Dead Boys (29 page)

“Let’s go in on a wreath,” I say. “Have it waiting for him.”

“Know what I mean?”

“This place.”

“Your old lady’s gone, right? We’ll have dinner.”

Two years ago Adam ran over a jogger and killed her. The woman darted in front of his Explorer, and there was nothing he could do. Even the cops said so. This was before we met. Someone who knew him then told me he wasn’t the same person afterward. One night while we were drinking, I asked Adam about that. “Of course it changed me,” he said. “I’d been waiting all my life for an excuse to fuck up.”

L
OUISE SHOPS OFF
a list, but I like to freestyle. When she’s out of town, I buy Whatever I want: sardines, Ruffles and onion dip, pot pies, quarts of Olde English “800.” They’re getting ready for St. Patrick’s Day at the store. Lots of cardboard shamrocks and leprechauns. If you believe the supermarket, we’re always celebrating something.

Only two checkstands are open, and both have long lines. I pick up the
Enquirer
. The woman behind me bumps me with her cart. I ignore her. She bumps me again. “Listen,” I say. She grimaces apologetically, all of her teeth showing. People often think I’m angry when I’m not. Something about me is too hard.

The days are getting longer. There’s still an orange glow in the west when I leave the store. A hippie asks me to sign a petition. I refuse, but I try to be nice about it. Moths circle the lights in the parking lot, heroic in their single-mindedness.

A
YEAR OR
so ago I had a problem with earthquakes. The big one seemed to be imminent. I couldn’t sleep, I couldn’t swallow. My health insurance would have covered a shrink, but there was no way I wanted those kinds of claims floating around. I paid for it out of my own pocket.

She was nice enough, and I liked her office. The lighting or the furniture or something was very relaxing. Pretty good for a random pick out of the yellow pages. I told her that I felt something cataclysmic was about to happen, and this was keeping me awake nights.

“Do you see yourself as being in danger, or others?” she asked.

“I just want to get rid of the insomnia,” I said. “I have to work.”

She set me up with weekly appointments and a prescription for Xanax. I never returned, though; I didn’t want to answer any questions. Her receptionist called once or twice, but I pretended to be someone else and said I was out of the country. Louise was traveling a lot then. I went through the pills in a couple of weeks. Three of those and a beer — what a tremendous buzz. In the end there was no earthquake and nobody got hurt. That was good, I guess.

S
OMEWHERE BETWEEN THE
restaurant and the titty bar, Adam tells me he’s going to kill himself. He’s driving because he’s less drunk than I am. First he gets quiet, then he says, “I’m never happy. I want to die.” We’re on Sunset Boulevard. Dreams have come true on this very street.

I take a deep breath and push it back out between my teeth. I didn’t realize we were that kind of people. I thought we were tougher. Adam laughs when I don’t say anything. He puts on his sunglasses. A song he likes comes on the radio, and he turns it up and yells, “This is my jam!” I have failed him.

Monday night is amateur night. Not really, but that’s what the sign says. We’re supposed to believe that there are all these horny housewives dying to take off their clothes for strangers. It’s cute in a way. Old-fashioned. Another sign says DO NOT TALK ABOUT DRUGS OR YOU WILL BE ASKED TO LEAVE. There are nicer places, but we like this one.

We sit at the rail. The only other customer is a Mexican cowboy who spends more time staring at himself in the mirrors that cover the walls than at the strippers. He’s got a beautiful pair of boots. The two girls dancing tonight take turns, three songs each. Whichever one’s not onstage when we order fetches our beers from the bartender.

Adam’s doing a thing now. Embarrassed about what happened in the car, he’s laying it on thick. He slaps me on the back, whistles and claps and throws too much money around. The dancers play along, illegally flashing their beavers and letting their nipples brush his face as he tucks bills into their G-strings and tells them he loves them. They lie, and we lie, and that’s how it goes. The cowboy leaves. He spits on the floor on his way out.

One of the girls is named Danisha. Sometimes she speaks with an English accent, and sometimes she’s Jamaican. She complains about the jukebox. “Too much ’eavy metal,” she says. When she dances, she looks me right in the eye while grinding her pussy against the pole, and she sits beside me between sets. “Buy me a drink,” she says. “The owner’s watching.” I’m having fun. This bar, this woman. It feels good to be in the middle of something.

I ask Danisha where she’s from, and she draws little circles on the inside of my thigh with her long, red fingernail as she answers. “Baby, I been all over the world. London, New York.” She keeps clicking the stud in her tongue against her teeth. Girls like her often wind up dead. Nobody claims their bodies. After an hour or so Adam gets tired of pretending. He twists his napkin into knots and frowns at his beer. “Let’s go,” he says. “Let’s get the fuck out of here.”

W
INDOW WASHERS ARE
working on the building next door. They stand on little platforms that lower from the roof like lifeboats. You couldn’t pay me enough. I wonder if they ever see anything interesting — people fucking, people fighting. Heidi taps on my door with a pen to get my attention.

“I brought doughnuts. They’re in the lunchroom if you want one.”

It’s not worth it. You never know who’ll be in there.

Donna is out today. Something about chicken pox or flu shots or chaperoning a field trip. I take her calls and sit in for her at a meeting. On my break I go down to the little store in the basement of the building and buy a lottery ticket. The girl who sells it to me wishes me luck. “Thanks,” I say, because that’s what you say.

New e-mail. A couple of ads: “See your favorite movie and TV stars in hot XXX action.” “Are you tired of working for someone else?” Adam has sent me a photo. I look over my shoulder before I open it, make sure nobody’s around. It’s a man who’s been run over by a train. Half of him lies leaking on one side of the rail, half on the other. I hate the Internet.

There’s also a letter from a girl I went to high school with. I didn’t know her well back then, but she got my address from my sister and now writes me about once a month. She lives in Alaska with her husband and a bunch of kids. The usual thing is she complains about her life, and I tell her to keep her chin up. Lately, though, she’s been fantasizing about having sex with me. Her letters make me blush. I asked her to send a picture, but she wouldn’t. Adam says this means she’s a pig.

Louise calls. She might be getting sick.

“Come home,” I say. “I’ll take care of you.”

“Probably not till Friday. It’s up in the air.”

There’s something cold in her voice. I play with the stapler on my desk, the paper clips. I don’t want to love her more than she loves me. We’ve been married six years, and I hope we make it to seven. She tells me about a dinner she had with her clients. Tapas and sangria.

“Where are you again? Seattle?” I ask.

“Denver.”

“Right, right.”

Heidi is at my door. They need me in the art department. I rush the good-byes and hang up. There is nothing for me to do but stand and walk down the hall. I’m full to bursting and empty at the same time, like the universe on paper.

I
OPEN THE
window and lie on the couch. Our apartment overlooks a school. A sneaky breeze clinks and clanks the chains on the swing set in the playground. It’s warm for March. About now I would usually read one of the magazines that are always piling up, but not tonight. tonight I’m not going to worry about what I’m missing. I turn off the TV. The moon climbs the palm tree across the street and sits there shining.

I’m thinking about my childhood. It used to be right there for me, but now there are so many blanks. A police helicopter flies low over the building, then circles, playing its spotlight over a house up the street. It makes a sound that I feel in my chest more than hear. I put on my flip-flops and go downstairs. One of my neighbors is standing on the porch, her hair in curlers. I didn’t know women wore curlers anymore.

“See anything?” I ask.

“I think it’s those Armenians.”

I shuffle toward the commotion. Four or five squad cars are parked in the street, doors open, light bars flashing, abandoned in a hurry. The helicopter is right overhead. Its sun gun paints the house pale blue and makes the shadows wobble, like a whole day captured in a time-lapse movie. I’m surprised that I haven’t been stopped yet. I start to cross the street to get even closer, but a cop steps out of the bushes and says, “Over here. Now!”

We are crouched behind a hedge: me, the cop, a bald-headed kid, and the kid’s two Chihuahuas. The cop closes his eyes, listening to a sputtering radio. His shotgun is pointed at the ground. I’ve seen the kid walking the dogs before. He tells me it’s a hostage situation. A man is holding a gun on his elderly parents. “They forgot his birthday,” the kid says. “It’s sad.”

I reach down to pat the dogs, and they lick my fingers. There’s some kind of flower smell in the air. The kid’s leg is touching mine. He’s shaking. Maybe he’s scared and maybe it’s crank. I’m not scared because I don’t care anymore. It’s a good feeling, like getting something over with.

Another cop joins us. He tells the first one to take us out of the area. I want something bad to happen; I dare it to. Electricity buzzes out of my balls and spirals up my throat. The Chihuahuas bounce at the ends of their leashes, pissing and sniffing, as we hurry away, bent double, and I glimpse the silhouette of someone standing in the doorway of the house with a gun to his head.

T
HE ALARM GOES
off at seven-thirty. I spent half the night running up and down a beach, searching for a place to throw away a broken bottle. “Toss it in the water,” said dream Adam, who looked nothing like the real one. The sand sucked at my feet, and there were bruised fish rolling in the surf. I find myself on Louise’s side of the bed, my head resting on her special pillow, the only one she’ll use. I once put the case on another pillow to test her, and she knew as soon as she lay down.

Some mornings I beat the guy in the next apartment to the shower, but not today, so the water pressure’s for shit. Looking at myself in the mirror afterward, I decide to grow a mustache. I shave everything but my upper lip. There’s not a word in the paper about the standoff. I go through it page by page at the kitchen table. If that didn’t make it, what else was left out? I hate to start a day wondering.

Someone has slipped Jesus flyers under the windshield wipers of all the cars in the garage. Big black clouds are piling up on the mountains to the north, but the rest of the sky is clear. The radio says rain by noon, so the wind has a lot of work to do. I stop for gas, and a homeless man asks if he can pump it. He’s not one of those funny ones. He stinks, and his pants are falling down. I give him a buck, but he can’t figure out how to work the nozzle. I tell him not to worry about it, keep the money anyway.

Donna calls me into her office. She’s wearing a denim shirt embroidered with Warner Brothers cartoon characters. Bugs Bunny, Daffy Duck. “Did you sign off on this?” she asks, holding out the proof for an ad I okayed for her when she was out one afternoon.

There’s an apostrophe missing in the copy: Yogurts finest hour. That’s the kind of thing I’m supposed to be concerned about. It’s difficult lately. I want to say, “Maybe you should do your own fucking job,” but I don’t. There are pictures of her children on her desk. I curse them instead.

The plaza is empty at lunch. The clouds have moved in, and the wind leans on the trees. I drop a potato chip bag, and it is carried off before I can get to it. The mirrored windows of the skyscrapers towering over me reflect the gray sky. Because of this, you almost forget the buildings are there. Birds sometimes smack right into them and fall to the ground, senseless.

I
EAT SALTINES
and Vienna sausages for dinner, sitting in front of the TV. I have a few drinks. The questions are difficult on the game shows tonight. The contestants sweat and lick their lips. We have surround sound. We have DVD. One day soon I’m going to bump us up to a plasma screen.

The phone rings. Someone says, “Sorry,” and hangs up. The bathroom smells like cigarette smoke. It comes in through the air shaft from the apartment downstairs. The lady with the curlers lives there with her husband. I can never remember their names. He’s on disability, and she’s a part-time dog trainer. They keep odd hours. “The kike came by today,” the husband says, his words drifting up the air shaft with the smoke. He’s talking about our landlord. “How do you feel about wood floors?”

I pause to look at a picture hanging on the wall of Louise and me standing in the snow. What makes it funny is that we’re in shorts and T-shirts. We’re wearing sandals. You take the tram in Palm Springs, and they haul you up a cable from the desert to the top of a mountain in about five minutes flat. The right time of the year, it’s eighty at the bottom and freezing on the summit.

I had to beg Louise to accompany me. We were on a weekend getaway. She shut her eyes and clutched my arm as we swung out of the station. Now and then the gondola shuddered, drawing gasps from the other passengers and causing Louise to dig her nails into me. Going from rocks and sand to icicles and hissing pines with such startling suddenness was like a dream. I was a little unsure of myself. What other amazing shit would happen?

The snack bar on top was full of kids in some kind of uniforms. Their screeches rose up and were trapped in the rafters. Louise and I hurried out to a deck in back that overlooked a hilly area where people sledded and built snowmen. Everybody was dressed for the cold but us. The snow was dirty, and rocks showed through. Big black birds sat in leafless black trees. Louise had a headache. She thought she might pass out. I asked someone to take a picture of us. I put some snow in my mouth. Louise shivered and started to cry.