onions and tomato were all locally grown in the summer, and Dick and Mrs. P didn’t cook them into hockey pucks, and they were just better, all kinds of ways.

Just the same, the people who said they loved Philbin’s hamburgers, whenever they chose to go out for a burger, took their kids to McDonald’s, because that’s where the kids wanted to go, and the French fries were better, because McDonald’s changed the grease in their deep fat fryer now and then.

Maybe Philbin needed to change his grease more often. Or advertise on national TV. Or give away cheap toys, or wear a clown suit. Or else, maybe just plug in a time machine and take the whole place back to 1956. Everything must’ve seemed pretty promising back then, with new décor and two little girls running in and out.

Hell, 1956 had seemed so promising, Mom and Dad had gone and had me. I guess things don’t always turn out.

I pasted Mom’s IOU into my account book and refig ured the total. $2,937.41. One way and another, since ninth grade I had been making about six grand a year, most of it in off-the-books stuff like yardwork and ad sales and carrying sofas. That worked out to Mom having taken about half a year out of three, or one out of every six dollars I’d made.

That was a little comforting. Looked at that way, she wasn’t any worse than paying taxes would have been, and no more useless.

I was balling my fists and breathing hard. I closed up the account book and decided I was entitled to a hot shower. Also to a house that didn’t smell like a damn litter pan, and a whole year of being normal. But the hot shower was the one I was pretty sure I could get.

I pulled my McDorksuit out of the dryer and put it on a hanger in my closet. I scoured myself down till I was pretty much pink skin on bones, enjoying the hot water and the Ivory Soap. At least this was something that was all mine. The cats had stayed out of the towels, for once, too. Life was okay.

I ran my electric shaver over my face on the off chance that I needed a touch-up, though I probably wouldn’t have needed a touch-up for a shave from last week.

In the mirror, I didn’t look any worse or any better, just clean and naked.

In a paisley shirt, low-cut tight pants, and the shoes I usually wore with the jacket-and-tie to sell radio ads, I studied my image in the mirror: less Inconspicuous Madman, more Well-Dressed Dork. And to think some people don’t believe in progress.

I made sure the sash lock on the porch window was unlocked. The only key to the house was in Mom’s purse, always, and that was either on her arm, or, when she was asleep in bed, on her night table.

I could have chanced going into her purse while she was passed out, but the one time I had tried it, the summer before ninth grade, it just didn’t work out.

 

 

It started when a hard thunderstorm made me come home from a lawn mowing job early. I walked in on her making out with some college guy. She had her shirt off and the whole living room stank of pot.

She was yelling, all pissed, and shoved me out the door, so I walked around town for hours and was just sitting on the steps of the roller rink when Officer Williams saw me and said I had to go home, it was past curfew.

He must’ve seen I was upset, because he insisted he’d take me himself. When I got home Mom had had all the windows open for a while, so I don’t know if Williams could smell the pot (though I still could) and the minute I got in the place she was yelling at me about running away and having been worried sick, just like she was still being a real mom. Williams left quick and as soon as he was gone, Mom slapped me and told me not to ever bring pigs around the house again, then shoved me out the door and locked it.