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The Time I Got Lost in Greece
Category Archives: Fiction
Segway to 1995
I was a high school sophomore when a flying discus struck Principal Wible and sliced a quarter of his ear off. A doctor stitched that purple piece back together. The rest of his ear remained pink. Wible sued the parents for thousands of dollars. He wore a bandage over his left ear to hide it.
But I digress.
Ray Fleming and I had stayed friends for thirteen years. He went through a rough divorce. It was caused by his love affair with XXX pornstar Kitty Pumpkins. Kitty danced at a club called Rubber and Chains, a bondage club on the weekends. After Ray’s wife found out, she set his MacBook on fire.
Ray had left Hollywood and moved to Texas. He taught business at Baylor University. We would meet twice a year. One night we met at Rubber and Chains. I walked there, a mile from my apartment. A group of hipsters whizzed by me on Segways, those silly motorized scooters.
A line of vampires stretched from Selma to Hollywood Boulevard. They waited to pass a doorman with a few tattoos on his face—just a few. Kitty had reserved my name on her list. It was a sweet gesture. I cut my way to the front of the line.
The doorman let me in. Freaks in black leather lit clove cigarettes. Kitty danced for her birthday party that night on a back patio. Her nipples were covered with black electrical tape. The rest of her breasts were exposed. Ray stood in the back of the bar behind the murky crowd. No one gave space to anyone.
We hugged and said we missed each other. Afterward, he ordered Guinnesses and Jameson shots for us to make the gothic crowd more tolerable. We both had shown up for Kitty since we wanted her body like every other man.
The lights dimmed. Kitty met us at the bar. Her breasts were in the wild. The sweat from her neck made her skin shine. She held hands with Day, her boyfriend, a Satanic surfer. After buying us a round, Day invited us to the Hollywood Cemetery. They were screening a movie from the nineties about a lonely pirate. It came out when I was in high school, which was over twenty years ago. My God, how time flies.
“Am I the only one who thinks it’s strange that they’re screening that movie?” I asked.
“They do it every year,” Ray said.
Ray, Day, and Kitty snorted coke in the bondage room upstairs. I felt detached at the club. The pills, the weed, and the alcohol had finally caught up. I floated over those goth people. Yet I still leaned against a brick wall, somewhere at eye level with them. The number seven flashed in my mind and caught on fire. It stuck me in a nightmare. But the thought of Kitty made the detachment go away.
I woke up that Saturday morning facedown in the alley. The hangover hurt too much. I could barely squint my eyes. A pigeon looked down on me as I lay on the side street. I swatted it away. It flew off. Nothing else except a Segway took up the alley. I stepped on that embarrassment at thirty-eight years old. One move of my body made the aching worse. I leaned forward on that thing. It took me with it. The scooter was dumb yet fun. I caught up with a power walker heading toward the end. When we got close, he stopped, but I kept going. A wall of white light blinded me. But the closer I approached it, the less pain I felt. A centrifugal force sucked me in.
The heat increased across the border. It felt about fifteen degrees hotter. When I passed the white light, it didn’t look like Hollywood Boulevard: no tourists, homeless people, or stars on the sidewalk. I’d vanished from Hollywood to a strange familiar town. It was like entering a room and forgetting the reason. Beyond a few buildings was my high school football stadium with a painting of Buster the Bull, the mascot. He was all red and yellow with his manly fist up. One of those gothic people must’ve mickeyed my Guinness.
When I turned around on the Segway, the white light had left for a brick wall. I pounded it and yelled for help. I pulled my phone from my pocket. It had died. I could’ve used a phone booth. But the last time I saw one was during the Clinton administration.
Chester Avenue was full of cars. It dropped beneath a railroad underpass. Where were the Teslas, the Scions, the Priuses? Only Fords, Hondas, Acuras, and Mercedes took up the avenue. And they were the ugly models from the nineties.
A man in the underpass leaned against a torn knapsack with a rusty thermos clipped to it. He held a cardboard sign:
PLEASE HELP. PROUD VET. JUST NEED FOOD.
He stared frighteningly at the Segway.
“Where am I?” I asked.
“You’re in Fresno.”
“Fresno? How did I end up there?”
He pulled his knees to his chest. “I don’t need no weird shit. Do you have food? I just puked in the dumpster. If you don’t got no food, you won’t do me much help.”
“Where’s a phone?” I asked.
“There’s a Circle K up the road, or you can try the high school.”
I gave him a dollar. “Sorry to bother you.”
“But I said I needed food.”
“There’s nothing on me,” I said. “That dollar can buy you something at Circle K.”
He looked at the dollar bill, front and back. He held it up as if it were a counterfeit. But not much light shone in the underpass. “What is this?” he asked.
“It’s a dollar bill.”
“Is it real?”
“I hope it is.”
“Why’s Washington’s head so damn big?”
“It’s the new dollar bill,” I said.
“It looks fake.”
“I used to think the same thing, but I’ve gotten used to it. I mean, shit, our president is a game show host. You have to get used to change, right?”
He pointed at the Segway. “And what is that thing?”
“You’ve never seen a Segway before?”
He shook his head nervously.
I spun on it. “What the hell is going on?” I asked.
He pulled himself in closer. I’d sounded angry.
“How did I end up in Fresno?” I asked.
“Please,” he said. “Please leave me alone.”
“You’re the scared one? I’m the one who was in Hollywood a second ago. Now I’m here.”
“Go away, please.”
I respected his boundary.
My high school waited for me on the other side of the underpass. At least they would have a phone in the principal’s office. I wanted to call my mother to tell her what had happened.
The kids were eating in the grove at lunchtime. The rich, popular kids sat on blankets with grapes and well-put-together sandwiches under elm trees. The poor, average kids sat next to flies in the dumpsters near the gymnasium. Nothing had changed. But the students shared a common resemblance with my past.
Then it struck me.
A Mercedes roared into the senior parking lot. Grunge music blared from it. Chad Iguana stepped out with the same white t-shirt, same blue jeans, and same workman’s boots since my senior year. He was the richest kid at my school. Judge Iguana had bought him that car.
The kids in the grove caught onto me. I was a thirty-eight-year-old man on a motorized scooter with horizontal wheels. The scooter began to sputter. It lost its power. But somehow it had lasted twenty years into the past.
It lost total power at the benches near the dumpsters. How could I mistake Will Rappaport with his nerfy orange hair or Martin Chang with his Beatles haircut? They both wore sideburns like every other boy around us. Most students wore flannel. I had on the same clothes since last night. It was a black shirt, black Vans, and black skinny jeans. Everything had to be black to fit the dress code at Rubber and Chains. Those grungy teenagers began to circle me.
Martin pointed at my Segway. “What is that?”
“Martin Chang?”
“Who’s asking?”
“Where’s Joel Barrington?” I asked him and Will.
“Not here today,” Will said.
“Why not?”
“Don’t know,” Will said.
“Nobody knows,” Martin said. “He didn’t show up. You his uncle or something?”
His uncle? How insulting. “What if I told you he’s here?”
Will and Martin looked at each other. They started moving elsewhere.
“Your favorite team is the Bruins,” I told Will.
“How did you know that?” he asked me.
“And Martin, you play the violin two hours a day when you get home. If you don’t do that, your mom will make you sleep in the backyard.”
“What’s your point, sir?”
“Sir?”
“Yeah. How do you know about us?”
I pulled out my wallet and showed them my California license.
“What’s going on?” Martin asked.
“Come on, Martin. You studied engineering at Harvard.”
“I did?” he asked.
“I mean, you will. I’ve come from the future. It’s really Joel. And Will, your dog’s name is Buster, like the school mascot.”
Martin grabbed his backpack. He was about to hightail away from me.
“Martin, you live across the street from Will. Harvard accepted you after you scored a 1600 on the SAT. You’ll work for NASA and want nothing to do with me. And you’ll move to Norway. And Will, you’ll go to Sacramento State to study history. But you’ll become an offensive line coach at this high school.”
“You’re really scaring us,” Will said.
“I don’t mean to,” I said. “I’m just trying to prove it’s me. Where’s Paul Talisman?”
“What the fuck is this?” someone asked.
Chad Iguana and his followers approached me. Ben Michaels, the class president, stood with him. I used to daydream about Teressa Monaco in high school. Now she stood next to me.
“I’m not here to scare anyone,” I told them. “A famous person once said that telling lies takes more work. Or something like that.”
“What is this thing?” Chad asked.
“It’s a Segway.”
“And what does it do?”
“You ride on it.”
“Where did you get it?”
“Some alley in Hollywood.”
“I’m calling bullshit.”
Their questions and comments flew from everywhere.
“I’ve never seen that shit in my life,” Chad said. “Can I ride it?”
“It’s dead as a doornail,” I said. “But you can ride it in about fifteen years.”
“And what’s with the clothes?” Teresa asked.
More comments flew:
“Yeah, really.”
“Why are they so tight?”
“You’re stuck in the eighties, dog.”
“The eighties will come back,” I said. “Sad to say.”
“What’s with the hair?” Ben asked.
“And sideburns won’t be cool anymore,” I said.
“They what?” Ben asked. “You look like a sellout.”
“How am I a sellout? I don’t look like you.”
Ben and Chad looked at each other like baffled tribesmen.
“Believe me. I’m the furthest thing from a sellout. I’m almost forty and never voted. Can’t work a corporate job because of misconduct, and hate being a team player. Still like Pearl Jam, Nirvana, and Soundgarden. And Biggie Smalls is the illest.”
“I think you’re posing,” Michaels said.
“I wouldn’t be caught dead in those shoes,” Chad said.
“Yeah,” someone else said.
“Dead on, Chad,” someone else said.
My best friends stepped back from defending me. Chad started cracking his knuckles. He wanted to fight an adult from the future. Whenever I got nervous, I would pull my phone from my pocket without thinking. And I did that out of habit.
“Look. He’s got a walkie-talkie,” Ben said.
They began to laugh and tighten around me for a look. Teresa got closest.
“Is that like a TV?” she asked.
“It’s called a smartphone.”
“I’ve never seen one before.”
“You can call people and write with it, too. You can even listen to music and play video games with it. I predict you’ll be addicted to it.”
Teresa flipped her hair and grazed my arm. “Are you rich or something?”
“Not as rich as your parents.”
“What?” she said.
“That’s lame,” Chad said. “Only a tool would have one of those.”
That was hard to argue against.
“Can I give you my number?” Teresa asked.
“Sorry, but you’re too young.”
The narcs showed up, the hall monitors. They split the crowd.
“Who are you?” one of them asked.
“I’m visiting.”
“We see that,” the other one said. “You got a slip to be here? This campus is for students and faculty only. What is that?”
“I need to use a phone. Mine is dead.”
He pointed at the Segway. “No. What’s that?”
“It’s a dickmobile,” Ben said.
The rest of his clan laughed.
“I’m tired of explaining it,” I said. “It’s basically a scooter for lazy people.”
“Then roll your butt out of here,” the first narc said.
They let me use the phone in Principal Wible’s office. We passed his secretary first. She looked too drained to worry about a Segway. The date was May 15, 1995, and it showed on her calendar.
They took me to Wible’s office. “What’s going on here?” he said. “I have an assembly in thirty minutes.”
“He needs to use the phone,” a narc said.
“But why? Who are you?”
“I can tell you in private.”
“You can tell me now,” he said. “Make it quick.”
I laid the Segway against his wall. I placed my dead phone carefully on his desk. “You graduated me this year.”
“What’re you talking about?”
I pulled my driver’s license from my wallet. I placed it gently on his desk. He picked it up and looked at it.
The narcs examined the Segway.
“Joel Barrington, 1769 El Cerrito Place in Los Angeles,” Wible said. “Your license expires in twenty-five years. That’s one heck of a deal. You have this ridiculous thing on wheels. And what’s this thing on my desk?”
“It’s a phone, sir.”
“A phone. Sure doesn’t look like a phone.”
“Well, it died on me. Might as well not be. So I need yours.”
“So you got this phone as you call it. You’ve worked something out with the DMV or this license is fake like a unicorn. Now what do you plan to do before I call the police?”
“I plan to use your phone.”
“To call who?”
“My mother.”
“Fine. Tell her you’ll be home in time for dinner.”
It didn’t matter how far into the past I’d gone. Wible’s bitter sarcasm had never left. I had to use his phone with big keys for the numbers. Wible watched me dial it. The narcs watched, too. No one helped the situation. And how could they? My mother’s phone number was stored in my memory in 1995. But I couldn’t remember her cell phone number. It came to me in that desperate moment.
We’re sorry, but the number has been disconnected or is no longer in service.
Of course. Why would Mom have a cell phone in 1995? And I forgot her number when we lived there.
“You get one more turn before I ask you to leave,” Wible said.
The narcs came back into Wible’s office after going outside. “No one is in class,” one of them said. They were interchangeable. “They’re all crowded around because of him.”
“They’re laughing, sir.”
“You hear that? They’re laughing at you,” Wible said.
“I understand.”
“You distract them.”
“They’re calling him a tool, sir.”
“See? They’re calling you a tool.”
“Where I come from, a tool is acceptable.”
“I see,” Wible said. “And what planet are you from?”
“From the year 2017.”
“Uh-huh.” Wible signaled the narcs to get close to me from behind. “So what brings you to our world, Mr. Barrington?”
“It was an honest mistake,” I said. “Like the time the discus sliced your ear.”
Wible covered his insecurity with his hand. “How did you know that?”
“Elaine Parker,” I told him. “She hit you with a discus at track and field practice. I watched it happen. You sued her parents. Look me up in your directory. I’m a student. Or was a student.”
“I’ll look you up all right.”
I waited impatiently for him. He licked his finger and opened a filing cabinet beside his desk. “And what’s your explanation for being here?”
“I drank too much and did too many drugs at a goth bar last night. And I woke up in an alley with the Segway.”
“The Segway?”
“The scooter.”
Wible pulled out my file and examined it. “I see your name here. And I remember you now. And you’re saying you’re from what year?”
“Two thousand seventeen.”
“Two thousand seventeen,” Wible said. “I see.”
After he’d said the year, the narcs began to giggle. Even Wible sat back in his chair and grinned.
“And this Segway is your time machine?”
“Not exactly. It’s a millennial transportation device.”
“An MTD for short.”
“Sure.”
“Then where’s your time machine? I would like to see it.”
“It’s hard to explain without you laughing at me.”
He tried to hold his laughter in. “Why would I laugh?”
But he couldn’t hold it in any longer. Neither could the narcs. Everyone began to laugh. Wible even slapped his knee.
“It’s OK,” I said. “You can blame the millennials.”
“Millenials?” Wible asked. “Are they your people?”
“I’m a Gen X-er. You know that. Millennial is the label for the new generation. The whole concept is a blur.”
“How so?”
“I have no time to explain.”
“So what can I do for you?” he asked.
“Nothing. FML.”
“FML?”
“Fuck my life.”
“Hey,” Wible said seriously, “watch the language.”
“Sorry. Acronyms will take over. I’m just mad I went back in time. I used to think time travel would be cool.”
“On a serious note, who told you about me?” Wible asked.
“You punished me for bringing a Playboy to school.”
“Have you sought a counselor?” Wible asked.
“Many years.”
“Has it helped?”
“No, they’re not very good.”
“Are you seeing a counselor now?”
“Back in the old world, the future world, before my insurance coverage changed.”
Wible signaled the narcs. They closed in. They were about to grab me if I said something outrageous.
“Mr. Barrington, I’ll have to remove you now. As I told you, there’s an assembly I have to tend to. We’re calling the authorities.”
The narcs grabbed me from behind. I tried to fight them off but couldn’t.
They brought me out to the May heat in Fresno. I felt famous. Students waited there. A school reporter tried to interview me. The narcs pushed me through the crowd. The students attacked me with their questions and statements:
“Can I see that phone?”
“Let me ride that scooter.”
“Why do you dress like a pussy?”
A police car waited at the curb. One officer opened the backseat door for me to climb into. One of them took the Segway. The other one cuffed me. The cuffs bit my wrists. The officers must’ve figured I was mentally ill. I was. But that was irrelevant to the case.
Eventually, I ended up with Robert in the underpass. I told him what had happened.
Judge Iguana had committed me to an inpatient clinic on Truxton. A psychiatrist evaluated me. He asked me the same questions that Principal Wible had asked. I gave him immediate answers. He would’ve medicated and hospitalized me if I had insurance coverage.
They took the Segway and my phone away. I was just another delusional to them. The government wanted to use those things for testing and research.
I’d searched for the time machine but found only brick and mortar.
“You said you came from Hollywood?” Robert asked.
“I did.”
“I always wanted to move there. I played jazz trumpet in the seventies in St. Louis, right after the war.”
“Would you move there if you could?”
“Not no more.”
“It might be too late for me,” I said.
“What else can you tell me?” he asked.
I described the high school, the unrest I caused, those familiar faces. He wanted to know more about them.
“I so happened to go to my twenty-year reunion,” I said. “The school president I told you about is married. He had a few kids. And he became another real estate drone. He lives in Colorado because he likes to ski. Teresa Monaco got fat and married. She had eleven kids because she was a Mormon. And Chad Iguana ended up murdering his dad, Judge Iguana. But I missed him at the reunion. You would guess he wouldn’t be there. I already told you about my friends.”
“What about them things you had?” he asked.
“Those will be invented in about ten years. Ironically, the inventors will die by their own inventions.”
“God damn,” he said. “Anything good come out of this?”
“Sort of. Teresa wanted my phone number. I’d always wanted her up until now. It’s too bad she ignored me in high school. Then again, I never wanted eleven kids.”
A First World Problem
I fell asleep in class. Mother McCarthy called my name to write a proverb on the chalkboard.
I’d avoided chalkboards. A boy once scraped one with his braces in elementary school. It sent electric shocks through my skull.
“No,” I said.
“What did you say?”
“No.”
“Defy me again, and you will see me after class.”
She forced me to write that proverb repeatedly on the chalkboard. I can still hear the screeching of it. I can still feel the scratchy chalk in my hands.
I got in trouble a third time. My parents had to pull me out of St. Agnes.
“You’re going to public schools from now on,” my mother said.
September 1991.
My social studies teacher, Ms. Shoebill, began to kiss Ms. Bates in her Jeep one morning. It was of all places in the faculty parking lot. It would’ve cost them their jobs if anyone found out. When they opened their doors, I started peddling past the football stadium on my BMX. I buried the secret in my gut. I would clench my stomach any time Ms. Shoebill looked my way.
Each day, I looked for them on the campus. I was like a birdwatcher to a rare species under a narrator’s gentle voice:
The social studies teacher sits under a sycamore tree for lunchtime. She snacks on apples and saltine crackers while absorbing a paperback before she retreats to her pedagogical habitat. She assigns her pupils a quiet study session during class and grades papers to the songs of 10,000 Maniacs. Once the workday is complete, she coaches girls’ softball.
For her lessons, Ms. Shoebill hammered the students with dates dates dates. We had to memorize the date of the Versailles Treaty, the date when Washington crossed the Potomac, the date when Lincoln’s brains fell into his popcorn.
One day, she surprised her students with an oral quiz.
I raised my hand.”Aren’t we going to learn about people?”
“What do you mean?”
“Social Studies means studying people, not dates, right?”
“Just focus on what matters,” she said.
The only thing that mattered was a passing grade. My father would’ve thrown my Nintendo away if I’d failed.
I heard two boys in homeroom:
“You want the answers to the midterm in Ms. Shoebill’s class?”
“Of course.”
“Go to the Pepsi machine at the tennis courts at 12:30. You’ll see Joe Renna selling them for twenty dollars.”
“Twenty dollars? That’s highway robbery.”
“Do you want them or not? He’ll ask if it’s your first deal. Say no.”
I met Joe at the machine with twenty dollars in hand.
“Is this your first deal?” he asked.
“Yes.”
“It is?”
“I mean, no.”
He sneered at my shoes. “How much are them Agassis?”
The tennis player Andre Agassi had his own Nike shoes in the early nineties. They were black and bright orange.
“$150.”
“For those things? What a ripoff.”
“What do you mean?”
“They’re alright for pussies,” he said.
Renna wore Air Jordans. They were for douchebags. I kept that to myself.
“If you want the answers, it’s twenty bucks,” he said.
My weekly allowance was worth the cost. I handed over a bill. Joe gave me a piece of paper with poorly written letters to fifty multiple-choice questions. Obviously, I couldn’t take the exam with the paper on my desk. I had to stash them somewhere where Ms. Shoebill couldn’t see them. So I decided to use the inner bill of my baseball cap.
My eyes would look up at the bill during the test. No one else wore hats in the classroom, so they must’ve been cheating in some other way. All I knew was I wasn’t the only one.
Ms. Shoebill crept beside me and yanked the cap from my head. “Really? Are you serious?” She took my Scantron and tore it into pieces in front of everyone. I wanted to stab myself with a No. 2 pencil. But she took that away as well. “Who else?” she said. “Raise your hand.”
No one made a peep.
“You stay after class,” she told me.
The bell rang. She said, “Class dismissed.”
I remained at my desk.
“Come up here,” she said.
I stood at her desk and stared at my Agassis. “Ms. Shoebill, I’m sorry. I plead guilty: one count of cheating.”
Ms. Shoebill stashed my ballcap in one of her drawers. “Now I have a strong case,” she said.
“For what?”
She crossed her fingers together over the scantrons. “To have you expelled.”
“Expelled?”
“I never trusted you, and here’s why. This is white-collar crime. Do you know what white-collar crime is?”
“When someone commits a crime in a white collar,” I said.
Ms. Shoebill pulled an aluminum bat from her desk. “This isn’t a joke, young sir.”
I was serious.
“White-collar criminals do prison time because of it,” she said. “My grandfather was one. Our family disowned him.”
“I won’t do it again, Ms. Shoebill,” I said.
She pounded the desk with her bat. Her stapler jumped. “And I say good riddance,” she said loudly.
I couldn’t speak. It wasn’t only because of the fury inside her. It was the crime I’d committed. I’d never gotten in trouble that severely. I was just a confused freshman. I gorged on too much mac and cheese. Now I was a criminal who was lower than dirt. Expulsion would’ve sucked up every speck of me for good. I would’ve become an outcast to the worst degree.
“Who gave you the answers?” she asked.
“Ms. Shoebill.”
“Don’t try getting out of this.”
“This kid.”
She stood from her desk. She leaned forward.”Tell me the kid’s name.”
“I don’t know.”
“You’re going to see Principal Wible,” she said.
Principal Wible? He used to be a warden. Kids would leave his office never the same again.
“Can I retake the test?”
“No, you may not.”
“Can you give me a week?”
“A week? For what? To find an answer?” She closed her eyes and pinched her nose. “You sound like my grandfather.”
She was breaking me down, but I wouldn’t squeal. I hated snitches. Sure, my actions made me deserve a severe sentence but not from Principal Wible. I pressed my palms into her desk. “Are you going to paddle me with that bat?” I asked.
“Don’t be stupid. You have ten seconds to give me a name.”
What would happen if I snitched on him?
When she picked her phone up, I blurted out Renna’s name.
“I see,” she said. She hung up the phone.
“Ms. Shoebill, I won’t ever do it again. Are you going to tell Principal Wible?”
“Yes, I am.”
I had to say something to change her mind. “But I noticed something in the parking lot,” I said.
“And what did you see?”
I came close to spilling the beans about her and Ms. Bates. But I couldn’t bring myself to do it. It was my first attempt at blackmail. Besides, blackmailing a teacher would’ve lowered my morale. I was already below the dirt. All I wanted was her pity.
“Him selling the copies,” I said.
“And?”
“I should’ve never bought them. But I wanted to cheer up my Mom. She’s very sick.”
“What does she have?”
I had to think of something, anything. What was the first disease that came to mind?
“Ebola.”
“Ebola. How odd. Was she in the Congo?”
“I meant e. Cola.”
“You mean E. coli?”
“Yes.”
“My prayers to your mother. But this is still a white-collar crime. Now go to the chalkboard.”
Not another chalkboard. “No,” I said.
“Why not?”
“Because I have a condition.”
“How can you expect me to believe you?”
“I can’t write on chalkboards.”
“Do you have a doctor’s notice that says you can’t?”
Joe was selling those, too.
She made me write: My name is Chris Pasquetelli, and I’m a cheater. My name is Chris Pasquetelli, and I’m a cheater… It went on for the whole period. I began to sweat from the chalk in my hands. The first squeak on the board caused a dry heave.
She was playing an album by 10,000 Maniacs as she graded papers. My teeth and fingernails began to scream.
“Doesn’t Natalie Merchant have a great voice?” I said. I was trying to flatter her.
But she ignored me for the rest of the time being.
After she released me, I began to run to the nearest bathroom. I held my hands under cold water. That water couldn’t relieve the anxiety. It washed the chalk from my hands, but my hands were still dry with guilt.
Ling found me in there. He was a foreign exchange student from China. He had a flattop and wore Polo shirts. His English was very fluent. “I heard what happened,” he said.
“She made me use the chalkboard,” I said. “It was torture.”
“What if you get expelled?”
“It’s OK. I snitched on Renna.”
Ling checked under the bathroom stalls for shoes: “Joe Renna?”
“Yeah. He was dissing my shoes anyway. Karma’s a bitch.”
I’d learned about karma from Ms. Shoebill. It was one of the few interesting subjects in her class.
“Chris, don’t you realize what this means?”
“That I’m a rat?”
“His dad works for the mob.”
“Who?”
“Who do you think? Aldo Renna’s a mobster.”
The panic only got worse. I should’ve known that about Joe.
“What should I do?” I asked.
“Go run somewhere. Run somewhere far.”
“Ling, I’m fourteen. Where would I run to? And what will I say to my parents? ‘How was school, Chris?’ ‘Oh, I got expelled, and I’m being chased by the mob. What’s for dinner?’ I’m better off telling them in Chinese. Maybe you can help me with that.”
But Ling offered no more advice.
My parents that night acted like it was just another day. I pretended it was, too. I was quiet at the dinner table. Part of me wished they’d known already.
“Chris, are you alright?” my mother asked. “You’re quiet today.”
“I have a headache.”
“Why don’t you lie down,” my father said. “You can eat dinner later if you want.”
It was a shame, too. Mom had cooked my favorite macaroni and cheese recipe with onions and sausage. But lying in bed wouldn’t solve my problem. Ling was right. I was better off running away. But I also had to protect my family however I could.
I lay on my bed. I pictured Mr. Bossman Renna and his goons waiting outside with hammers and box cutters.
“You ratted my son, you stool pigeon. What’ll it be? Head or thumbs?”
I sat in homeroom the following morning. Wible’s voice leaked through the intercom: “Joe Renna, come to my office. Joe Renna, come to my office.”
A group of students whispered from behind:
“It must be Ms. Shoebill’s exam.”
“Who snitched?”
“I think it was the deaf one.”
“No. I think it was Monica, the one with scoliosis.”
Wible called out a list of other names, including mine.
I felt the stares when I stood from my desk. The teacher tried to keep her eyes on the podium. But she glanced. So everyone knew me as a cheater. Shoebill had caught others. But I was the only one in my social studies class she’d caught. The gossip had already spread.
I tried to conjure the right words on my way to Wible’s office. The cold wind in October began to blow against me. It was an overcast morning. The fog dropped in. It covered the top halves of the school buildings.
I sat in his office next to his secretary. One stroke from her typewriter made me jump in my seat. She slammed the platen left again and began the following line. She knew Principal Wible better than anyone. I never saw him on campus. It was like he lived in his office. What did a person like him do outside of school? Did he have a wife? Or did he live alone? Did he count the number of students he’d ruined?
“What’s he like?” I asked her.
She laughed to herself, and that was it.
The bell rang. Joe Renna left Wible’s office. He smirked with a cigarette tucked in his left ear. Wible must’ve let him off. It paid to be a mobster’s son. The secretary scowled at me without the need for words. She nodded at his office for me to go in.
“Wish me luck,” I said.
The principal had turned the lights out, but the lamp on his desk shined across his lower face. His eyes glowed under a shadow. Wible wore black leather gloves. It was something killers wore to choke their victims.
“Mr. Pasquetelli, close the door,” he said.
I closed it, expecting the worst psychological punishment. Wible wore a silver suit. His tie was red with blue diagonal stripes. I couldn’t see the rest of his office from being so dark. His jaw stretched out in the light. There was a deep dimple on his chin with evil in it. A box of staplers sat on his desk. Staples could be excellent torture devices to use on juvenile delinquents like myself.
“Have a seat,” he said.
I sat in a fiberglass chair before his desk. I was like a defendant in court. It felt low to the floor. Maybe Wible’s desk was elevated. Either way, he looked scarier up close. Maybe his home was inside a cave. He retreated to it behind the filing cabinets. I imagined him living in a dark castle. Thunder rumbled every night. His hair was black and silver and parted to the side. He was medium weight. He crossed his fingers across the desk over a paper. It had students’ names crossed out.
“I’m going to ask you a question, and you’ll have to answer it,” he said.
His voice was raspy. He was covering up his real voice. Or maybe his real voice had become gravelly. He’d yelled at students and inmates after too many years.
“What is six inches long, has a bald head, and drives women crazy?” he asked.
“What?”
“I said, what is six inches long, has a bald head, and drives women crazy?”
I was confused he would ask that. I knew what the answer was, but I wouldn’t say it, so I played dumb. “I don’t know,” I said. “What?”
He pulled a one-hundred-dollar bill from his desk drawer and smacked it on the table. Benjamin Franklin stared back at me. The bill was crisp, fresh from the federal reserve. Franklin’s lips were pursed at me: come on, boy, don’t laugh. I did, albeit nervously. His joke was genuinely funny. But Wible’s face wouldn’t budge. He didn’t laugh along. He wouldn’t crack a smile. Nothing in his world seemed funny.
“Why’re you laughing?” he asked.
“The joke, sir.”
“That wasn’t a joke. That was a riddle. A riddle is supposed to make you think.”
“Sorry.”
“Let’s get down to brass tacks,” he said. “Several of Ms. Shoebill’s students were caught cheating on her midterm. That includes you. Can you tell me what happens to students when they cheat?”
I thought of a way to avoid that question. I could only guess what Wible wanted me to say. “They get caught?”
“Something worse than that,” he said. “Some of those criminals never get caught. They can keep doing it to their graves. Their hands get cut off in some countries. Cheaters can prosper here, but they suffer something else. Their faces change.”
He stopped talking. I wanted him to elaborate. “What do you mean?” I asked.
“Wrinkles form,” he said. “They begin to lose their hair. Their teeth fall out. They become ugly and appear much older than they are.”
Who wanted that? I was already insecure about my acne.
He pulled a yearbook from his drawer. “Mr. Pasquetelli, do you know a senior named Craig Bowman?”
Of course. I used to think he was the school janitor. Students called him Quasimoto. Wible opened the yearbook to the kid’s photo. He smiled with hope. He was once a handsome freshman with all his hair, with tiny features of a child actor. But he looked gaunt by senior year, gray and malnourished. Patches of hair had gone missing. Students thought it was a disease.
“I caught him spraypainting the statue of Buster the Bull in his sophomore year,” Wible said. “I punished him. He cheated on an exam like you did. I guess my punishment wasn’t severe enough. Thus I took drastic measures. I didn’t expel him. I made him stay here to set an example for other students. Look at him now.”
Craig Bowman was seventeen going on fifty. He had the look of demise. He looked like every child’s nightmare, the living dead of our high school.
“So, you have a choice, Mr. Pasquetelli. Either face expulsion or go to the basement like Mr. Bowman.”
The bad kids went to the basement. The lights were dim. The hallway and the bathrooms, and the classrooms were windowless. The kids came out pale like Craig. Craig cleaned up after students during lunch. I always saw him with a broom and a dustpan. Students felt sorry for him on the whole.
So how bad was expulsion? My parents would find out I was cheating either way. They would look differently at me forever. But like I’d said, expulsion meant disappearance. If Wible was right, I would end up like Craig Bowman anyway.
“The basement,” I said.
Wible spread his arms out. His fingers began to tap his desk. “Are you sure you want that?”
It was like asking if I wanted to be hanged or blown away by a firing squad. “If I had to choose, I would do anything than be expelled,” I said.
Wible stuck the yearbook in his drawer. He leaned back in his chair. “Very well then,” he said. “I’ll remove you from all your current classes. We’ll begin the process. You’re to perform service on the campus during lunch. That means you’ll pick up the trash. You’ll come to me weekly for the rest of your time here. Negligence will result in expulsion. I’ll call your parents after you leave my office. Are there any questions, Mr. Pasquetelli?”
I had a million questions. But I could form none of them into a sentence.
“No, sir,” I said.
The principal remained in the shadows. “You may leave now, Mr. Pasquetelli.”
I wanted to die after leaving Wible’s office. I understood why students had dropped out of school after a meeting with him. I had Joe Renna’s father to worry about, not to mention.
The bathroom was a good place to hide from Joe. I waited there during lunch. I looked for shoes in the other stalls, wires in the sinkhole. I waited at the urinal to pee. My bladder was shy.
When the door opened, I closed my eyes. I heard the squeaking of shoes on the wet floor. My eyes reopened. Joe stood at the next urinal. He pissed a stream as long as the Nile. I avoided him. But I felt his presence looking at me.
“It was you,” he said.
I kept my mouth shut. Somehow rumors became true.
He finished peeing. He turned to me and stared, smiling.
“Please,” I said. “I’m in enough trouble as it is. Just give me mercy.”
Joe spat in the urinal.
“He let me off anyway,” he said. “See you around, puss.”
Joe left me at the urinal.
Another freshman had taken the fall, as it turned out. I wasn’t the only one who’d snitched.
My mother and father sat me in the kitchen and expressed their disappointment.
“I don’t know if I can ever look at you the same again,” my father said.
“Your dad is right,” my mother said.
I could barely hold my fork without shaking.
They sat at the other end of the dinner table. They didn’t want to be near me. My father crossed his arms. My mother warmed her hands between her legs. She’d cooked lasagna that night with a salad and garlic bread. I could only stare at the food.
“But we still love you,” he said.
“Yes, we do,” she said.
My father was a TV anchor. She was an engineer. His face was still covered in makeup from the six o’clock news. My mother still wore her work clothes. The kitchen was quiet except for the hum of the refrigerator. Even that turned off. I was left to hear the children outside. A dog started barking. The kitchen light over my head outshined the moonlight. It pointed down at me. It was engraved: I was officially a cheater. You can’t walk away from that once it’s done.
Wible Hall was aptly named. Its walls were plastered with cracks everywhere. The students kept their heads down. What were their crimes? The only light came from the lights from the ceiling. Halogen lights. They were like something you would see in a tunnel. The classrooms were darker than the hall.
One class every student in the basement had to take was shop. We would make small bookshelves and ceramic mugs for the teachers.
I cleaned up in front of my friends at lunch. They felt sorry for me. And students loved to litter. I walked by Craig Bowman. We exchanged looks. Both of us held our brooms and dustpans. He kept his head down. He looked away from me after a glance.
Normal students wanted nothing to do with us. They knew us as cheaters, or vandals, or thieves.
I guessed the thing between Shoebill and Bates remained a secret. And Ling moved back to China at the end of the school year. He and I would stay out of contact.
But Wible’s words followed me through high school and beyond. Was he right? I would check mirrors and swear I saw crow’s feet. I would find hair on my pillow. One morning, my left eye was bulging more than my right eye. I became too obsessed with my body for any long-term goals. My future tumbled into a junior college.
Why did I go to my ten-year high school reunion? People must’ve still remembered my reputation. Some of my hair had fallen out.
I drank too many IPAs and spilled the truth to Monica. She was the one with scoliosis.
“I snitched on Renna,” I said.
Her eyes were about to fall into her Martini. “For what?”
“For selling the answers to Ms. Shoebill’s midterm in freshman year.”
She’d taken the social studies class with me.
“Oh,” she said. It didn’t sound like a big deal to her. “That Renna fucker owns a hockey team.”
Sounded right.
Ms. Shoebill arrived in a suit and tie. But where was Principal Wible? I ducked out and got stoned in the parking lot.
Nostalgic Cuckold.
I lost my virginity in the summer of 1998. I was twenty-one. We met on AOL chat before we met at a coffee house. I was a college student, broke on Prozac. Meg was thirty and an auditor for gas stations. She belched at the patio table. She spread her legs apart with her jeans on. She snuffed Parliament after Parliament in an ashtray and lit another. She also called herself a libertarian, whatever that meant.
“I was possessed by the soul of Jack Kerouac at fourteen,” she said. “It happened in Algebra class when I had my period. You know him, right?”
“Isn’t he a dead country singer?”
“No, he’s a poet, Pumpkin Pie. And he’s not dead if he lives through me.”
I said what I had to say to get laid.
Twenty years later, it was eight hours of dullard work and two hours of wartime commutes. I would crawl home each night. I would kiss my dog. I would scratch my wife’s head. I would watch trendy TV shows, losing vigor by the day’s end.
One day, I drifted from the wasteful internet to Facebook—as if there was a difference. I searched for Meg. Pages showed profiles of women with the same name from countries such as Iceland, Scotland, and the Netherlands. But they looked different than Meg. One was one-hundred-and-seven years old. Her location was the afterlife. It sounded like Meg’s black humor. But this lady was Indonesian. A fifty-year-old woman from San Francisco shared my hometown. San Francisco was where Kerouac had lost his mind. In her pictures, she wore clothes most women would wear. She didn’t wear Doc Martens or Che Guevara shirts. But her curly blond hair and her sunken cheeks gave her away. I sent a friend request. It could’ve been mania, but one day I skipped Los Angeles to twenty years into the past.
I was stuck on the 101 North in gridlock. It took forever to leave town.
I coasted down the grapevine and played goth music to remember those nights with her and her vivid pillow talk. “I’ll fuck the fairytale bullshit right out of your ears.” The dust on my dashboard reminded me of the tar clinging to her ceiling fan. It sparkled like stripper glitter. The smell of sex filled my car.
I tried to capture the memories at The Cellar. It was now under new management, as you would’ve guessed. What else could I have expected after all those years? They’d turned it into a hipster hideout. It was a cardboard speakeasy, a place for fraternity alums. It had dozens of tap beers. A couple of alums at the other end of the bar brushed peanut shells off their suits. They talked about real estate. Bartenders wore spats, bow ties, and suspenders. The jukebox ironically played pop metal.
My bartender flipped his brown hair. His handlebar mustache hung under his nose like a party favorite. He tossed a coaster at my fingertips to impress me.
“I’m Marty. Welcome to happy hour, boss. What’re you having?”
He looked like a Marty.
“I used to come here,” I said. “Long ago.”
“Our specials are four-dollar Jager Martinis.”
“What’s a Jager Martini?”
“Good question,” he said.
“Forget it.” Jack used to order me Greyhounds. “Get me a Greyhound.”
Marty rubbed his mustache, looking lost.”Sorry, but remind me what a Greyhound is.”
Why wasn’t I surprised? “Grapefruit juice and some vodka.”
“That’s it?”
“That’s a Greyhound.”
“I can make those in my sleep.”
The taste could make a rattlesnake gag, but Meg used to force me to drink it against my will. I tried my best to transport myself to the nineties. Marty waited for me to taste it after he’d made it.
“Tell me what you think,” he said.
I pulled cherries, orange peels, and sliced pineapples from the glass for a sip. All I tasted was grapefruit juice. But a gentle breeze flew in from 1998. They kept the door open upstairs.
“Let bygones be bygones,” I told him.
He looked proud.
“The Cellar used to shut the door to keep the cops out.”
Marty began chopping mint leaves and celery. He was ignoring me.
“Twenty years ago was like a lifetime ago. The door behind me led to the cigar room. Now it’s probably where you stock the beer.”
“It’s still the cigar room,” he said.
“Oh, is it.”
“Yep.”
I took my glass and a pack of Marlboros to the door.
“No smoking,” he said. “You’ll have to do it out front.”
“Out front?” I said. “We used to smoke back there until two in the morning when they closed. Can I still see it?”
“Of course. But we close at ten. And leave your drink here.”
“Leave it here? We used to bring our drinks and sit in the lounge chairs all night. What can I bring?”
“No vaping either.”
Times had changed for the worse. But I wondered what waited for me on the other side. The door creaked open. I caught a whiff of clove cigarettes. Goth music bounced off the bricks. The mortar held memories of those nights. The floor was still sticky. The room was still dingy. The velvet couches with burn holes, the flickering lights on the ceiling were still there. I could smell the burning tobacco and butane lighters. I could see the goth guys with metal chains hanging from their wallets, and goth girls with mascara dripping down their cheeks.
“You made it, Pumpkin Pie,” she said.
The voice and pet name came from only one woman.
Meg in the corner booth tilted her cigarette hand in a shadow. Her right leg crossed over her left leg.
“You’re really here?” I asked.
“Never left.”
It took me to our first date. She invited me to her house. She lit a candle at a powwow in her bedroom next to Mom and Dad’s room. Junior college beatniks snapped their fingers rhythmically. They read their poems. The poems were sappy and political. I felt like I didn’t belong. Meg stood and read an ode. She kept saying Pumpkin Pie, so I knew it was about me. She made me blush.
She drove me to The Cellar on her German motorcycle. It was a Zundapp called Stella. She stole somebody’s shot at the Cellar and stuck her tongue down a woman’s throat. When a customer tried to steal her tip, the bartender stabbed him with a corkscrew. Yeah, those were the days.
A goth metal band began to play. They triggered sexual energy in the crowd. Girls used to claw each other over their men. Some would bleed, and others puked. Urine leaked from the toilets. God, I missed that place.
Meg would become Jack in The Cellar. Her libertarian name was Steel Castle. Her sexual name was Kitty Phantasmagoria. Jack took no bullshit. After a woman smiled at me, Jack tore her nose ring out.
She stole my innocence on that first date. Kitty stripped down to her candy-striped panties. Her legs were bristly combs. She smoked Parliaments and rode me to a climax with her ashtray on my stomach. The Prozac kept me from coming. I had that problem all summer, but the memories counted.
She saw me at my college dorm in the fall semester. My roommate laughed at her, saying, “Do you even know what a libertarian is?”
Steel Castle scratched his face and called him communist swine. She grabbed her clothes and marched out of my dorm. “Sorry, but I can’t date someone with a roommate like that. Farewell, Pumpkin Pie. I wish you nothing but the best. In five years, you’ll be fabulous.”
I watched her climb onto Stella and zoom away. Forever. I would’ve cried, but the Prozac numbed my feelings. And she was wrong about the five years.
Jack lit a Parliament in the corner booth despite the new rules in The Cellar.
“I’ve been waiting, too,” I said. “I always wondered what to say. Did you get my friend request?”
“What’s a friend request?”
She’d remained indeed. Meg was too busy for social media.
“Kiss me, Pumpkin Pie,” she said.
Jack on menopause still wore her black leather jacket with silver zippers. My hand slipped between her thighs. Her lips were soaked in vodka. Our tongues hardened, softened, withdrew, jousted, and wrestled. Meg loved to have her ears kissed and her hair pulled. I ripped a clump of hair out of her head.
“It’s OK, Pumpkin Pie.” She patched it in its proper place. After that, she wiped the slobber from her lips and smudged her cheeks with lipstick, the real Jack.
“Let’s ride Stella home like old times,” she said.
“Are your parents home?” I asked.
“They’re dead.”
“What about Steel Castle?”
“Died nine years ago from typhoid. But Kitty is waiting.”
“Stay here,” I said. “I need to finish my Greyhound.”
“I’ll be waiting, Pumpkin Pie.”
When I left the room, the goth music faded to modern alternative.
My Greyhound was missing from the bar counter.
“Where’s my drink?” I asked.
“Sorry, boss. I thought you left.”
“Thought I left? You saw me go in there.”
“You were gone for like an hour.”
“I was?” It felt like ten minutes. “Fine. I’ll buy another.”
“Just so you know, it’s no longer happy hour, boss.”
“For the love of God, stop calling me boss.”
The drink would cost two-fifty. It was ten times as strong, too. But that amateur Marty embodied what that place had become. Weak and overpriced.
“This is plain wrong,” I said to him.
Marty grabbed a TV remote. “What do you need? You need the soccer game? I can put it on.”
“See my point? We used to come here to escape TV. We would watch bands play on that little stage in the corner.”
The drum set was now a raffle machine. My nostrils burned. It wasn’t from the rot of old beer either. It was from the Fabuloso after the other bartender had mopped the floor. No one ever mopped the floor at the Cellar. Twenty years didn’t whizz by. They splattered like whale guts.
Marty ignored my story. He served my second round with more fruits and a little umbrella. He left me there for the frat brothers. The reverie died. What was the point of sitting any longer? So I took my last sip and decided to close out.
The Phi Sigma Kappa brothers got off their stools. It was time for them to head back to the real estate firm. I pulled out my credit card. The Cellar used to be a cash-only bar.
I stepped outside. The rain had begun trickling under the moon. The San Joaquin Valley was wet a few days out of the year. I tripped over a silver pail. It caught raindrops. A lipstick case and cigarette butts floated in it. The butts had purple lipstick stains like the ones Meg used to snuff in her bedroom. Did a thought about me ever cross her mind in those twenty years?
Well, the following Sunday, the woman from San Francisco wrote me back:
Who the fuck is this?
I described every detail possible about our three-month relationship. She replied: oh, yeah, u again.
She rejected my friend request.
What a fool I was to reach out to a girlfriend after all those years. It was only a plea for attention.
“Why have you been so quiet?” my wife asked me.
I had trouble explaining. It’s all black and white.
Fear and Loathing in a Thrifty.
Anyway, we both moved away to college. Drew went on a full-ride scholarship to USC. I couldn’t decide on a major. My plan was fifty years at college. I wanted to take classes for degrees for the next fifty years. I never wanted a job.
“Welcome back,” he said.
“Is everything all right?” I asked.
“I dropped out,” he said. “I’m back in with my parents.”
“Oh.” I didn’t ask him why. He never explained it.
“What do you want to do today?” I asked.
“Like six o’clock. Why?”
He pulled out a Phillies blunt. “Let’s sit by the pool and smoke this.”
I’d smoked weed only once before, when I was at college.
“I have to piss,” he said.
“I’ll wait by the pool,” I said.
It was over a hundred degrees in Bakersfield. The blunt tasted funny. It didn’t taste like weed. And it burned my throat. My Adam’s apple caught on fire.
“Let’s get ice cream,” he said.
“You read my mind.”
We didn’t take a dip in the pool. We journeyed through the neighborhood instead, like in high school. The heat was muggy by dusk. That blunt had caught up to us. We passed a Cyclops. He rolled the garbage to a melting curb. Naked sea nymphs called us from their houses. Red and yellow eyes watched us from a sewer drain. Even a chimera (chained to a fence) rolled on a neighbor’s lawn. I tried to convince myself I’d imagined it all.
“What the fuck is happening?” Drew said.
“Did you see the Cyclops?”
“I did.”
“What about the naked women and the eyes in the sewer?”
“I saw that, too,” he said.
It was like we shared the same brain. We’d crossed a border. The whole neighborhood changed colors. A yellow house turned pink. A mailbox switched from blue to yellow. Other objects lost their coloring. We crossed a squirrel with zebra stripes.
“Shouldn’t we turn back home?” I asked Drew.
“We’re almost there,” Drew said. “I can see the Thrifty from here.”
Nothing could stop him from ice cream. I could’ve walked back alone. But who was Odysseus without his crew?
We had to fight through a swarm of lightning bugs. The more aggressive ones latched onto our skin. People who passed us watched us. We began to flail our arms to keep the bugs off. We buzzed at them: bzzzz…bzzzz…bzzzz…
The automatic doors of the Thrifty flew open. The fluorescent lights made us see the lightning bugs much clearer.
“We’ve died,” Drew said.
“This is death.”
“What should we do?”
“What else does a dead person do?” he asked. “He keeps living.”
Which we did—just ride it out. Other people seemed to follow me in my periphery. They disappeared. I cut into a different aisle to dodge them.
My parents shamed me through the speakers:
“Look what happened to you. You came back with a ring in your nose. We used to think you were a good kid. But look at you now: high in a drug store. You’re just another drug addict. We’ve failed you, and you’ve failed us. Now get out of our house. Clean up on aisle nine.”
Voices in my head led me to the Hallmark section. My mind hid in one of those cards. I began opening each one of them. It whispered to me: “I’m right here…I’m right here…”
Drew was in the toy section. He lay on his back. He grabbed lightning bugs from the air: “Bzzzz…bzzzz…bzzzz…bzzzz…”
The voices called me from somewhere else. They sounded closer. I began pressing my ear to each card. I pulled every birthday card from the rack. I stuffed them in my right hand. I looked down at my shirt. Those bugs were everywhere, so I joined Drew on the floor. Together, we snatched the bugs from the air. I tried to squash them in my hands, but they multiplied.
An exhausted Hispanic woman stopped over us. “Can you get up from the floor, please?”
What if she was going to call the police on us? I stood right away, but Drew remained on the floor. He was still snatching bugs.
“His parents just separated,” I said.
Drew weighed two-hundred-and-twenty pounds. I was too weak to pick him up. So I dropped a stuffed alligator on him. He screamed and jumped to his feet.
“Come on. Let’s get some ice cream,” I said.
The lady shadowed us to the ice cream counter. She told the man, “Watch these two.”
It was Mr. Druffers. He’d given me Prozac the week before. He wore his pharmacy coat with an apron. Drew and I could still function. We could remember why we’d walked there. But that array of colors distracted me. The pink in the Bubblegum ice cream, the yellow in the French Vanilla, the green in the Pistachio Nut, the brown and white in the Rocky Road all confused me. What is the concept of color? To discern objects from each other? The colors in the Rainbow Sherbet communicated to me not in words but feelings. The feelings said, “Get out before the truth is revealed.” Colors existed to warn me.
“I want you to be free.”
I heard the snap of a finger. The voice flew out of Mr. Druffer’s mouth. His eyes lunged at me. I lost the ability to speak.
Drew tried to scratch the lightning bugs off the glass. He left his fingerprints on the frost.
Mr. Druffers failed to understand my existential crisis. I stared at the Rainbow Sherbet. What did his question mean? What did I want?
“What is this stuff we put in our mouths?” I asked him.
“Huh?”
“This food we call it. Who made up ice cream?”
“Tell me what you want, young man. I have a migraine. Customers are waiting.”
“I just don’t know.”
“Can’t you decide on something?”
Two years into adulthood and I still wrestled with decisions.
“He’s still looking, Pete. Bzzzz…bzzzzz…”
“Oh, good. Your friend can speak human,” Druffers said to me. “And it’s not Pete,” he said to Drew, “it’s Mr. Druffers.”
“Bzzzz….bzzzz…”
“I’ll deal with you donkeys later.”
He kicked a set of squeaking doors behind the counter and walked away.
“All I Need Is A Miracle” leaked through the speakers.
“Mike and the Mechanics,” I said.
“Who? What?”
“This is Mike and the Mechanics.”
“Oh.”
“I hate Mike and the Mechanics.”
The rest of the store was mute. The cashier went out for a cigarette. Too few people worked at Thrifty. Only one checkout lane was open out of seven.
Mr. Druffers helped three old ladies at the register. Men as tall as him weren’t supposed to live that long. You never see an elderly at six-foot-five.
When he returned to us, he said, “All right, I’m giving you donkeys ten seconds to make up your minds. When the time is up, you’ll have to leave.”
“Triple scoop of Chocolate Chip, bzzzz, Pistachio Nut, bzzzz, Rocky Road, bzzzz…bzzzz.”
“And for you, Plato?”
He began counting from ten. I felt pressured. The voices in the Rainbow Sherbet, the Hallmark cards, and even Drew’s buzzing conspired against me.
“I’ll order for him,” Drew said.
I was unaware of which flavors Drew had ordered for me. I never heard Mr. Druffers asking me to pay him. Oh, well. I was aware of the ice cream. It began to melt in a pharmacy full of voices and lightning bugs. The fluorescent lights buzzed at a high frequency. Mike and the Mechanics were drowned out. That Hispanic woman had raised the light volume to a repellent level. I felt blind. A chimera in the cold/flu aisle rolled over. A man sat in a wheelchair. He ate ice cream on a sugar cone, too. The act of eating flustered me. I watched him smack his lips.
“We shove this stuff called food into these stretchable holes on our faces called mouths,” I told Drew.
He poked his finger through the top of his triple-scoop. He inspected it for lightning bugs.
“Doesn’t that scare you in the least?” I asked.
“Man, you’ve been at college too long,” he said.
I’d been gone for a year.
“We can’t survive without food. Once there’s too much food in our bodies, we push it out the other hole.” My voice sounded very slow. “After that, it looks much different. Its color is lost. It won’t smell anything like ice cream.”
That stuff called ice cream started dripping to the floor. I couldn’t feel my cold hands or taste the ice cream. But I stuffed it in my mouth. I was spellbound. I enjoyed it too much with false pleasure.
Drew had wandered to a newsstand. I must’ve annoyed him with my doctrine on human sensation. He started flipping through the pages of a baseball card magazine. He communicated with it.
A man over forty began shelving paper towels. He didn’t belong in a short-sleeved collared shirt with a name tag.
The rolls lost balance like wooden blocks in Jenga. He ducked at the avalanche. I had to watch it. He appeared smart enough to fix teeth for a living. He may have done it in the past. It could’ve been months or years ago. But he was hobbled by the devastation of malpractice. Or whatever the reason, this was his hell: being harassed by paper towels. Even worse, he may have been stricken by a psychiatric disorder like mine. Maybe he’d worked at Thrifty since my age.
The name tags showed how many years each employee had proudly served the company. For peace of mind, I tried to read his nametag. I wanted to know his title at the store. It would’ve made me feel slightly better if he was the Regional Manager.
“Are you the manager?” I asked.
But he ignored me. He frustratingly picked the paper towels up from the floor.
My mind from somewhere goaded me to keep asking the question.
“Sir?”
But he still ignored me.
My vision blurred. I stepped closer until the man came into focus. His left ear had the same scar as mine. I’d sliced myself with a guitar string. His nametag showed his name and nothing else: CHRIS. My name.
Drew stopped next to me. “Holy shit.”
His mouth was open. He stopped eating his ice cream.
“What’s wrong?” I asked.
“That guy looks just like you.”
“He what?”
“That guy, he looks just like you.”
“What does it say on his nametag?”
He squinted his eyes. “It says Chris.”
The ice cream fell off my cone and onto my left shoe. It began to drip off the laces.
“Let’s get the fuck out of here,” Drew said.
I agreed.
When I turned around, that poor man stared at the puddle of ice cream. He started shaking his head. I never wanted to see him again.
He’d killed our high, not that it was a bad thing. But we couldn’t connect our words with our thoughts. I’d left the store without paying for my birthday cards. Maybe the Hispanic woman didn’t notice. Or she wanted us to leave so badly that she’d let me shoplift.
The neighborhood had been restored to its original colors. The squirrels looked like the same old squirrels. The Cyclops, the naked nymphs, and those eyes in the sewer had disappeared. The chimera was really a bulldog. Our minds had returned, although mine was lethargic. The man at Thrifty had scared those mythical creatures away.
“That’s reality, Drew. A stack of paper towels falling on your head. Whatever doesn’t kill you only embarrasses you in front of others.”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean that man was rejected. He was weakened by something. What if rejection gets worse?”
“What if he’s just a fuckup?”
“That’s it. I’m staying at college. I’ll take classes and accumulate degrees until I’m old like that man in the wheelchair.”
“What about Mr. Druffers?”
“Druffers is a pharmacist.”
“Yeah, but he’s a grump.”
“Let’s not dwell on it,” I said. But maybe his life was better than it appeared to be. “Think of it like this,” I said to Drew. “Would you rather stock the shelves for a living or defend murderers in court like your dad?”
“Stock the shelves,” he said. “But ask me the same question ten years ago. I would’ve said the opposite.”
“How is it possible that he looked like me?”
“I don’t know, but I’m never doing this again.”
“Doing what?”
“Wait,” I said. “What bug spray?”
“Your spray in the bathroom,” he said.
“You sprayed the blunt with RAID?”
“Lumpy said to do it.”
“Just because he’s your dealer doesn’t make him an expert. Fuck, man, we got brain damage.”
So Drew and I never smoked bug spray again. That was the positive side of the outcome.
Drew ran out of weed the following day. We got stoned off the last nug and rode to Lumpy’s house. On the way there, I was nodding off at the steering wheel.
At the light on Ming and Ashe, he pulled to my left. I felt his aura. Looking over at him was like peeking at my eighth-grade report card. I could still see that black F in English.
The man sat rigidly behind the steering wheel. It was an absolute shit box. His hands were at ten and two. He stared depressingly forward, wearing his short-sleeved collared shirt again. The shit box was without a make or a model—as if it were sold at a black-market dealership. And it was white, with burn marks all over the hood.
“Don’t look to your left,” I said.
“Why?”
“It’s the guy from Thrifty.”
Drew looked anyway. “That poor bastard,” he said. “I know what he’s thinking. I got a shit car, a shit job, a shit wife. I got shit clothes, a shit haircut….”
“Do you still think he looks like me?”
“Who? Him? Nah.”
“It’s the guy from Thrifty, the paper towel guy.”
“Oh my God. You’re right.”
The light turned green. I waited for the man to pop the shit box in gear, but his car stalled. He tried bucking himself from the seat as if it would start the engine.
“Should we help him?” I asked Drew.
So I punched through the intersection with my used Honda CRX. I went to return the Hallmark cards before driving to Lumpy’s house. The man shrank in my rearview until he no longer appeared.
May As Well
I was a high school freshman. My English teacher Mrs. Martin made us write an essay on what we wanted to be when we grew up. I wanted to do standup comedy, so I wrote that down. Students stood at the front of the class one at a time. Most boys wanted to fight fires, while most girls wanted to nurse people.
“Mr. Talisman,” she said, “please come up.”
As I read mine, the students began to giggle. They probably thought I was joking about being a standup comic. They probably thought Paul Talisman was trying to rile Mrs. Martin up. I was the same kid who’d snuck a dildo into class.
“This is a serious assignment, Paul,” she said.
“But I am serious.”
“If you say so.”
“Can I sit down now?” I asked.
“The question is ‘May I sit down,’ not ‘Can I sit down.’ After all, you’re able to sit. And yes, you may.”
After school, I rode my bike to a bookstore to read erotica books. The employees would read, sit on bean bags, stand around, and talk about films, literature, and music. They would mention other countries they’d visited. I pretended to read a book but actually listened to them. They seemed cool, wearing their own clothes, which I liked most about them: their individuality.
This one dude wore a Doors t-shirt. It hung over his thin body. It was like his shoulders were a coat hanger. I wanted to dress that way for school, with brown corduroys and white Converses. But I had to lose weight to pull it off like him.
I went to school dressed that way anyway. The girls ignored it, but my friends complimented my shoes. I wore a Ramones T-shirt too because I’d heard about the band.
The dude at the bookstore noticed it one day. “Hey, I love the Ramones,” he said. “What’s your favorite album?”
My favorite album? I looked around the bookstore. It could fit a basketball court. Most employees hung around an information desk in the middle. And there was a cafe serving coffee and pastries.
“I mean, they all rock,” I said. “How can I pick just one?”
“I hear you,” he said.
“Who’s your favorite writer?” I asked.
He tapped his finger against his lips, staring at the ceiling. “If I could pick one, I would go with Vonnegut.”
Vonnegut? Who the hell was Vonnegut? “Ah, what’s your favorite book?”
“Definitely Breakfast of Champions, for sure.”
“And your favorite album by The Doors?” I asked.
“Hmm, their first album.”
I wanted to work in that bookstore to keep chatting with Jesse. I could’ve always stocked shelves there instead of telling jokes.
After class the next day, I went up to Mrs. Martin. She left the curtains open to let the sun shine through the windows. Her classroom was bright. It made me squint. She sat at her desk with green olives in Tupperware.
“I thought about what you said. And I’ve decided what I want to do. I want to work at a bookstore.”
She wore the same long white dress with brown feathers and Birkenstocks. She’d definitely gone to Woodstock. That was all I knew about her: what she wore. She kept her business private. The students knew she was married. That was about it.
“What for?” she said. “Don’t you have any bigger ambitions than that? Give me a break. Come back to me with a better idea.”
A better idea? I thought about my parents. “Well, I don’t want to sit in a cubicle for the rest of my life.”
She stopped eating and looked at me with eyes as wide as those olives. “Very good,” she said.
One day, Jesse was missing from his usual shift on Wednesdays. He would work from ten in the morning to six at night. A cold draft in the store told me he was gone forever. The guy in his place wore a collared shirt with the store’s logo. It said Tim on his nametag. His style annoyed me.
“Where’s Jesse? Is he sick?”
A fluorescent light shined over his head. His big nose shadowed the rest of his face. His shirt was tucked tightly in his khakis. “Jesse doesn’t work here anymore.”
I knew it. How tragic. The best ones always leave. The store had changed without him there. The books lost their colors. Everything turned black and white. Tim added nothing more to the conversation. He kept his eyes on the computer and a cart of books beside him.
“What happened?” I asked.
“Jesse is studying literature at Berkeley,” he said.
It would’ve taken five hours from the San Joaquin Valley if I could drive.
“All the way up to Berkeley?”
“No, at Berkeley,” he said.
Prepositions gave me headaches.
“At UC Berkeley?”
“Yes,” he said.
I would miss him. But what a storybook life he lived: from a bookstore to a prestigious university.
I loved the erotica section at the bookstore. It was next to the fantasy section. I closed my eyes and pulled a book from the shelf called Whose Muffins Are These? I opened it to a random page. The scene took place at a bakery. One of the employees burned a dozen Boston cream pies. She had to bang the baker to keep her job. He mounted her against the freezer. The writer used culinary metaphors: kneading, rolling, tossing, sprinkling, squeezing, basting….He shot his baker’s dozen into her sticky fritter. Stuff like that.
“You have an ID?” someone said.
I turned around. Tim, the supervisor, stared at me from the end of the section. I hid the book behind my back.
“Give me that book,” he said.
I held it out. He swiped the book from my hands and flipped through it.
“You have to leave the store,” he said.
And so I began straight for the doors. It felt like every person was staring at me. I was the pervert who got busted in the erotica section. Customers in line, workers behind registers, and even girls in the café with fritters behind the glass looked at me. A deviant like me should’ve been kept away from anyone’s daughter. Those glares followed me back to the parking lot. The bookstore itself glared, too. The storefront resembled a face. I couldn’t show mine in there again.
Little did I know I would work there eight years later. They must’ve forgotten me. But when I stepped inside to apply, they looked the same. Tim still worked there. He interviewed me with his thin glasses. But Tim smiled delicately and told me about his retriever. He told me about his favorite video games and his parents in Oxnard. I’d taken him wrong when I was fifteen. As an adult, I learned the meaning of a company man.
I ran into Les on the first day I worked there. He was a friend from comedy school. “What have you been doing?” he asked me.
Committing worse perversions than reading bakery porn. That was for sure. “Just been working,” I said. “What about you?”
“Went to trade school,” he said. “To become an electrician. It made more money than waiting for standup. What’re you doing working here?”
Les made me feel shitty with that question. “Got to pay the bills somehow.”
“How did the rest of comedy school go?” he asked.
“I don’t want to do standup anymore. My real passion is British comedy.”
“British comedy?” he said. I guess he had to think about that for a second. “But you’re not even British.”
“Who says you have to be British to do British comedy?”
He had to think about that also. “Well, it’s great to see you again, man.”
We hugged, but Tim was watching me. I had to get back to my shift.
The bookstore had lost its cool. It disappointed me. Some of the employees worked full-time. We made minimum wage. Those who worked part-time held second jobs and still went to school.
I approached my first customer. She looked twice my age but could fill her miniskirt perfectly.
“Excuse me, miss, do you need help?”
She looked at me with eyes of venom. “Do I look like I need help?”
She was in the self-help section.
One morning, Tim approached me with a cart of books. “Can you arrange these books in the erotica section?”
My hands went cold. I could move and stuff them in my pockets, yet they were numb.
“Paul? You listening?”
“What?”
“Can you arrange these books in the erotica section?”
“Erotica?”
“Unless you’re busy.”
“I quit,” I said.
“You what?”
“I said I’m quitting, or I might. I might not quit.”
He got up close to me. “Does this make you nervous? If so, I totally understand. I can have someone else do it.”
The memory came back to me as if I was reliving it. The words he spoke. Him standing at the end of the section. Me handing him the book. Me leaving the store. Yuck. Horrible.
“It’s fine,” I said. “I’ll do it.”
The erotica section made me prickly. Someone had left a diaper there. Other than that, the section looked the cleanest in the store. I guess because no one ever went there. The religion section, on the other hand, needed a deeper cleaning than the children section.
Any moron could’ve done that job. I would straighten the shelves. Tim would roll the cart with more books for me. I began to hunker down. My eyes tried to avoid them, but I found the old one like it had never left: Whose Muffins Are These?
The writer, Lance Chance, had written dozens of erotica books with his picture missing from the jacket sleeve. What mother with that last name would call her son Lance?
I flipped to another random chapter. A customer needed more money to pay for a wedding cake. The baker had spent all weekend preparing it. No matter what, people seemed to let the baker down, which led to more sexual coercion. He banged her in his office. Man, that bakery crawled with sex.
“Are you on break?” I heard.
I turned around. His Christian face looked as red as eight years ago.
“I am,” I said.
He pulled a book from the top shelf. It was a fantasy/erotica book called Pusseidon. It involved mythological heroes and mythological creatures getting it on. Challenging territory for me.
“Did you swipe your card?” he asked.
“Of course.”
(I lied.)
“Then try this one.” He handed me Pusseidon.
So I’d misjudged Tim all along. Sure, he micromanaged, and he loved God too much, but he could also let loose.
After that moment in the erotica section, he and I would hang out at the information desk. During a long period of downtime, we debated Christianity versus Atheism.
“I must be agnostic,” I told him, “because I think God is made up, but if I was trapped in an elevator, I would pray to him.”
“You see his power? If a man kills himself, he goes straight to hell. No ifs, ands, or buts about it,” he said.
“I think the people who drove him to suicide should go to hell,” I said.
I loved to argue with Tim, especially on the subject of religion. It fired him up. He majored in Theology at Ventura College. He defended himself with biblical facts. I knew next to nothing about religion. I just believed what I believed. He pulled out a book about the Mennonites. The book didn’t involve sex, so I didn’t read it. But the name Mennonites sounded cool. Mennonites should be the name of a football team.
Anyway, the store gave its employees a ten-percent discount on all books. They let us use it only once a week. I judged the books by their covers. Most of them put me to sleep—the actual books. They fooled me too often.
The longer I worked there, the more awful books I read. After two years, the bookstore bored me into inertia.
I needed a holy spirit to bail me out. It arrived in the form of a film producer. We met in the parking lot of the bookstore on my lunch break. He wore a black suit on a hot July afternoon in Sherman Oaks.
“You look a certain way,” he said.
He must’ve been referring to the bandage on my nose. I wore it publicly to hide my burn marks.
“Are you interested in acting?” he asked.
Interested? Of course. “Yes,” I said. “But what’s it about?”
“It’s a British comedy,” he said. “Can you speak with a British accent?”
Could I? I practiced all the time. Maybe God did exist, blessing me with that producer of British comedy. I spoke in that accent for the rest of the conversation.
“Why, sir, if you don’t mind, please do send the script.”
“Well done,” he said. “And I love the bandage look. It suits the comedy. But we’re shooting in New Orleans. Do you mind traveling?”
“Why yes, I travel quite a bit, sir. Call me a wayfarer, if you will.”
“Good. But you’ll have to arrange your plane ticket,” he said. “We’re running on a low budget, so we must watch our expenses.”
After we agreed to do this, I fell into a manic episode and quit the bookstore. I thought it was the start of something special.
I drove in my Volkswagen Bug to the east coast rather than fly. Paul Talisman hates flying. My parents had died in a plane crash.
Most of my family lived in New Jersey. I called them for their addresses to visit them, to tell them their relative was acting in a movie.
I escaped a cyclone in Iowa. Father Time may have killed me slowly, but Mother Nature could’ve wiped me out instantly. Somehow, I dodged the tornado, and my family dodged me.
The producers needed me to pay for my lodging, so I paid for a week at the Lucky 9 Motel in the French Quarter.
One night, I found shelter in the motel from a heavy downpour.
A young guy at the front desk stood behind thick glass.
“We should hide in a bunker,” I said.
“A bunker?”
“Yeah, I just walked through a damn hurricane.”
“It’ll pass.”
One of us could think straight.
The hurricane followed me into a nightmare. The waterline rose past the motel window. Fish bones and human skeletons drifted by. A tidal wave pushed through the door and flooded the room. I woke up before the nightmare could drown me to death.
By sunrise, the hurricane was still attacking. I could’ve died. So I skipped a shower and fled the town. The mouths of the sewers swallowed too much water for alligators. Their bellies scraped along the curbs. My life had somehow turned biblical as if I was Noah. I swore never to return to Louisiana again—or anywhere on the east coast for that matter.
The film became a documentary about the making of it during a hurricane. It won awards at film festivals. The actors who played themselves as actors moved on to lead parts in TV shows and small parts in movies. If only I’d stayed in New Orleans….I had to crawl like those alligators back to the bookstore. I would work there for the next ten years.
One afternoon, Les met me in the cafe on my break. It had been many years since I’d last seen him. His hair had grown to his shoulders with mutton chops. He’d lost even more weight. He was practically a skeleton.
“I quit the electrician job long ago,” he said.
“How come?”
“Too dangerous. Plus, I got to do standup. It’s the whole reason I moved here. But now I’m thinking of quitting.”
“Why quit now?” I asked.
Les took a bite out of a blueberry scone. He wore torn clothes like an electrician. “Where’re the right people, man? It gets harder the older I get. I’m edging forty. I think about quitting, then I change my mind, think about quitting, then I change my mind. I did open mics at the Improv about a dozen times in those years, man. But nothing’s ever taken off.”
I wished I had the right advice to give him, any advice. But what was an employee who’d worked at the bookstore for ten years supposed to tell him?
“Let’s get a drink somewhere,” I said, “and catch up.”
“Oh, I quit drinking,” he said.
“You did?”
“I quit drugs. I quit holistic remedies, fried foods, and red meat. Gluten, too.”
So we could hang out only at the cafe.
“I’m driving back to Philly,” he said.
The idea sounded impulsive.
“Why do that?” I asked.
“Just visiting family.”
“You keep in contact?”
“Oh yes.”
At least someone kept in contact.
“Good for you,” I said. “That makes me happy. Why’re you visiting?”
“Because my uncle fell under a city bus.”
“Jesus. I apologize.”
“I’m going to the funeral on Thursday. I can make it there in four days.”
“Just don’t drive through Iowa,” I said.
He stood to hug me. “I’ll see you when I get back.”
He did get back, a week later, on the phone. Les only texted. But that time, he called.
“I woke up,” he said.
“What do you mean you woke up?”
“At the funeral. It woke me up. I’m staying here.”
Staying in Philly? It sounded like the worst mistake. “Did you think it through?”
“I did. At our age, relatives start dying off. I need a wife. And how can I get one out there? They treat me like shit. I’m too washed up.”
“Don’t think that way. Just keep doing what you’re doing,” I said.
“And what am I doing?”
My guess was standup. But Les should’ve been thinking like an individual. He wanted his family to tell him what to do.
So once Les moved back to Philadelphia, my only friend was Dan Dupree. He’d gone with us to comedy school. I knew him only through Les. We would hang out whenever Les would hang out. The last I heard, Dan served drinks across the street from the comedy school.
Les called me again. Tim saw me on the phone.
“It’s an emergency,” I told him.
“It’s freezing over here,” Les said.
“Are you setting up any shows?” I asked.
“If I had time,” he said, “with debt and all. I’m parking cars like I did in LA, and I work every day of the week. It’s hard to make money parking cars here like you do out there, man.”
“I can bet,” I said.
“I wish I had the energy to write new material. I mean, they have open mics at a few places. Hold on,” he said.
His father hollered something in the background. I could only hear, “Take out the trash,” and “Help me get out this frickin’ chair.”
He got back on the phone. “Paul, I’m in love.”
“You’re in love?” I said. “In Philadelphia?”
“Yeah. I met this girl. Girls can treat you so nice. LA must’ve made me jaded.”
He met her at the funeral.
“Something about her glows,” he said. “Fate has touched us both. I think Uncle Marky’s death opened me up.”
So he stayed there for her.
“I also forgot that people still mow their own lawns out here. They’ll wave at you when you drive by. And people speak the truth to you. I mean, the people are uglier, sure. But I can afford to pay rent easily.”
Les was living with his parents. “Which makes sense,” I said.
“Yeah. I’m buying a house in the suburbs once I can move out of Pop’s place. You should move out here, too.”
“Dude.”
“Come on, man. The dream is dead.”
“What?”
“Believe me. Just get married and have kids. Forget about that bookstore and your acting dream.”
Les broke my heart with that comment.
A week later, he called me again. I hated answering phone calls. But Les had me worried. It sounded glum.
“She dumped me, man.”
“Allison?”
“Yeah, the bitch.”
“All right, calm down.”
“She put me in the friend zone. She said she wanted to date younger guys.”
“In those words?”
“So she implied. But I’ve outgrown the friend zone, man.”
“Every man has…”
“I should’ve seen it coming,” he said.
“I saw it coming,” I said.
“You did? You should’ve said something.”
“Dude, you were dating a twenty-three-year-old. At some point, the balloon would pop. You would’ve called me jealous and bitter if I told you that.”
“Well, you are.”
“OK, fine.”
“So I left all my shit in California for her, thinking I was starting new. Now I’m stuck in the same rut that drove me out of California.”
A few months later, he sent me an email, the first email he’d ever sent me:
…I ‘ve moved back to Philly for a reason. God has a plan for us…
Was the plan good? And how did God make the plan? Did he meet the devil every quarter to discuss numbers? Was heaven bringing too many souls? Did hell need more souls to punish? And was the devil punishing the unworthy souls severely enough? They both needed human experiments. What excellent questions to bring up with Tim. Tim said my friend was right. Everything he was doing was in God’s control.
Les wrote about his first show in five years. He may have given up and moved back, but at least he was doing standup in Philadelphia. That inspired me to seek auditions.
Les told mediocre jokes, but he promoted himself wisely. He posted ads online. He stapled fliers at bars and coffee shops. He used to drive a van with his name, face, and website on it. Before he moved to Philly, he’d sold the van and bought an electric car, a Toyota Prius. It looked like a shoe on wheels.
The only crowd was his parents. There’s the bad news. One of them had seen his fliers. After all, they were both retired. They had too much free time. And all his material was about his family. God must’ve planned that, too.
But he said he tested new jokes for gigs in the future. It was hard to gauge whether the jokes were funny with his parents. They were the only ones in the coffee shop. People came to Philadelphia for reasons other than comedy. It would’ve been rare if any comics stole his material, or if they burned his ego. His parents applauded him after every joke. He cut the performance short after six minutes and thanked his parents for coming. They hugged him, kissed him, and praised him. I understood the shame he went through.
“I’m quitting,” Tim said to me. “My time has come.”
“Time for what?” I asked.
“Time to work for God. I’m heading to Isreal, where I’ll live.”
“For what reason?”
“To convert people to Christianity, my friend.”
I wished him good luck, and I hoped he would survive.
The woman who replaced him also praised Jesus. He must’ve planted seeds before his departure. The longer I worked there, the more born-agains appeared. A born-again group held meetings every Wednesday night.
The store carried fewer books than when I’d quit the first time. It looked bare in the store, like the dying tree outside. The erotica section may have lived on and looked as clean as ever, but the Lance Chance books had gone out of print. That was when I knew I’d worked there for too long. I grew tired of life, tired of working for someone else. I’d failed at the auditions, so I gave that up again.
One morning, the new manager made me work the music section. A girl with pink hair and black lipstick showed up. She wore a t-shirt for a rock/rap group called the Insane Clown Posse. Whatever. Maybe she would keep to herself.
“Do you work here?” she asked.
My laminate hung from my neck with my name on it. “I do. The Insane Clown Posse is in the next aisle.”
“What makes you think I’m looking for that? Because I’m wearing the shirt? That’s, like, profiling, dude.”
“Forgive me.”
“And why did you point to the rock section, dude?”
“Stop calling me dude.” I tugged my laminate in front of her. “Call me Paul.”
“Show me the rap section, Paul.”
She followed me as if I were trying to escape her.
The Insane Clown Posse filled a whole row of CDs. I saw them in the rap section. I stood corrected. I hardly worked in that part of the store.
“Just curious,” I said. “What do you like about ICP?”
“I’m looking for the new joker card.”
“The new joker card? So that’s why you listen to them? Because of some card?”
“So?”
“So, do you care about the music?”
“Only a Juggalo would get it,” she said.
“So you belong with the Juggalos?”
Her gum smelled like foot cream.
“Belong?”
“You know. Their fanbase, right?”
“I’m going to the Juggalo convention this week.”
“Where’re they holding the convention?”
“At the palladium. They’re revealing the new joker card.”
“So you’re looking for a card in one of the CDs.”
“Yeah. The special edition.”
“So it’s like you’re hunting for an Easter egg.”
“I don’t have time for this. Can you walk away, Dad?”
I held my anger inside. “I’m just wondering what the importance is,” I said.
“I talked to Shaggy online. He said I could get free merch.”
“Shaggy who?”
“Stop with the questions.”
“Don’t cop an attitude,” I said.
“Likewise.”
“What if Shaggy is lying?” I asked. “What if he’s trying to get you to buy his records?”
“And what if you work this shitty job for the rest of your life?” she asked.
I slapped the CD right out of her hands. It had happened automatically.
“Hey, fuck you, dude. You just, like, assaulted me. Go fix your nose, old man.”
The manager stormed in:
“What happened?”
“I’m quitting, I swear, I quit.”
“That young woman is yelling for security. What did you do?”
“I’m going on lunch. I need a break. Those angry nerds are taking over the store. We’re dealing with a civil rights group. Oppressed nerds. We have to see them every day.”
“You can’t help customers if you’re losing your temper, Paul. You should stay home.”
I needed a cigarette, especially with her about to suspend me.
My cell phone began vibrating. Rather than answer it, I went to the bathroom.
I waited at a urinal for something to come out. It was a phobia. I couldn’t pee in public. My phone began to buzz again. Someone in the stall groaned as if he’d sat on nails. I answered the phone with my free hand.
Dan Dupree had called me for the first time ever. It used to be just a text here and there about comedy school before that.
“Are you alone?” he asked.
“Not physically.”
“Go walk somewhere,” he said.
The person in the stall wasn’t leaving soon.
So I sat in my car, where I thought I could find solitude.” OK, I’m alone.”
“Les died.”
“He what?”
“He died.”
“But why? How?”
“He left the car running in the garage.”
“But he drives a Prius.”
“I don’t know, man. They told me at the club.”
I was frozen in my car. Les was the first person close to me besides my parents who’d died. “I just spoke to him yesterday.”
We had no more words to say, so we hung up.
I sat at the lunch table in the workers’ lounge and stared at one of the walls. There was the Escher painting of a bunch of staircases leading to a ceiling. And there was a light socket that appeared to have eyes and a mouth. And to the right of it was the Munch painting of that screaming yellow face. How could I process what Dan had told me?
The manager came in. She began to fill her thermos in the water fountain. She’d managed the store for eight months, and I kept forgetting her name.
“Paul, do you need to go home?”
“My friend died.”
“Oh,” she said.
“I think I’m going to faint.”
“You may go home, but please don’t forget to clock out.”
“You said may.”
“What?”
“You said may. That’s proper English.”
“Paul, just go home and lie down.”
“OK.”
“And dear, he’s not suffering. He’s gone to a better place.”
“He killed himself,” I said.
“Oh,” she said again. She began to roll the cap on her thermos. “I should go back out.”
The news about his suicide was false. He’d taken his life some other way. My guess was pills because of his addictions. I heard most people overdose by accident. But what did that matter? What mattered was his death.
That same afternoon, Dan was working at the bar. The bartender had left for cigarettes and weed. That left Dan and me alone. He set his broom aside and sat with me at the counter. We shared a pitcher of beer with pigs feet, but I’d lost my appetite. The warm beer burned my throat.
“Are you going to the funeral?” he asked.
“In Philly? I can’t afford that.” I said.
“Me neither.”
“I could write my condolences to his parents,” I said. “But I would feel too awkward.”
“Why?”
“Because we’d never met.”
Dan pulled his beanie to his eyebrows. He poured himself another round. “I’ll miss him for sure,” he said.
“I miss him already.”
The bar had white tiles, rustic ceiling fans, and wooden walls with pictures of old movie stars who’d come there. They’d set tables for people who wanted to eat. I was yet to see anyone do that.
“This town makes it hard to miss people,” Dan said. “When they leave, I just say, ‘OK, good luck with that.’”
“He always had so much passion,” I said, “but his decisions always got in the way. I should’ve told him to stay here and ditch that girl. But he was always too stubborn.”
“Be honest,” Dan said. “Something deeper than that girl made him do it. But I agree about his passion. He did save my life.”
“That’s right,” I said. “What happened?”
As I’d implied, Dan was almost a stranger to me. I liked his poise, and that mattered. I had to collect as many friends as possible before I got too old. I also needed to leave that bookstore for good. But how could I thrive independently? Look what happened to Les. But he lived with his parents. He’d depended on them, but at least he’d given an effort.
Dan rolled up one of his jacket sleeves and showed me three scars up his wrist. It was the first time I’d ever seen that in real life.
“Why did you do that?” I asked.
He looked around himself first, making sure we were alone. “You know The Tonight Show wanted me?”
“The real Tonight Show?”
“Yeah, no other Tonight Show.” He scratched his red beard. Dan wore a couple of gold rings on his right hand. “I crushed my set one night at the Improv. They laughed at my favorite bit about the horse and the school bus. That was my best material. Usually nobody laughs at it.”
That was his worst material.
“Crowds laugh at my bad jokes,” he said. “So I hoped for something to hit. More people showed up to my sets. I saw my name on the marquee. Those big black letters gave me a huge boner: DAN DUPREE. TUESDAY NIGHT. Do you remember that?”
It was bright in Sherman Oaks. The sun shined through the entrance on our faces. I stared at a coaster for the bar. It read The Green Room. A character on it wore a handlebar mustache and a top hat. He looked like a magician. I should’ve learned magic, but it was one of those things you learn at a young age.
“I do,” I said. “You never told me you went on The Tonight Show.”
“Who said I went on it?” he asked.
“Those assholes,” I said. “They passed on you for someone else?”
“Nope. I used to dream about going on Conan. I hated The Tonight Show. I bombed one night when Conan’s people sat in the crowd.”
That poor guy. We both regretted our twenties. Les and I would drink together (back when Les had a drinking problem). Les would call Dan’s material a heap of plastic bottles—whatever that meant. But I knew comedians competed viciously against each other.
“That fucked me up,” Dan said. “But Leno’s people saw me perform a week before that. Paul, I should’ve known better at that age.”
“What age?”
“My twenties. I needed to think about it. That’s what I told them.”
“Think about what?” I said. “It’s the fucking Tonight Show.”
He emptied his pint of beer.
“I turned it down,” he said.
Things like that actually happened. What was going through his head at the time?
“But why?”
“I told them, ‘I’m sorry, but I’d rather go on Conan.’”
“Jesus, Dan,” I said.
“I know,” he said. “I’d stabbed myself in the back. When you have an opportunity, you better make sure it counts. The future really did look far away at that age. Now here we sit. I’ll accept any show that’ll take me. I’m still waiting on them. And waiting.”
Dan got up from his stool and grabbed his broom.
Life Goes On Without Me.
Seven years went by. I took LSD every day. It fried my brain. When I quit trying to become an actor, I lost my identity. When I lost my identity, I lost my job. When I lost my job, I lost the money to pay rent. When I lost my apartment, I became a male escort.
In Tropic of Capricorn, it says that a man succeeds in his forties. And Bukowski wrote that time is meant to be wasted. My grandmother—or my father’s mother—stayed in a hospice for her last days. She said life begins at forty. She could’ve meant my body would begin to crumble.
I needed to fill out a tax form on an overcast Monday. I needed to attend a job seminar. I needed to cut my hair. I should’ve bought groceries. I wished to keep from doing those things. I worked for eight hours on one page of a memoir about my father’s suicide. I called it The Long Drop To The Hudson River.
I entered Musso and Frank’s on a Monday night. The moon was full. A Moscow Mule cost me twenty dollars at happy hour. I was on the clock. Monday nights at Musso and Frank’s were gold. The restaurant crawled with divorcees. But when it was copper, the restaurant was filled with online dates. Since it was copper that night, I punched out after the third Mule.
A brick of cologne sat beside me in a suit. The top button of his dress shirt was undone. He wore sunglasses to show everyone his importance. He began to chew ice from his glass of Hennessey to get me to notice.
“How you doing? The name’s Carmine Alonso. Film producer. And you are…?”
“Paul Talisman. Actor.”
That was a lie. But I needed money.
He scooted in. “Hey, I’m not here to tickle your balls. I’m also a writer, a writer of poetry. But I need someone to write me a draft of a screenplay.”
Come to think of it, my balls began to itch.
“What’s it called?”
He arched his hands in the air like he was hoisting a marquee:
“Carmine,” he said. “Or Alonso. I haven’t decided. When you finish that drink, come to my house. I want to talk about the project.”
He lived in Shadow Hills. He made me drink to seduce me into writing his script.
I sat on his leather couch, facing a hundred-inch TV screen on the wall. A fireplace burned beneath it. He stood there, explaining the story:
“It’s about my time with the mob, see. And I got ties with bookies in the Bahamas. That should be included, too.”
I would’ve done anything for money. But involvement with the mob was dicey. “Am I right for this?” I asked.
“We met an hour ago, pal. But think about who you’re working with.”
“Yeah, but I need time to figure out the story.”
“I got to think about it.”
“Is it fear? You’re scared, aren’t you?”
“You’ve been drinking,” I said. “I want to make sure you mean it.”
“Look here. It was Confucius who said: ‘do what you love and get paid for it.'”
Those were not his words. But I pretended Carmine knew what he was saying.
“Haven’t heard from you in a month,” Carmine said. “We good or what?”
“We’re good.”
“You have a script for me?”
He flipped the pages in his living room, looking for keywords. He laughed and shook his head.
“Did you really read it?” I asked.
He sat on the couch with me again. But that time, he squeezed me. He kissed my cheek. “It needs a rewrite, darling, but you’re great.”
“What’s wrong?”
“It needs more blood and death. Why slit his throat? Give him a Colombian necktie. You following me?”
I followed.
“Now let’s get out of this robe. I’m taking you to celebrate.”
We watched his wife dance at Cheetah’s in Hollywood. Brody was the prettiest of all the girls in there. She was a twenty-five-year-old suicide girl. I kept my eyes on her until she looked at me. Carmine could’ve gotten jealous. He was thirty years older than her. It was obvious she’d married him only for his money. Her beauty overwhelmed me before she started talking. Brody was a racist.
“I’m from Wisconsin,” she said. “The people are nice and polite and everything. So where’s the respect here? They take forever to cross the street, and they do it on purpose and in spite. Have you ever had one of them give up a cigarette? Always bumming off you. No fucking shame.”
I nodded at her but took offense at what she said about other races.
“Do me a favor,” Carmine said. “I got an emergency call and gotta go. Get her out of here safe and sound, would you?”
I had to wait for her shift to end at four in the morning.
Brody said she liked older men as her clients. Older men paid their way to the front. It was no coincidence I liked rich older women, so we were perfect for each other.
“I went out with a CEO last night,” she said. “He bought me dinner, but I didn’t give him nothing. When he called me today, I skipped the callback.”
She’d said it with gaiety, too. It disgusted me.
“What do you look for in a man besides his age and wealth?” I asked.
“Men are utilitarian.”
“What do you mean?”
“They’re all dick and money, nothing else. Just get the baby and leave,” she said.
“So you want a baby with Carmine?”
“Did I say that? I meant theoretically.”
I hated her. It made me want her more. We kissed against my motorcycle. Her lips tasted like licorice.
Her tattooed beauty made up for her racist mentality. She lived by herself in a duplex in Mid City. She invited me in when I dropped her off, but I would’ve rather gone home and worked on the screenplay.
She had chickens on her bed.
“Why are there chickens on your bed?”
“Just push them away. They’ll leave.”
I stayed away from those dirty birds, so she pushed them away with her hands. They left through a doggie door.
Carmine was fine with Brody as an escort. But her cheating on him was where he drew the line. She chose whom to sleep with: caucasian men only. As a professional, I had to settle with what I could get.
Not only was Brody racist, but she was kinky. She snuck into my apartment one night with a ski mask, thinking I was sleeping. She tried to smother me with a pillow. When she hovered over me, I grabbed her throat. She liked that over anything else. She started moaning.
“What the fuck do you think you’re doing?” I asked.
She tried to speak with my thumbs pressed against her larynx. I knew it was her by her smell. Brody smelled like an egg sandwich. Besides, the ski mask couldn’t hide her neck tattoos. They were darker than shadows.
When I let go, she had sex with me with the mask on. The ski mask made her look hotter, more desirable.
Brody would roleplay scenes of sex crimes. We would creep on each other and act out a murder. It excited her. But when she went on racist rants during pillow talk, I told her to fix that.
One night, she texted me to come over. The door was unlocked, and the ski mask was behind a flower pot on the porch. It was the night of the Academy Awards. But that didn’t matter. We were acting out scenes of our own. I found the ski mask with a chef’s knife under it and picked them up. I pulled the mask on. Her neighbor passed with her dog and rolled her eyes.
Brody had planned it. I would show up at the time when she was taking a shower. She wanted me to creep from behind with the knife to her throat.
Our fling was copacetic until she stopped taking Seroquel. Brody was bored by the scenes we were acting out, so she thought of a new one.
“Set my bedroom on fire,” she said.
“Set your what?”
I smelled butane in the room.
“Go ahead. I poured the butane around my bed already. We can do it while it’s on fire.”
As an escort, I’d done things I wasn’t proud of. I’d used toys on myself. I’d done orgies with friends and neighbors. I’d dressed as a bear (she had the right costume). But pyromania was outside of my comfort zone.
“I think you’ve gone too far,” I told her.
“Are you calling me a freak?“
“Just saying…”
“What is it? You hate me? You think I’m a piece of shit?”
“Why would you think that?”
“You hate women, I can tell.”
“OK, now you’re trying to piss me off.”
She double-downed on her bipolar and threw a nail file at my head, a softball, a hair dryer. I dodged everything except for a bottle of nail polish. The bottle stung my right eye. I needed to run away before she would kill me.
The bruise lasted a week, going from red to blue to black to green to yellow. She called me every day and left threatening voicemails. That wasn’t roleplaying. She was going to tell Carmine.
I was getting phone calls at midnight, not from Brody but from Carmine’s goons. They said in my voicemail:
“You’re a dead motherfucker. If it’s tonight, tomorrow, a year, you won’t know.….”
I had to turn my phone off. Noises outside made me paranoid, so I slept in cheap motels, which were just as dangerous. Carmine scared me out of Los Angeles. Someone else would have to write Carmine Alonso.
I drove to Las Vegas and searched Craigslist for roommates—back when Craigslist was still around. I moved in with two female escorts. They lived in a two-story house in Henderson. Anyone in Vegas could’ve worked for Carmine, like chauffeurs—or ridesharers as they now called themselves. They wore Bluetooth in their ears. They drove black Escalades. They stood in black suits in one-hundred-degree weather, smoking cigarettes. They would stand outside my house.
I quit the escort trade and found luck at roulette. It wasn’t Russian Roulette. That would come later. My luck came at the same table.
I won five hundred thousand dollars on the night before Christmas. The casino tried to figure me out, but there was nothing to figure out except luck. The owner invited me to his office. He looked at the check before handing it to me.
“Consider this a check to keep you away,” he said. Another rich man had paid me off.
The five-hundred grand lasted me through another year. The money trimmed the days. That was the shortest year of my life. My roommates moved in with Vegas moguls, so I moved into the Luxor. I would order room service every night: ribeye steaks, lobster, and blue-label Johnnie Walker. The women must’ve smelled the lobster outside because they would knock on my door. I forgot their names a few hours after sex. Some things had never changed since being an escort.
Sooner or later, the fortune would run out. I used the rest of it to move back to California. At forty-four, I was worse off than I was at forty-two. Broker. More desperate. Looking for a real job. Looking for a haven. Looking for someone to stay with me. I was at my most impulsive.
I lived in a motel in Hawaiian Gardens. It was far from Hawaii and far from a garden. All those towns outside of Los Angeles were better off without names. When I was looking for roommates online, I read about a secret club:
ARE YOU DESPERATE AND WANT TO END IT ALL? COME TO THIS MEETING IN THE INLAND EMPIRE. CALL ME FOR DIRECTIONS AND MORE DETAILS.
NICK
(714) ###-####
Nick was a party clown from Riverside. The group met in a basement below a California Pizza Kitchen. Middle-aged men had come to play the other kind of roulette (as I’d said before). The password was AVOCADO.
Nick brought the revolver.
“You have to fully commit for this to work,” he said to us.
I believed I was. Eight others had shown up. A light bulb hung from the ceiling. Nick did kids’ parties and was also a licensed marriage family therapist. He said he sometimes wore the clown suit in front of his clients, depending on his schedule. He wore it that night.
Each man had to tell his story as they used the revolver as a talking stick.
“Please respect your neighbor and stick it in your mouth,” Nick said, “not at your temple.”
The stories they told sounded more dire than mine. The first guy said he smoked too much crack and ate his left hand. He squeezed his eyes tighter than his finger on the trigger. The click of the gun let the air back into the room.
Nick may have led the group, but he participated in roulette. He was fair. A long time ago, Nick held up a register. He shot a cashier’s leg at a Baskin-Robbins. The cashier stayed alive. The guilt over that night compelled him to become a therapist. But his wife was sick of his drinking problem, so she and his children left him. Now he was willing to end it. Someone would have to replace him if he lost, which he did. There was one bullet in the revolver. Everyone else got to live that night.
Russian Roulette was a good measuring stick of how bad we wanted death. We didn’t want to toss Nick in the river, but we had to.
Afterward, I spoke with Lenny. He was the guy who’d eaten his hand.
“Where do we go now?” he asked.
“Good question. I have to get a job.”
“What’s your background besides that escort thing?”
“Well, I act pretty damn well, and I wrote the draft of a screenplay, but what does that matter today or tomorrow?”
“Got any retail experience?”
“Plenty.”
He said he worked at a pet store in Monrovia. The gig paid closer to nothing: less than three thousand a month. But I could afford rent, utilities, and food with Lenny as a roommate.
We lived in Cerritos, the human landfill outside of Los Angeles. Lenny liked to watch TV. I liked to read books about writers.
One night there was a preview for Carmine Alonso. The film would premiere in a week. I asked Lenny to rewind it.
“Pause it at the credits,” I said.
The letters on the screen were too small. I had to get up close. The writer happened to be Carmine Alonso. Son of a bitch.
“Has it gotten worse?”
“Yes, it has. We’re here because of broken hearts,” I said.
“You never told me your story,” he said.
“I’ll make it brief. Henry Miller said a man hasn’t suffered until he’s been in love.”
“I was in love,” he said.
I told him about Brody, Shirley, Carmine, and my father. Lenny was the first person to know about them.