Tales of the Madman Underground (24 page)

 

 

The faces weren’t new to me. I had met most of Mom’s bar crowd before. In Lightsburg, everyone knew everyone, and she’d been bringing some of them around the house a lot. The main thing I noticed was that all of them, men and women, had hair past their shoulders. (Dad had worn a crew cut all his life.)

They spilled a lot of wine and beer on the wall-to-wall shag carpeting, and for a while I tried to get it cleaned up quick with paper towels, but Mom told me not to, that I was embarrassing her, and handed me a beer and told me I could try my first one. I guess I was supposed to feel like a man and stuff. It didn’t taste like much of anything. Even later on, when I was drinking all the time, I never liked beer much.

Then Neil showed me how to do boilermakers, and he made me do two to “make sure the little guy gets it right.” Whiskey was definitely better than beer, at least by comparison, not much worse than cough syrup.

I didn’t have much body weight then, and I’d had a bunch of drinks in less than an hour. So I was real drunk, which at least made the time pass faster; I sat on one end of the couch and watched a lady I didn’t know set down her cigarette onto the carpet and grind it out with her boot heel. I wished all these people would go home and that Mom would come back from the bedroom, where she’d gone with Neil.

Judy sat beside me and asked me how I was doing and about school and shit, and she seemed to think everything I said was really funny. She wandered away and I watched people get drunker and smoke pot.

I sort of understood why they drank, though, because with the drinks in me, it all went by faster and didn’t hurt as much to watch those people make a mess.

Next morning I woke up on the couch. Everyone was gone except Neil, who was in the bedroom with my mother. I felt like I had been poisoned: head aching, sick to my stomach, sore in every muscle. I puked in the toilet, which helped, except that I realized I might have been the most accurate but I sure hadn’t been first. I was the first one to flush, though. I wanted a shower or bath but the tub was full of empties and cigarette butts and mostly-melted ice.

I started picking up empties and putting them in the box to take back to the store, dumping ashtrays in the trash, piling glasses in soapy water in the sink for washing, the usual after-party stuff I realize now, but at the time it was new to me. Red wine splashes and cigarette burns were everywhere in the beige shag carpet. A year ago, when Dad and me had put it in, he’d been so fussy about getting it lined up right—too sick to do it himself but watching me all the time, making me try again when I didn’t get it right.

Mom had stood by telling him not to pick on me, I was only a boy and all this didn’t matter, while I scuttled around getting the pad underneath just so, and then measuring and cutting and placing. But Dad had told me when it was all over that I’d done a good job, and even Mom had said that after a while, when she forgot to be mad at him about “making” me do it.

The doorbell rang, and I found Judy on the front porch, a big cardboard box at her feet. “Hey, little guy, how was your first drunk?” she asked.

“I’m kinda sick.”

“You just need practice.” She lifted the cardboard box and carried it into the house, setting it down in the middle of the living room rug. Mom, wearing just an old T-shirt of Dad’s, and Neil, wearing sweatpants, a hair-covered beer gut, and a vacant expression, were staggering out of the bedroom. “Morning, sleepyheads!” Judy said. “Look what I have for everyone!”

She opened the box and turned it gently on its side, and eight kittens came tumbling out. Mom sat down to play with them on the living room floor, and Judy joined her, and the two of them talked baby talk for the next hour or so. With no idea that the kittens would be staying, and turning into cats, and breeding, I thought they were cute, myself.

After he realized Mom and Judy weren’t going to give him more dope or have sex with him, Neil left. I washed some dishes to have a clean bowl, but when Mom saw me getting out the box of Cheerios, she said she had some money left over so she took Judy and me out for pizza to celebrate her party, her coming out, and her new kittens. It was my money, but I couldn’t see a way to ask her to at least give back what she hadn’t spent, so I went along. The pizza tasted like shit and the waiter asked me why I wasn’t in school.

Later that day when I was putting laundry together—as long as I’d missed school and track practice I might as well see if I could get the house clean, I thought—I found the IOU in my pants pocket. I pinned the IOU on the bulletin board in my room.

I don’t know if Mom ever saw it or took any hint from it. By Christmastime, there was a column of IOUs down one side of the bulletin board, mostly from when she’d borrowed yard-work or paper-route money, and another one from the second time she’d cleaned out my savings account. She hadn’t asked that time, either.

That was for her Halloween party. On the first of November I saw the electric bill in the mail, opened it, and saw she hadn’t paid for two months, though I’d given her money for it. So I took some money I’d just gotten for turning over a compost pile, put it in a coffee can, and stuck it into the space behind the World Book in the bookcase Dad had built.

About a week before Christmas, I had a couple spare dollars and was getting a paperback in Philbin’s when I noticed a little stack of account books. I bought myself one.

That night, stapling the IOUs in next to where I’d recorded them, I decided she owed me for the account book ($0.87 with tax), too, and wrote that in as an entry: December 17, 1970. For some reason I remember trying to be real quiet with the stapler, so Mom wouldn’t hear me.

 

 

For some reason tonight while I was cleaning out McDonald’s, I kept thinking about that first party, which always got me what Mom called “all full of angry energy,” so I burned that energy on work and got done even faster than usual. I was done with everything but the window forty minutes before Harris and Tierden were due to hit the puddle—to my deep disgust, I even rechecked all my homework and reviewed all the reading; it made me feel like a suck-up buttlicker, but I was going to be prepared in class tomorrow.

At least I had
The Three Stigmata
along, so I read that in the back until the pathetic
chungk-splutch
! hit the window—it hadn’t rained in days, and the puddle was nearly empty. I went out, hosed the walk and washed the window, and called that good.

They’d been half an hour early. Times must be dull everywhere. Still a long while to clock-out.

With a start, I woke up and sat upright. The clock said twenty minutes till clock-out—

Thumping on the window.

My first thought was that it was Bobby Harris being a jackass and I needed to wake up just a tiny bit more and go outside and kick his pathetic squishy pink pudge boy frog-face down his throat and out his ass. I sat up and saw Marti. I must’ve looked like a real duh with my hair all cowlicky and mouth hanging open, but she wasn’t laughing.

I opened the door; the parking lot smelled like an open grave, the first breath of cold sludgy Ohio fall.

“I know it’s close to time for you to leave but I need a friend real bad.” She didn’t look at me when she said that.

“Come in, goddammit, of course,” I said. “I just woke up, fell asleep over my goddam book.”
Goddammit
, I thought,
I am sounding just like goddam Browning.

“I know, I woke you up.”

“I didn’t even realize that was what woke me. Food, coffee, anything? I still haven’t thrown anything out.”

“Yes, please, everything.” She sat down at the table where my book was, slumped forward, hands knotting in front of her knees. Her nail polish was all scragged up, and she’d chewed a couple of nails enough to make them bleed. “I’m locked out till Mother gets home, and it was way too damp and cold to sleep in the car, and . . . aw, shit, Karl, I need company.” She rubbed her wet face on the back of her hand; I gave her some napkins.

I set the remaining burgers and big pile of roomtemperature dried-out fries down in front of her. “Well, I could use some company, too, Marti. It’s been kind of an up-and-down day.”

“Yeah. Guess there’s a lot of it going around. Thanks for the food. I got home and Dad started right in screaming at me, and Mother was already gone off with your mother, and . . . well, basically, I just got screamed at for some hours, and when he was done with that, finally hoarse I think, he started in crying about it all, and begging me to forgive him. After enough of that I just fuckin’
cruised
. I hate the ‘I’m a bad Dad’ phase even more than I hate the screaming and yelling . . .” She stopped for breath and was staring down at her burger.

“Did you get anything to eat?” I asked, feeling like a mom, though sure as shit not like mine.

She shook her head. “He started the second I walked in, so nobody made dinner—”

“Eat, Marti. Just eat.” As skinny as she was I figured she probably didn’t have any reserves.

“I’ll be quick so you can leave on time.” She crammed a third of a burger into her mouth.

“Slow down, and enjoy that stuff if it’s possible. Kathy doesn’t care what time I leave, only what time I clock out, and she knows sometimes I sleep here when I’m locked out, or have friends over. Everything’s cool as long as I clock out on time.”

She swallowed that big bite she’d rammed in, and said, “Okay. Jeez, I’m so hungry, this stuff is good.”

“Ketchup for your fries, miss? I can recommend it—it’s my main source of vitamin C.”

She smiled. “Sure. What does Kathy do if you clock out late?”

“Well, a couple times I’ve fallen asleep and done it, and gotten off with a warning. Eventually, though, if I made a habit of it, I’d disappear in the middle of the night, and never be seen again, and the only clues the police would have would be a few orange hairs and some enormous shoe prints. But for a few weeks afterward, all over the country, the Quarter Pounders would taste just a little bit more like Lightsburg, Ohio.”

She smiled, then looked at me more closely. “Fuck, Karl, you look worse than I do.”

“Thanks, I try. Today bounced me all over the place.” I mopped my face with a couple of McNapkins and tossed them in the McTrash. “I guess I don’t really want to talk about it.”

“’Kay.” She started into a Quarter Pounder and chewed slowly. “I hate to admit how good this tastes. Sorry to be keeping you up.”

“You’re not. You did me a favor by waking me up.” I looked at the clock; close enough not to lose any pay, so I grabbed my time card from its rack on the wall, and clocked out. “I sometimes sleep here when I get locked out. I just have to get up by three forty-five, when Pancake Pete comes in.”

“So we could sleep for like two hours and forty minutes.” She reached into her purse and pulled out one of those little fold-down travel alarm clocks, the ones that look like a plastic clam when they’re folded down. She saw me glance at that and said, “I always have one of these in my purse because I get locked out a lot.”

“It’s a good idea. If I had a purse I’d carry one too.”

She smiled like we’d traded the secret handshake. “Great. Five more minutes while I swallow more food?”

“Ten if you like. I wasn’t going to get much sleep tonight anyway.” I grabbed a cheeseburger just to be sociable.

“Karl, are all the Madmen short of sleep?”

“Well, you and me aren’t the only ones. Bonny gets to sleep, mostly, because her household is pretty normal, if you don’t count that she’s the parent and she’s blind drunk a lot of nights. Cheryl and her sister, Paul and his sister, Squid and the two younger kids, they have to hide out now and then because it gets dangerous at home. Danny’s just a plain old all-American farm boy with a father drinking away the farm. Mostly he just cries because he’s exhausted and picked on all the time, but so far he’s never been locked out—his dad wouldn’t do that because he needs Danny to do the early morning chores, since he’s always too hung over himself. So some are better off than us, some worse, I guess.”

“Where does a locked-out kid sleep in this town? The last places we lived were warm and dry at night so I’d just sleep in my backseat—I even have toothpaste and toothbrush in the glove compartment.”

“Well, you can sleep here if I’m working. Get here before one, Sunday through Thursday nights. Paul can hide you in his basement sometimes, if you sneak in and stay quiet. Bonny or Darla are home alone a lot and they’ll let you have a couch, but you have to catch Darla before she leaves Pongo’s at nine, because she spends a lot of time over in Vinville with college students. Bonny goes home real early and you do have to put up with little kids who are starved for attention. And I’d stay the hell away from Cheryl’s if you’re a girl; she’s got a real scary grandfather, you’ll hear about him in therapy meetings.”

“Which you’re planning not to be at.”

“Well, you know, except for you it’s all gonna be reruns, and you already told me your story.” I hoped goofing would get her off the subject.

She looked more serious than I wanted her to, but all she said was, “I guess. I still think you’re an idiot, even if you’re a great idiot to have for a friend. Where do normal kids sleep when they’re locked out?”

“I guess I’ll find out. Anyway, in a real crisis, especially if you get thrown out real late, the Carrellsen Hotel lobby is okay if it’s cold—the clerks will usually let you sleep in an armchair, and sometimes if you have a few bucks and they’re not full up they’ll give you a break on a room. There’s three college guys that are night clerks there—Greg and Don are reasonably cool, Jack’s the best one for letting you have a room if he’s got one. If you look in the Carrellsen and see a guy with gray hair behind the desk, it’s Roy, so
don’t
go in. You’ll wake up with his hands on you—boy or girl, in the lobby or in a room, Roy doesn’t care. On the other hand if you see that the desk clerk is a lady with a dyed-black beehive and Bozo makeup, go right in, because it’s Marilyn, and she’s the best. She’ll almost always give you a room if she’s got one, even if you don’t have a dime; she’s a real churchy but the good generous kind. But she’s only at the Carrellsen on Sunday nights.