The Complete Roderick (51 page)

‘Don’t worry, kid, you’ll pick it up. None of you young kids know anything about slow dancing.’

‘Well no I don’t – oops. Sorry.’

‘It’s okay. I guess you came here for the Auks, they come on later.’

‘The Auks?’

She looked him over. ‘If you never heard of the Auks, you must be older than you look. Or else, Roderick, you haven’t been around much.’

‘No I guess I – oops. Sorry.’

‘You been in the slammer, kid?’

‘Jail? Not lately I mean no, I –’

She squeezed at his shoulder. ‘Never mind, lover, it don’t matter to me. Tell me your hard-luck story if you want, or tell me nothing, all the same to me. But you got slammer written all over you, that pale, pasty look, that weird short haircut, the kinda lost look you got, like you’re afraid you’re gonna make some wrong move and end up back inside.’ She looked serious for a moment. ‘Hey you fixed all right for bread? Because if you’re broke, I can let you have a coupla bucks till you get a job.’

Roderick was so astonished that he tripped and nearly fell. ‘Sorry! Do you mean you would lend money to a perfect stranger?’

She grinned. ‘Nobody’s perfect. A good stranger’ll do.’

‘I’ll be damned. Well well.’ After a few moments he said, ‘Well I don’t, but thanks. Thanks a lot, Ida.’

The dance ended. Ida started fiddling with her earring. ‘On the other hand if you’re flush, you might buy a girl a beer. You might even buy
me
a beer.’

Roderick was delighted to rush her to the bar and order one beer. The bartender looked from him to Ida. ‘I’m sure the lady would prefer a champagne cocktail,’ he said.

‘Beer,’ said Ida. ‘Just now the lady prefers a beer, Murray.’

The bartender winked. ‘Sorry, Ida, I didn’t know you was with a
friend.
One beer, coming up.’

Roderick, watching her drink it, thought,
friend.

‘You don’t drink?’

‘I can’t,’ he said.

‘Don’t tell me, the stomach. I seen it all before, the way them places ruin a guy’s stomach. Half the guys get out they can’t eat or drink. Other half can’t sleep. Most of ’em can’t screw worth a
damn.’ She sighed. ‘But what do you expect, you can’t lock a guy up like an animal and then expect him to come out still human. Take you, for instance. You don’t feel very human, do you?’

‘You really understand me, Ida.’

The deep laugh. ‘Lover, that’s my job. Which reminds me, I better circulate. Thanks for the beer.’ She stood up, adding, ‘Don’t forget, if you need a favour. I’m always around this joint.’

She drifted away. Later Roderick noticed her talking to a battered-looking man in a bowling shirt. She was drinking a champagne cocktail. Then he lost sight of her because the place was filling up with a new crowd, mostly young people dressed in white.

The white seemed to be a kind of uniform for both boys and girls, some of whom had bleached white hair and white makeup Roderick began to feel out of place in his old hand-me-down suit.

The lunching trio left and three young men in white began setting up some complex equipment. Roderick drifted over to the bandstand to watch.

‘Jeez,’ said one, ‘didn’t anybody check out the co-inverter? The Peabody drift is over 178 how can I patch anything in to that? Barry, you check that out?’

‘Yeah it was okay. Wasn’t it, Gary, you was there.’

‘Was I? Yeah well in that case okay, what’s the problem? Just patch it in, Larry.’

‘Like hell I will, you wanna blow the whole psychofugal synch box?’

‘We could run on 19th-channel syntonics, just until –’

‘Oh listen to the expert, will ya? You hearing this Gary, our boy here thinks he can play it all by ear, he’s the big electronics expert all of a sudden. Only he don’t know how to check out the equipment, a simple drift-check and he –’

Roderick said, ‘Maybe I can help.’

Larry threw up his hands. ‘Why not? Let everybody be a damn expert, why not?’

‘Well you see I couldn’t help noticing you’ve got a Pressler-Joad co-inverter there, if it’s one of the early models A300 through A329 you can make it into an obvolute paraverter with harmony-split interfeed, see? All you do is take off the back – hand me that screwdriver, will you Larry? – and then you just
change this pink wire and this green wire around. Now you got full refractal phonation with no drift, see?’

‘Hey you know you’re right? Great!’ said Larry.

‘Hey thanks man,’ said Barry.

‘Yeah man, thanks. Listen here’s a pass, anyplace we play, you get in free, okay?’ said Gary.

As soon as Roderick got down from the platform, a girl grabbed his arm. ‘Hey you know them, personally? You a friend of the Auks?’

‘Well no, not exactly.’

The girl wore white, her hair was bleached, and her eyes decorated with gold crow’s feet. Her earrings were tiny integrated circuits, also in gold.

‘God, I really like them, I think they’re real other-world, you know?’

‘Other-world.’

‘Who do you like best, Larry, Barry or Gary?’

‘I’m not uh sure – who do
you
like best?’

‘Oh, Barry. I mean when he gr-rinds that synthesizer, I just – ohhh!’ She rolled her eyes.

‘Oh?’

‘He was my favourite back when there were the original six, even back then, before Harry and Cary and Jerry dropped out.’

‘Oh.’ Roderick was spared further conversation by the other-world Auks. One of them (they all three looked alike to Roderick) grabbed a microphone and growled into it:

‘Okay now, robots! Let’s do that raunchy robot!’

Roderick quickly got out of the way of the dancers, who were doing an odd, jerky walk. Now he began to understand the uniforms and makeup: they were imitating some fictional robots.

The music was traditional rock, though generated by a complex of electronic instruments. Every now and then, one of the Auks would seize a microphone and growl a few words:

Do the raunchy robot

Do the raunchy robot

Do the raunchy robot roll!

Lady dressed in white

Gimme some light

I am in a deep black hole.

Roderick found it too loud, too cheerless. But he politely remained standing in front of the giant speakers throughout the rest of the set. The girl who liked Barry best seemed to be dancing at Roderick, or at least keeping an eye on him as she jerk-walked through numbers like ‘R.U.R. My Baby’ and the Palindromic tune ‘Ratstar’.

At the end of the set, when Roderick started making his way towards the exit, the girl followed. She was still walking like someone with spine damage, and her face was expressionless. When a white-haired boy tried to stop her, she pointed to Roderick, saying:

‘I … am … under … his command … I … obey!’

‘Now look,’ Roderick said, to the circle of white-haired boys who were closing in on him. ‘Now look, I don’t know what this is all ab –’

Someone screamed, and he saw a folding chair coming at his head. He ducked, and suddenly fists and feet were after him, driving him into the floor. He fell, took a kick under the nose and rolled away into another kick.

Then he wasn’t the centre of it any more. Youths were chopping and kicking each other as though a mass tantrum had spread through the crowd. Roderick saw blood on white shirts, faces twisted with rage, folded chairs spinning through the air. Then someone grabbed his collar and dragged him through the forest of struggling legs to the exit.

‘Ida!’

‘Outside, kid, quick.’ They raced across the dark parking lot, hailed a taxi and were away from it, safe.

‘Jeez, Ida, thanks. Thanks a lot.’

‘You need taking care of,’ she said. ‘But then don’t we all?’

It was not the worst of times. It was not the best of times.

The tone arm hesitated as though judging distance, made the leap and lowered safely on twelve-string guitar music. Leadbelly sang:

Funniest thing I ever seen

Tomcat sittin’ on a sewin’ machine

There was a cat in Ida’s cramped little apartment, a fat Persian that blinked and yawned until she shooed it off the sofa, but there was no room for a sewing machine.

‘Make yourself comfy, Roderick. Why don’t you take a bath and a slug of bourbon and say we take it from there?’

‘No but wait, wait. I don’t drink, and I don’t need baths. And it’s kind of you, Ida, but I don’t think I could take it from there either.’

‘I’ve heard that before,’ she said, plumping a cushion. ‘But you’d be surprised what you can do when you get in the mood.’

Roderick sat down and let the Persian rub its head against his shins. ‘Look, maybe I’d better explain: I’m a robot.’

‘Yeah? That’s what all these crazy kids say, nowadays.’ After pouring herself a drink, she sat next to him. ‘I thought you had more sense, Rod.’

‘No, I mean a real robot. I’m full of wires and stuff. Honest.’

Ida tasted her drink and frowned. ‘Sure, kid. Anything you want. Only I hope robots don’t like beating up on women or nothing like that. I’m not so good at that scene.’

‘Beating up on – I thought they only did that in the movies! No, heck Ida, I didn’t mean I want anything special, anything freaky. I meant I don’t like anything at all.’

‘Okay but if you did like something, what would it be?’

‘I don’t know, something like – well, like love. I guess.’

‘Roderick, there has to be a first time for everybody. And I’m a
pretty good teacher, if I say so myself. There ain’t much I haven’t seen, done, had done to me, smelled, tasted, dressed up as, sat on or listened to. I could tell you some stories – only they might scare you off.’

He said nothing while she had two more drinks and fiddled with the tassels on a cushion.

‘Well, for instance some guys get turned on by just a fabric, rubber or leather or silk or even cotton. One guy had to be hanged in a telephone booth while a woman wearing yellow cotton gloves – me – pounded on the door. Another guy used to wear cotton long johns with the flap down, and I had to pretend to be scared while he whipped me with a piece of cotton string, I had to call him King Cotton. Then there was the gingham guy. He would sit at the kitchen table just like in the ads and I would come in wearing nothing but a gingham apron to pour milk on his cereal Then he’d listen to it, while yours truly got under the table to make him snap, crackle and pop. That’s to mention only cotton.’

She went on to describe strange rituals called golden showers, dog shows, thundermug brunches, Leslie Fiedler croquet; scenes involving coffins, chains, ice sculpture, lecterns, skates, trusses, apricot jam, the recorded cries of whales, pool tables, confetti, door chimes, Worcestershire sauce, early photos of Stalin, voodoo dolls, thimbles, mukluks, croziers, castanets, documentary films on the cement industry, whoopee cushions.

‘… and I knew this FBI special agent, boy was he ever special. We always started off me whipping him with a towel from the Moscow YWCA while he sings about Notre Dame marching on to victory, then another girl comes in – we’re in the bathroom – and handcuffs him to the faucets and washes his mouth out with soap while he studies pictures of Whitaker Chambers and Jean-Paul Sartre. Then I had to barge in wearing a J. Edgar Hoover mask and release him but only so’s we could put him under a hot light and I ask him to name all the state capitals while she dusts off his cock for fingerprints. Then at the last minute a third girl rushes in and hands him a writ of
habeas corpus.
Boy, we earned our money in them days. And we always had to be careful with that guy’s face because he’d always just finished getting a face-lift. So listen, kid, you ain’t got no problem I can’t handle unless
maybe you like boys.’ She put a hand on his leg and slid it towards his crotch. ‘Tell me all about your problem, Rod. You got a wooden leg here, that it? You shy?’

Roderick stood up. ‘Maybe if I just undressed and showed you –?’

She nodded. ‘I won’t be shocked. I – holy cow!’

Roderick stepped out of his dropped trousers and then took off his shirt. ‘See, I am a little different.’

‘Different, I’ll say. Turn around, will you? Jeez, no asshole either. And you, what’s that in your belly button, looks like an electric socket or –’

‘It is an electric socket. It’s how I recharge. Like I said, Ida, I’m a real robot.’

‘I believe you, I believe you.’ She poured another drink and gulped it down. ‘So there’s nothing I can do for you?’

‘If I could stay overnight and charge my batteries, I guess that’s all.’

After another, very large drink, Ida said, ‘A robot. Does that mean you got no feelings at all?’

‘I’ve got some feelings.’ He thought about it. ‘It’s just that I can’t do much about them.’

‘It’s a challenge, all right.’ Ida seemed to be talking to herself. ‘A real challenge. Okay you recharge tonight, I’ll get some shuteye. In the morning when I’m soberer, I’ll think about this problem of yours some more. See, the way I look at it, nobody with feelings oughta go around not being able to let ’em out, all frustrated and ornery. Okay, so what if you got no ordinary sex equipment – sex is all in the mind anyway.’

Someone had said that before to Roderick, long before. Pa Wood, was it? (But Pa was always saying things: sex is all in the head. History is a bunk on which I am trying to awaken …)

‘Machines
,’ said Indica Dinks,
‘are only human, after all.’

The audience laughed, then applauded.

The host, Mel Mason, said,
‘I love it! I don’t understand it, but I love it!’
After more applause, he said,
‘But seriously now, Indica, isn’t this Machines Lib idea just a little
–
wacky? I mean, do you really expect everybody to just turn their machines loose? I’d hate to be in the front yard when somebody liberates a big power mower!
’

Indica smiled just enough to show she recognized the joke, but did not join in the audience laughter. When it had abated, she said quietly,
‘We don’t expect people to stop using their machines, of course not. We just want people to
understand
the machines they use, to understand and
respect
them. If you don’t have respect for your own car, your own home computer, how can you have any respect for yourself?’