Benchley, Peter - Novel 07 (15 page)

 
          
 
TWO ON, TWO out.

 
          
 
Bottom of the third (and last) inning.

 
          
 
Drunks 2, Junkies 1. And hadn't that caused an
uproar, who'd be a Drunk and who a Junkie. There were barely enough players to
make up one team, forget two, and Marcia—chooser of sides and coach of both
teams-could hardly put her three star junkies on the same team, not when one,
Crosby, had been the National League's MVP two years ago; and another, Twist,
had played high-school ball, could bat from either side and had the reflexes of
a spider; and the third. Hector, had in batting practice demolished one
softball and driven a second so far into the desert that no one could find it.
So she had assigned Hector and Twist to the Drunks. Hector hadn't cared
("Long as you don't trade me to the Homos, I don't give a shit"), but
Twist had rebelled, claiming that to be called a drunk was damaging to his
self-esteem ("A drunk got no self-esteem, he slobbers and falls all over
hisself, but a junkie, he got plenty 'cause he just takes hisself to a separate
world and leave me be"), and that had led to an argument with Marcia about
the nature of chemical dependency and the similarity of different addictions
("It doesn't matter what we call ourselves, our problems are all the
same"), with historical references made by Twist to great junkies
("Jimi Hendrix and John Belushi, they died like menThey didn't rot away
and puke thesselves to death") and Hector countering, "Dead is
fuckin' dead and it don't make no difference 'cause either way you don't get no
more pussy." Clarence Crosby had offered to give his place on the Junkies
to Twist, but Marcia had said no, it was a matter of principle, so Twist had
stalked off the field and declared he was "leavin' this fuckin' place
'cause there's discrimination against junkies" and he'd get the court to
send him someplace where junkies got a fair shake and didn't have to suck hind
tit to a bunch of scumbag drunks. The betting was that Twist would have packed
his bag and walked out of the clinic if
Preston
hadn't come up with the idea that perhaps
his roommate might accept the status of "guest star" with the Drunks.
Twist had liked the idea, he didn't really want to leave, everybody could see
that, but he couldn't give in so easily, so he had said no, he wasn't going to
be a star drunk for anybody, so
Preston
had
said how about if he was a "visiting artist" on temporary assignment
from the Junkies. That did it. It was probably the "artist" part that
appealed to Twist—that and the fact that the compromise had been advanced by
Preston, whom Twist had come to revere as the repository of vital and exotic
information about things like New York and the stock market and the English
language, even though Preston was a weakling and a lush, which didn't matter
because Twist had assigned himself the role of Preston's protector and had
vowed to rescue him “in case any of these assholes want to make you their
girlfriend or something," a circumstance that Preston regarded as about as
likely as the Parousia—but, whatever, Twist agreed to pitch for the Drunks. And
as
Preston
took the field—left and center field, to be
precise—Marcia had winked at him and patted him on the ass, just like Davey
Johnson congratulating Darryl Strawberry.

 
          
 
Preston
bent over and socked his glove and shouted, "No batter baby you can do it
no batter no batter blow one by him baby no batter ..."

 
          
 
From his station on the mound Twist turned and
glared at
Preston
. "You off your fuckin' feed, man? No
batter? This sucker hit thirty-two home runs las' year. He told me hisself.
Four a them off Dwight fuckin' Gooden."

 
          
 
Preston
hadn't bothered to see who the batter was: Clarence Crosby. He shrugged, waved
his glove, socked it again, called back, "Yeah, but he hasn't seen your
stuff. Sock it to him, give him the old dipsy-do, no batter baby no batter
..."

 
          
 
"This sucks," said Twist. He
appealed to Dan, who stood ten feet behind the plate as catcher for both teams
and umpire. "How 'bout you lemme pitch to this man, 'stead of all this
underhand sissy stuff?"

 
          
 
"No way," said Dan. "He's
already batting left-handed and cross-handed. He's handicapped."

 
          
 
"You say," Twist argued. "I
seen him bat lefty 'gainst John Tudor one time, blew the man away."

 
          
 
"Ratshit," said
Crosby
. "I can't hit dick left-handed."

 
          
 
"Yeah, well, dick ain't pitchin'
today."

 
          
 
"Play ball," Marcia said from the
sidelines. "This is therapy, Twist, not combat."

 
          
 
"For you maybe. It's my self-esteem at
risk here."

 
          
 
On second base, Priscilla took a little
dancing lead, faking a dash for third. She had closed her eyes and swung at a
puffball from Twist and had hit a dribbler down the third-base line. Butterball
had charged in from third, tripped on the ball and fallen on it. By the time
Thad rolled her off the ball and thrown it to Duke at first, Priscilla was
safe. The next batter, Cheryl, who was so tiny that it would have taken fiber
optics to find the strike zone on her, had walked Priscilla to second.

 
          
 
Preston
saw
the glow of perspiration on Priscilla's calves, and he wanted to run his tongue
along the curve of her muscle. He imagined the sweet-and-sour blend of smells
beneath her shirt—salt and Opium—and he wanted to climb in there and bask in
the scent. Stop it! Stop torturing yourself! These thoughts were
counterproductive, a waste of time. Worse: They were against the rules. Thou
shalt not covet thy fellow patients. Thou art all brothers and sisters in
addiction, and it is a sin to desire to park thy roger in thy sister. And no
matter how clever he thought he was being, no matter how cool and blase,
Marcia—the clinic's one-woman Thought Patrol—always seemed to know what he was
thinking. She had warned him twice. Not that anything had happened between him
and Priscilla, not that anything was likely to happen—"happen" being
the sly euphemism for the commission of the Deed of Darkness—but Marcia had a
nose that could sniff out fleurs du mal before they bloomed. And of course she
was right.

 
          
 
"Yo! Gloria!" Twist glowered at her.
"You hie your little ass back to the base there. Even think about stealing
on me, I be all over you like drool on a baby."

 
          
 
Priscilla scurried back to the base and stuck
her tongue out at him.

 
          
 
Gloria. Twist had bestowed the name on her
after their first hour together in group, after he had returned from a
forty-eight-hour detox in the medical unit. They had both been assigned to
Dan's section, which annoyed Preston because he was convinced that if he hadn't
made a fawning, mooning ass of himself over Priscilla on the night of her
arrival, Marcia might have brought Priscilla into her section (with Preston),
just for the clinical curiosity of seeing how two rich (by her calculations)
WASPs would interact in the caldron of the group dynamic.

 
          
 
During a three-week stint as a night watchman
at a savings-and-loan (one of twenty-seven jobs he had held over the past three
years), Twist had seen a TV mini-series called Little Gloria, Happy at Last,
about the agonies and travails of Gloria Vanderbilt. For him, it was like
watching a story about people from another galaxy.

 
          
 
But as Twist listened to Priscilla tell her
tale—mother descended from British landed aristocracy whose fortune sprang from
a fortuitous backing of the right horse in the seventeenth century (James II),
genteelly addicted to sherry and various prescription hypnotics, dazzled by the
dashing scion of an American shipping family (not-so-genteelly addicted to
sour-mash bourbon), young Priscilla sent to British boarding schools till she
was twelve, then, when her parents moved to America, shipped off to a
Connecticut prep school with an allowance of one thousand dollars a month
(grass.

 
          
 
Quaaludes and Valium available to cope with
the pressures of exams), then on to some horseback-riding college with an
allowance of five thousand dollars a month (cocaine plentiful to give zip to
sex and meaning to the unbearable emptiness of being), charge accounts at every
store in the continental United States, a trust fund larger than many municipal
budgets, on her own without anybody who gave a damn except to say "How
nice, dear,'' and finally latched onto by a squadron of hippies who gave her a
family in return for letting them live on her ranch outside San Francisco and
funding their catholic tastes, until one day, in a brief interstice between
coke storms, she saw a sheep giving birth and underwent some sort of psychic
revelation, as a result of which she drove her Range Rover into town and
staggered into her family's law firm (twelve partners and sixteen associates
who did nothing but tend to her family's affairs) and announced that unless she
was put away somewhere, she was going to hire one of her hippies to shoot her,
so here she was, despite her parents' conviction that this was a lot of
overreaction (not to mention bad taste) and their publicly stated belief
(reiterated and reinforced daily over drinks) that she had gone to a spa to
"get it together"—as Twist listened to all this, he realized that
Little Gloria, Happy at Last wasn't just a load of made-up shit; people from
other galaxies did exist and here was one right in the room with him, so,
naturally enough, this little girl should be called—no, way—Gloria.

 
          
 
Priscilla loved the nickname, loved the
acceptance it connoted. There was nothing threatening about Twist. He had no
carnal ambitions toward her (Hector had once leeringly hinted otherwise and had
had to flee for his life across the quadrangle, shrieking loudly that it was
all a linguistic mix-up, "I no say nothing about licking her, I say I bet
you like her, I’m espanish for crissakes! Help!"), for it would no more
have occurred to Twist to introduce Priscilla to Lawrence (as in Lawrence of
Arabia, his fond sobriquet for his member) than to try to fuck a canary. He had
no idea how teeny tiny people from other galaxies reproduced, but for sure it
wasn't by fucking. Twist regarded Priscilla (Gloria) as his pet. To her, he was
a dark angel watching over her.

 
          
 
"Yo baby you're an artist you can do it
throw him a masterpiece."
Preston
socked his glove again.

 
          
 
"Where did you learn that talk?"
Lewis called from his station in right-center field.

 
          
 
"Made it up. It's easy."

 
          
 
"For you."

 
          
 
"No. It's all bullshit. Try."

 
          
 
"Do I have to say 'baby'?"

 
          
 
"Say anything you want."

 
          
 
Preston
saw
Lewis blush as he composed the words.

 
          
 
"All right, honey, throw him one,"
Lewis shouted, and he grinned at
Preston
.
"Throw him a hot one."

 
          
 
Twist spun and took a step toward the
outfield. "Who you callin' honey?"

 
          
 
"Twist!" Dan yelled from behind the
plate. "Pitch or I'll call a balk."

 
          
 
"This is fun," Lewis said when Twist
returned to the mound, adding, to be sure it was okay to have fun, "Isn't
it?"

 
          
 
"Yeah,"
Preston
said. "It is."
Preston
paused, startled to realize that in fact he
was having fun. It was as if acknowledging the reality affirmed it. Fun
probably wasn't the point of the game. He was sure there was some profound
therapeutic purpose to it, like establishing community or encouraging the
breakdown of inhibitions. But screw all that. It was fun. "It really
is."