Turtleface and Beyond (16 page)

I patted her for a little while and tried to calm her down. Her eyes were wild and she wouldn't focus on me. A quick thought occurred to me then, and without really considering it I picked up Willy, took her out of that cage, and began to run with her in my arms. She was very heavy. I hadn't picked her up like that since she was a pup. The other dogs in their cages started barking and yelping. I imagined they were cheering us on. Or maybe they were asking me to take them away as well. The only way out, as I saw it, was to go by that nice woman at the front desk. I was really out of breath from running with heavy Willy in my arms. I couldn't open the door either. So I put her down and yanked it open. Willy dashed through and I followed her.

The woman saw us and said, “Wait, you're not supposed to—”

We didn't hear the rest of it. We just ran, me and Willy, down the street. I figured the woman got out from behind her desk and followed us, but not very far. We took side streets and alleys all the way home. I was afraid the cops would be on the lookout for me and my fugitive dog.

That night I didn't sleep too well. I was worried that someone from Animal Control would come banging on my door. My plan if that happened was to keep quiet and pretend no one was home. I lay there thinking about this and realized I would have to move out of my place. That was okay, I wanted to leave town anyway. I couldn't stay there and be saddled with anxiety over the cops wanting to shoot my dog. I got out of bed at four in the morning and packed my bags. I left a lot of stuff behind, but that was okay too. Sometimes possessions just weigh a person down.

Willy and I left the apartment at about 6:00 a.m. Outside people were just starting to move about. First we went over to Alice's place to say goodbye and see if she had any money for me this time. I'd tell her I was leaving town. That might help.

At first I didn't want to knock on her door since it was so early, but then I heard noises inside. Marvin was awake. I could hear the little grunting and squeaking noises he sometimes made. I knocked on the door and Alice answered. She was awake too, but she looked distressed, like she'd been crying.

“Oh, it's you,” she said.

“I'm leaving town,” I said. “Me and Willy.”

She looked at me, puzzled. “You heard about Bob?” she said.

“No,” I said.

Alice walked back to the couch and sat down. “I got mad at him after you left and made him go down to the station and take back that report against your dog. I just didn't think it was right.”

Alice's face was white. She seemed really upset and I figured Bob had left her over this dispute. Now I felt even worse. It was nice of Alice to stick up for me though.

“Thanks, Alice,” I said.

“Yeah, well, he went down there on his crutches and all, just so they'd know he was still injured from the car accident…”

Alice began to cry a little, not a lot, just a tear or two rolling out from the corner of her eye. “On his way back here Bob tried to cross a street ahead of the light. I guess the crutches tripped him up and he fell down, right in front of the traffic. They didn't have time to stop for him. Bob got hit by a truck, some kind of delivery truck, a big one. It killed him.”

What a thing to happen, I thought. I wasn't sure if it was actually true. I thought maybe Alice was kidding around, but that wasn't really something Alice would do.

I had to let that information sink in. It was true, Bob was dead. Alice and I had a cup of tea and talked about him a little bit. She really seemed to like him for some reason. I tried to say a few nice things about him, about his funny sense of humor, something like that. Sometimes he could be sort of funny. But the truth was, for the most part, I didn't mind that he had died. He had never been very nice to me. I almost wanted to chuckle because I wondered if his last thought was how much he could sue that truck company for. But then I remembered that his last act was to take back that report against Willy. That was a nice thing of him to do, even if it was Alice who had made him do it.

The morning was passing away. It was getting hot out and still I hadn't left. I decided not to leave town after all. Where would I have gone anyway? I made a plan to go down to the dog pound and explain everything to the woman over there. She'd understand, I felt sure. Our slate might be wiped clean.

Marvin stacked up his blocks on the floor again and I got down on my knees to play with him. Over and over we'd stack a whole mess of blocks into a tower two or three feet high and then Marvin would get this funny grin on his face and swing his arm forward and knock the whole thing over. It was quite an amusing game for him.

Alice drank a bottle of beer while she watched us play. She didn't seem so sad now. “I'll be able to pay you the money tomorrow,” she said. “I can write you a check.”

“That's okay, Alice,” I said. “You don't have to pay me.”

“Sure I do,” she said.

“No, it's okay.”

“I'll write you a check right now,” she said. She got up and found her checkbook. “You can't cash it until tomorrow though.”

“I don't want it, Alice,” I said.

But Alice wrote out the check anyway. “Here you go,” she said.

I took the check from her. I put it in my pocket and promised to wait until tomorrow to cash it.

“Or maybe the next day,” said Alice, “you better wait an extra day just in case.”

“Sure, okay,” I said. “That's what I'll do.”

Marvin knocked over another one of his castles, laughing as the blocks fell down around him, and Willy and I got up to leave.

 

RESORT TIK TOK

 

A friend had returned from Thailand and informed me that one could rent a hut on the beach there for $1 per night, meals included. I was struggling to pay the rent on my studio apartment while holding down a shitty job as a hotel desk clerk. I'd work the night shift and when things got slow try to write short stories for publication. A few of my stories had been sold to magazines and though the payment was meager I figured if I moved out to one of those shacks in Thailand I could make things go a lot farther.

The only issue was the airfare. I didn't have it. To solve this problem I enrolled in a medical study where they deprived us of sleep for twenty-four hours at a time and then made us walk quickly on a treadmill while reading aloud from a book. The book was made up of slogans and stupid phrases repeated over and over and many of us got frustrated. If we stopped reading, the treadmill sped up and we had to start from the beginning. Eventually we all tripped or vomited, except for this one fellow named Frank who had incredible stamina. He made it to the end of the book. When we finished with the treadmills we had to drink some bitter orange liquid and then go into a room and masturbate into a cup. It was very difficult, given the fatigue. Only two of us could produce a sample. I was one of those two, and felt proud about it, but the important part was that odd study paid me $1,200, enough to get me to Thailand.

My friend had written out directions to a particularly remote Thai island and I arrived there after several days of rocky travel. While jet-lagged on the streets of Bangkok I'd been approached by a young boy who handed me a pamphlet promising a “Girl with Baboon” show at a nearby bar.

“No cover charge!” he assured me.

Who was I to turn down such an offer? I went over there and sat through several unenthusiastic “Girl with Girl” acts and a “Boy with Girl” act which should have been billed “Fat Man with Tired Person.”

Well
, I thought,
at least there's no cover charge for this
.

But then they brought me the check for the two beers I'd consumed and it was $65! Two months' rent!

“I refuse to pay,” I told them, but they locked the door and no more acts appeared on the stage. I found myself in an uneasy standoff. The beer was gone and I wasn't even going to get to see the baboon. Or maybe they'd release him to kick my ass. I'd heard baboons were very strong animals capable of ripping humans limb from limb. Or was that chimpanzees? I decided not to chance it. I paid the $65, a serious dent in my finances, and left that bar unsatisfied.

The island was very nice though, once I got there. Ah, yes! It was just as I hoped: beautiful white sand beaches, palm trees, smiling Thai locals, and packs of European hippies wearing little or no clothing all day long. I felt good there. The lodging was not quite as cheap as I'd been led to believe, but I did find a set of huts perched on some rocks away from the beach where I was able to bargain for a reasonable monthly rate. The place was called Resort Tik Tok and I gave them eighty U.S. dollars in advance for a proposed two-month stay.

Most of the beachfront huts were run by cheerful Thai hosts, but Resort Tik Tok was run by a Swiss couple named Rudy and Greta. Rudy was an ornery bear of a man, about forty-five years old, with long, thinning hair and a deep growl of a voice. Despite the idyllic surroundings he seemed always to be in a foul mood. His wife, Greta, was a knockout though, and I began fantasizing about her almost immediately.

Greta was a classic Swiss mountain girl with long brown hair and the body of an Olympic shot-putter. I'm not kidding about this. She could have been on the cover of
Swiss Female Bodybuilder
magazine, if such a publication existed. She must have been fifteen years younger than Rudy, at least. The thing that really got me about her was her insecure, imperfect smile. She had one little fang tooth on the side which stuck out from the rest and you could tell she was self-conscious about it. It looked great though. She could have been a supermodel, at least that's what I thought.

Rudy and Greta had a young daughter, a small tank of a child named Trudi who all day long ran across the sharp rock cliffs of Resort Tik Tok with no shoes or clothing. One time I saw her trip and tumble thirty feet down the rock ledge and land in a bush. Then she got up and ran along on her way. No tears or even a whimper! She was amazing, that Trudi, but it was her mother I was most interested in.

My plan had been to hole up inside my seaside shack and write for hours and hours each day. I'd build up a portfolio and then take the publishing world by storm. I got little writing done during my first month there, however. Knowing I'd likely be without electricity, I had made what I thought was a very clever purchase back in Bangkok: a solid little manual typewriter with stylish metal keys. It sat unused for weeks though, gathering dust on a table inside my hut. All I could muster on that island was a few weak sentences scribbled in pencil in a wrinkled notebook which I later lost in a café. Whatever motivation I'd had to write or generally work for a living had ebbed away. I was reasonably content to pass my days simply lying in the hot sun watching Greta in her bathing suit chasing Trudi around.

Rudy, I feared, had caught on to my admirations, but they had few paying customers and he tolerated my presence with cautious reserve. Rudy had some Chinese characters tattooed on his forearm and one day I asked him what they meant.

“Peace,” he told me.

“That's it?” I said. There were four or five different characters there. I thought they must say more than that.

“That's it,” said Rudy.

I watched him walk away, this angry hulking Swiss man, and tried to picture the young hippie he might have once been, the man who wooed beautiful Greta, and asked to have “Peace” carved into his arm.

I had been there nearly a month and accomplished nothing. Then an attractive Israeli woman checked into the resort with her French boyfriend and they quickly got in a bickering fight. He left the next morning and she proceeded to smoke hashish and drink rum punch all day long out on the veranda. I joined her in the afternoon and by nightfall we were both naked, pressed together on the single cot in my shack. She was a wet kisser and kept calling me “Jacques,” the name of the boyfriend who had just left her. I tried to imagine that she was Greta but it was no use. I awoke the next morning terribly hungover, with the Israeli woman sprawled asleep on the sandy floor below me.

I watched her sleeping there for a little while. She really was quite pretty, and sophisticated too, despite the way we'd spent the previous day. Back home such a woman would have avoided the likes of me, but the rules were different here on this island. Her eyes opened and she looked at me.

“What's your name?” I asked her. If she'd ever told me I'd forgotten it instantly.

“Malka,” she said. “My name is Malka. Who are you?”

“We met yesterday,” I told her. “My name is George.”

She rubbed her eyes and looked around. Her body heaved and she jumped up and made for the doorway, where she puked outside on the rocks. Little Trudi happened to be playing nearby and laughed at this.

Through the thin walls of my hut I heard Greta's gentle voice. “Shhh, Trudi,” she said. “It's not nice.”

Malka stuck her head back inside my shack and said, “I'll see you later.”

I assumed I wouldn't actually be seeing Malka later but in fact I did. She was eating an omelet at one of the small restaurants down on the beach and asked me to sit with her.

“You feel better?” I asked her.

“A little,” she said.

We became friends, me and Malka, bonding over the mutual failures that mired us at Resort Tik Tok. Later I confessed to her my longing for Greta.

“That woman is a lesbian,” she told me.

“No, she's married to Rudy,” I said. “They have a daughter.”

Malka gave me a pitying look.

“Why do you think Rudy is so upset all the time?” she said. “He married a lesbian.”

I thought about this and could see that Malka had a point. There appeared to be little chemistry between Rudy and Greta. On the one hand this realization made me happy, because it meant that Greta didn't actually love Rudy, but on the other hand it made me sad, because now she wasn't going to end up loving me either.