The Mentor (4 page)

He took a
few steps closer.

“You all
right, then?”  Poking his head into a beam of moonlight, his face looked
scarred from years in the sun, but it wasn't unfriendly.  One eye still on
me, he took a long pull from his beer.

I leaned up
on my elbows, still breathing heavy.  “How’d I get into that van?”

He frowned,
looked to his left and right sluggishly.  The man seemed to drift off for
a moment.  He finally said, “What van?”  

Then he
took a small step back, cautiously, as if he were suddenly aware the wet, angry
guy in front of him may try to take whatever he’d collected in his coat pockets
over the years.  

“Lost your
shirt boy,” He took another pull of his beer.  “I think I saw a shirt
balled up back in the woods over there.  Some other dirty clothes… maybe
somebody bunked over there for a while, stuff got left behind.  Might be
buggy.  Buggy’s better than cold, though.”  

With a wave
of his long, dirty fingers, he slowly began to walk away.

“Is there a
phone around here somewhere?  Gas station?”

The
homeless man kept walking, disappearing into the dark, either not hearing or
just not bothering to answer me.  I wobbled up to my feet and considered
for a moment looking for that shirt.  My man-boobs were freezing, capped
with nipples like sharks’ teeth.

I was
shivering.  And it wasn’t just because I was wet.  I just about
drowned under a hundred of water in a van
someone put me in…
to teach me
some sort of
lesson?
 

Standing
more firmly now and staring out as the moon finally reasserted its will upon
the quarry’s water, I didn’t have the first explanation of why I was there.

Chapter Two

“Sorry I
woke ya up, man,” I said to Pavan and meant it.

He took
another drag of his cigarette and, too tired to actually turn his head to the gap
in the window, he blew the smoke over the steering wheel, and it rolled across
the dash momentarily enveloping the small, plastic Jesus Christ figurine on his
dashboard.

He wasn't
terribly religious, but when he'd bought the car, Dashboard Jesus had come with
it-- super-glued smack-dab in the middle of the dash. 

Pavan was
too spooked to rip it out ("
That's like really bad luck, man!
"),
so Dashboard Jesus stayed.

“Yeah, I
only had a half hour of sleep when you called.”

“Rough
night.”

He nodded,
pulled something from his lip.  The sun was beginning to warm the air, and
he started rummaging around, one hand still on the wheel, for shades underneath
the fast food bags on the floorboard behind us.  

“Since I
had the early night 'cause I drove the new guy home again, I went to my
cousin’s house.  You know, Ray, right?”

For the
last ten minutes, I’d just told my best friend that some ninja sociopath
drugged me, put me in a speeding van and sent me to the bottom of the Fulton
quarry with nothing but a Bic pen and a couple lungfuls of air.  And he wanted
to talk about Cousin Ray?

'Course, he
did get up in the middle of the night to haul my ass out of the quarry, a good
forty-five minutes away from where his head had briefly met the pillow.

I said,
“Yeah, I know Ray.  The guy that's got the…” I lifted my hand up to my
head, drawing an imaginary line near my brow. 

“The nail
gun thing? Yeah, he got those out.”

“Good
thing.”

“Not sure
if they got all of them because sometimes if he’s in the room when you flip the
microwave on he pees himself like a freaked-out lapdog,” Pavan said and slapped
on an old, scratched pair of fake Ray-Bans.  The lenses looked like the
bottom of an Italian grandmother’s favorite iron skillet.  “Well, I go
over there to Ray’s, and his power’d been cut because he spent all his dough on
pull-tabs last week and they cut it.  So we’re just sitting around, you know,
smoking and somebody thought it might be a good idea to get the dog stoned.”

“Well, with
no power, right?”

“Yeah, no
TV or nothing,” he said, then scowled, and took another deep drag, and blew it
out.  “Well, the dog, I guess had this real bad reaction because he starts
running around munching all the stuffing out of the couch cushions, just
tearing through them like a mad beaver, and there’s that foam everywhere, so
Ray and everyone’s trying to stop the dog but, you know, they’re pretty drunk
and high, and it’s dark because there’s no power, so they’re just sorta
stumbling all over each other and to look at it, even in the dark, it’s like a
fucking New York blizzard with the coach foam all over the floor, everywhere,
then—“

“Pavan,” I
interrupted.  “I think a guy tried to kill me tonight.”  

His mouth
still bent around his next word, he flashed his eyes at me from behind the
shades.  His shoulders fell and he nodded just a little.  

“He put me
in a van, sent me to the bottom of a manmade lake and left me for dead.”

“I know
man, it’s just… it's so wild, right?  Crazy.”

My friend
Pavan was the kind of guy who always looked like he’d just been rousted from
bed: lines under his eyes, wrinkled clothes, and a huge mass of curly hair
weighed down by shampoo he'd not been patient enough to properly rinse away.
 

The hair
used to bother me because I was a head taller than him and with that messy
near-fro I usually saw more hair than face when we worked together or hung out.
 

He had
started at the theater about a year after I did but, impressively, matched my
level of disenfranchisement, lock step, within weeks.  

Weeknights,
he and I would tear tickets at the usher stand, clean each of the eight movie
houses and do it all over again.  That cycle would repeat twice more and,
often, one of us would be passed out drunk by ten o’clock.  

We had a
system which we’d worked out over the years to prevent us from
both
being lights out at the same time-- a misstep like that would probably mean
we'd both be fired.

I say
"system" when really we're just taking turns, every other day. 

Not that we
write it
down
or anything.  The moment you start to set meeting-makers
for the days of the week you plan to drink and pass out… that's probably a good
time to just go ahead and chuck the calendar entirely.  Hell, you're not going
to need it much longer anyhow.

Pavan had
the world's worst poker face.  And, at that moment, it wasn't hard to read him.

I said, “You
think I’m making this shit up?”

“No, no
way—“

“Yeah, you
do,” I said and banged the dash with the heel of my fist.  Next to us, some
guy wearing a tie and Volvo drifted back and moved one lane over.  “God,
man, you’re supposed to be my friend.”

“I am, Dex!”

“I just
went through a seriously fucked-up, traumatic experience here.”

“I know,”
he said.  “It just sounds…”

“What?
 Sounds what?”

Flicking
the smoldering cigarette butt out the window, he looked at me for a moment and
then looked back to the road again.

“Well, you
remember that dude the other night at the theater?  He was screaming in there and
all that?”

“Sure,"
I said.  "Last night."

“Well, he
was on something
crazy
.”

“Obviously.”
 

Pavan did a
shoulder-check, and I watched as he approached a semi-trailer.  Gunning the
little Honda's engine, he wheeled around and passed it. 

It took me
a moment to realize what my friend was saying.

“Wait a
minute… You think I took that guy’s stash and ended up swimming half naked in the
Fulton Quarry?”

Every now
and then, people with no place to go, go to the movies.  It's cheap rent for a
seat in a temperature-controlled room, no one talks too much and, if you're
lucky, something halfway decent is up on the screen.    

The
previous night, this one guy shows up and an hour into his movie, he stands on
the seat backs, straddling two rows and screams, “Be excellent to each other!”
and “Party on, dude!” from the movie
Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure
.
 

I have no
idea why he was yelling that.  He wasn’t even watching that movie.
 Mainly because it came out in 1989.  

But, some
movies… they touch people, move people, change their lives.  We hold them
dear and even retreat into them, a safe place, when we're at our lowest.

However, no
one has ever found solace within a Keanu Reeves movie.  Not even Keanu Reeves.

This guy
was obviously just really fucking high.

“Well, I
mean, no way, man.  No, I don’t think you took his stuff, whatever he was on,”
Pavan said.  “Did you?”

“NO!”

“Okay, I
was—“

“I’m not
one of your drug-addled buddies, man.  I’m a beer drinker, you know that.”
 I turned slightly and put my back against the car door to face my friend.
The small of my back where the toolbox had nailed me still hurt.
 “Everything I told you about tonight
happened
.”

He shook
his head like he was trying to stop a small bug from landing on his face.
 The Honda wove slightly as he did, but we didn't veer into anyone. 
Thankfully, northbound traffic was light—all the morning commuters were heading
south into Atlanta.

After a
full minute, Pavan finally spoke: “Why?  Why’d this guy single you
out for all this weird crap?”

I didn’t
have an answer.  It was something I’d been thinking about for the last
hour or so, sitting and shivering, waiting for Pavan.  No idea.

“You said
he gave you riddles and shit?”

“No, not
riddles.  Facts, like… notes.  He’d planned this night out, and he
was giving me a little idea of what I was in for.”

“Why?”

“Dunno,” I
said and grabbed a bent smoke from his pack.  I’m not a regular smoker but
watching him, it started to look like a good idea.  “Maybe he was trying
to spook me.”

“By giving
you water trivia?”

“I have no
idea,” I said and reached for the in-dash car lighter, but Pavan knocked my
hand away.  

“Don’t do
that.  Shorts out the electrical system and the car dies.”

I’d
forgotten.  “Why don’t you take that little lighter knob out so nobody
tries to use it?”

“Yeah but
then little bits of things end up in there like sunflower seeds and wrappers
and, I gotta dig in there and could electocut—“

“Okay, shut
up, enough about that.  You're making my head spin.”

“Hey,” he
said, and looked at me like I'd said something awful about Dashboard Jesus (I
hadn't.  I wanted to, sure, but I hadn't.  Bad luck).

“Sorry
man,” I said.  “I’m just really freaked out.”

“So, what’s
all this stuff about the baker?  Why’d he ask you about the baker?  You
think that old dude's in on this?  He don't look right, you ask me.  I'm not
eatin' any of his crap anymore.”

"Yes,
you will."

"Hell,
yeah, I will!" Pavan said and smiled for the first time all morning. 
"That guy's like a muffin magician or something.  Still, what was up with
the baker stuff?"

I leaned
forward and slipped a small lighter out of the console, then lit the cigarette.
“That’s the part that really is throwing me because I don’t tell anyone about
that stuff.  Not anymore.”

“What
stuff?”

“Nothing
bad, but when I was a kid… I developed, uh, what they call perfect audio-retention.”

“Yeah?
 That’s like when you’re a neat-freak and shit, right?  All your
socks lined up, pointing North in the drawer or something.”

“Not
anal
retentive
, man, audio-retention.  Everything I hear…”

I looked
out the window, trying to swallow the welling sadness a little, but only traded
the dull, sour taste for a bubbling lump that had been tumbling around in my
stomach all morning.

Still, I
just stared out there.  We were getting farther and farther from the city.
 The trees were starting to thicken, like a cold dog’s coat.  We'd be home
soon.  

“I sort of
can remember everything I hear.”

“Everything?”
 He whispered.  “You remember being a baby?”

“No.”

“You
remember what it sounds like being born?”

“
No
.
 It came on just before my teens,” I said.  “But I remember
conversations, television shows, awful high school musicals... all that
stuff."

“You
remember every single moment?  No way.  That's fucking nuts!"

The lump in
my stomach found something down there, took it in, and grew a little.

“Mostly.  I've
got a couple gaps.  But otherwise, yeah."

“What?
 No way,” Pavan whispered.  “You’re like a genius or something then?
 Like that Rain Man, dude.  Why didn't you never say anything about
it?”

“I just
don’t really use it much anymore,” I said.  “There’s no real need, right.
 I work at a goddamn movie theater.”

"
Hey
." 

He pointed
to the dash, and I apologized to Dashboard Jesus for the infraction.  Pavan let
out a deep breath.

“So… you
remember
everything
you hear?”

I shrugged,
lifting one shoulder.  All I wanted was to crawl under a blanket and
succumb to the elixir of sleep.  However, even if I did see a blanket in
Pavan’s car, I’d never use it.  Not even to warm myself during nuclear
winter.

Pulling off
the interstate, we sat behind a couple cars and waited for the light to change.

Pavan’s
eyes then closed to slits, and he asked, “Okay, what was the first thing I ever
said to you?”

I sucked in
some of the smoke (maybe I could suffocate the stomach lump or, longer term
goal, kill it with cancer) and spat the plume out the window.  “You said
to me, ‘Hey man, you see a fat guy run past here with a wooden rolling pin and
a bag full of film canisters?’”

“Okay, too
easy,” he blurted.  

"Right."  

"Even
I remember that.”  Pavan concentrated, pulling at his lip again.  I
waited.  “Okay, I told you about my trip to Vegas, right?”

“Yeah, two
years ago.”

“Okay, so
what was the name—“

“Angelina.”

His mouth
opened a little.  “Okay, how much—“

“The
handout said three hundred but you found out that was just for starters, like
some sort of
'Naked Lady cover-charge
,' you called it.  Anything
else would be extra, ‘
tips
,’ she told you and they started at five
hundred, which you did not have."  More smoke tumbled out of my mouth, but
I couldn't remember even taking another drag.  “So you paid her thirty-seven
bucks-- all you had left after the three hundred-- for her to just stand there topless
for three minutes while you pulled out your—“