Honeymooners A Cautionary Tale (40 page)

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Mary Mississippi and Jim
drove across town from the Great Highway to Mary’s loft south of
Market Street at the edge of the Mission. Jim placed his hands on
Mary’s softly swaying hips as in the drizzly air they climbed the
rickety outside stairs to her loft, which took up the entire top
floor of an old three-story brewery building. As Mary fiddled with
the lock of the big sliding iron door, Jim took in deep breaths of
air rich with the smell of freshly baked bread from the bakery down
the alley, and he gazed out over seeming acres of wet warehouse
rooftops that stretched all the way to the waters of the Bay, where
he spotted the dim outline of a ship making its way to the docks
in Oakland.

Mary undressed slowly as she
walked across the big room toward the brass bed along the far wall.
Her skin glowed pink in the pearly light that streamed though the
huge skylight. Mary lay back on the wide bed and opened her arms
and legs toward Jim, smiling that cute, crooked smile, the red hair
around her labia outlining an impossibly pink core. She bit her
lower lip as she watched Jim walk across the room toward her,
tossing his own clothes as he came.

As it turned out, Mary’s old
biker had had a dick that could put to good use not only a
dashboard but fender skirts and the grille of a Cadillac car. Hence
Mary truly got what she craved from Jim as she related all the
low-down, blow-by-blow details of the various dirty deeds she had
done to that old coot with a great cock and Jim spanked her bare
ass black and blue for her. What Jim reflected upon as he whacked
away at Mary’s cutely dimpled behind was that the one thing they
had always really shared was the craving of that fruit called pain.
In a nutshell, they were both fools for pain, Jim and Mary. They
were pure pain simple.

Jim flopped back on the bed
breathless, sweaty, his arms a ton of bricks. Mary crawled up onto
him. She licked the damp hair on his chest and sucked on his left
nipple. She buried her face in his chest hair and inhaled deeply.
—Boy, you have got to be the best- smellin’ man I have ever
personally had the extreme pleasure of smellin’. Sugar, what I
can’t figure out is if you’re this boy who may really love me like
he claims he does or if you’re just some sort of intrepid nooky
hound who fooled me good. Sugar, the time has come for you to shit
or get off the pot. Are you gonna move back to New York with me or
what?

I told you I’d be back in a
few weeks.

I’m not talkin’ about some
little bitty visit, boy. You know just what I’m talkin’
about.

I know what you’re talking
about.

How the fuck did I ever get
on the lonely side of love, anyhow? I know all about the crazy
road I’m on. I’ve been down it before. I figured I’d learned a long
time ago not to try to hold on to something I never had in the
first place. But I guess you never learn when it comes to nasty old
love. I don’t know how I got to be a goner over you. You are so
extreme is what I think it is. I’ve never met a man as hard and as
soft at the same time as you. You’re just so weird and extreme, and
also, I love how you smell. So what have I been to you, then,
sweetie, some kind of six-week stand? You still love her, don’t
ya?

You know I care for you. She
loves somebody else.

Fuckin’ care for me! You
asshole! You’re just one of those kinds of old boys who like to
fuck fantasy. I knew that about you right off. Well, I didn’t do
half the low-down, dick-suckin’ shit I told you. I just told you a
whole bunch of that shit for the pure sake of your boner. So who
does she love, anyhow?

Oh, really? You made stuff
up?

That’s the long and short of
it, you asshole. So who is he?

Just somebody, that’s who.
What wasn’t true?

Oh, a whole lot of it wasn’t
true.

What about the stuff with
Clay, for instance? The snowjob. That time he had you tickle his
asshole with his own toothbrush.

Well, yeah, that stuff was
true, I guess. Hey, you’re trying to turn the tables. I’m the one
with the big questions around here. You’re stalling on me, aren’t
you, boy?

I just can’t move back to
New York with you right now.

I know the score. I just
want you to know there were real, true feelings involved here on my
part, anyhow. All this wasn’t just some big fat joke to me. I meant
things and I’m real sad right now ’cause I know you’ll never leave
her. Not for me, anyhow. I’m real disappointed in how things turned
out, and most of all I’m real disappointed in you, Jim, I’ve really
liked being in love with you. Being in love makes me feel like a
million bucks. I believe in love. True love, too. I’m a sucker for
it. There’s a whole sea of love, and I’m just a little boat on it.
I was, anyhow. Now I’m gonna have to stop being in love, and I
could just cry my eyes out on account of it. I’m a real unhappy
girl right now, Jim, thanks to you. Jim, just don’t go making a
joke out of my true feelings. Don’t play this for laughs in some
old story. Please don’t do it. Give me that much anyhow, all right?
Show me that much consideration, will you, huh? Well, let’s go
ahead and fuck anyhow. I’ll fuck your brains out of your ears and
you just remember what you’ll be missing, boy. I just hope she
breaks your fucking heart. You got it coming, boy, big
time.

The Lights of Buenos
Aires

Ralph knew it was time to
get out on his own. He could no longer endure the endless
accusations and pain and potential violence, nor one more night of
Alice Ann’s efforts to raise the dead from this and a hundred
earlier lifetimes of turmoil. Ralph had had enough of Alice Ann
sitting at what had once been their diningroom table with her
space-cadet friends, talking in tongues, the room ablaze from
skull-shaped candles and musky incense smelling morbidly like
overripe roses and worms.

More than this even were the
criminal kids, who were finally totally out of hand. His daughter
had gotten that tattoo of a skull and crossbones above her right
breast, after all. Paco was back to weighing drugs on the kitchen
table, and Killer roamed the house freely. Ever since that night
when the boy had in a drunken delirium apparently cut off great
strands of his own long blond hair, he had taken to shaving his
head, except for a Mohawk strip down the center, much in the mode
of his latest hero and role model, that crazy character Robert De
Niro had played in Taxi Driver, full of hatred, sexual hang-ups,
and an affection for violence and revenge, after whom Ralph’s son
had decided to pattern his life. Most of all, though, Ralph had to
demonstrate to Lindsay that he was now a free agent.

He needed to be alone for a
few days is what Ralph wrote in the note he left Alice Ann. He
needed to get body and soul back together. He'd be in touch, Ralph
wrote in the note. Ralph took a room in a cheap East Palo Alto
hotel which had two narrow windows overlooking the Bayshore
Freeway. As he sat on his bed at night, smoking and watching the
endless traffic of people with places to go, Ralph could sometimes
glimpse an airplane descending from the dark western sky toward the
San Francisco airport. It would sink softly in the night as though
through liquid, its lights blinking in languid sequence, and Ralph
would fill with both an unspecified remorse for the past and
longing for the future.

Ralph had to use a pay phone
in the hallway for calls. Time after time he tried to get a call in
to Lindsay, but Jim always answered, and Ralph hung up. Ralph
called his old home a dozen times a day at least, let the phone
ring off the wall, simply to see who would finally answer, and when
somebody did, he would hang up. What Ralph liked best about his
little room was the small refrigerator which stood next to the bed.
When he woke up in the middle of the night confused and dying of
thirst, all he had to do was reach out, even with his eyes closed,
blindly, and open the door, and there was that cold bottle of
vodka.

One afternoon Ralph parked
his car down the street from the house and sat there smoking and
sipping vodka for over an hour, looking for the least sign of life.
When he was reasonably sure nobody was home, Ralph entered the
house and poked around. He examined the dirty dishes piled
precariously on the sink and reflected upon what their stains
revealed about the eating habits of a household to which he no
longer belonged. Ralph felt like some sort of archaeologist sifting
through the debris of a vanished people. He checked out the little
pyramid of butts in the ashtray on the kitchen table for evidence,
such as unfamiliar brands. He checked out the contents of the
refrigerator to see what they would reveal about the life of these
lost people. He drank directly from a half-gallon bottle of milk
and then poured the rest down the drain. He poured a bottle of
orange juice down the drain. He ate several bitefuls of leftover
Chinese food from cartons, and then threw the remainder in the
garbage disposal. He dumped half a dozen eggs down the garbage
disposal. He crammed lunchmeat and cheese, half a loaf of bread,
and a jar of Alice Ann’s favorite pickles down the garbage disposal
and turned it on and lingered there listening to that satisfying
grind.

The bedroom was as
straightened up as Ralph had ever seen it, the bed made, no piles
of dirty clothes. Ralph noticed that Alice Ann had bought new
sheets and pillowcases. In a sudden fit he tore the bed apart, left
the bedcovers in a pile on the floor. Ralph checked the medicine
cabinet in his and Alice Ann’s bathroom for evidence. Ralph dumped
all the toothpaste and toilet paper he could find in the house into
a pillowcase, and on top of that piled all the canned goods he
could carry, and forsook that place.

One night when the house was
closed up and dark, Ralph spotted a strange car parked at the end
of the driveway, a battered old Mercedes. When Ralph skulked over
to check it out, he saw that it had a flat tire. That could only
mean that Alice Ann and somebody, God only knew who, were off
together somewhere in her own rattletrap. Even he, Ralph Crawford,
was handy enough to change a flat, for God’s sake, Ralph reflected
with disdain. He listened with great pleasure to the hiss of freed
air as he deflated the Mercedes’ other three tires. He bent its
antenna into a question mark. He stood there in the dark driveway
breathless and looked up and down the street. A dog barked in the
distance and he could hear the faint hum of traffic from the
freeway. Ralph leaned against the car and smoked another cigarette.
He flicked the butt out into the driveway, its glowing ember like
the tracer of a bullet spinning through the dark. Ralph looked up
and down the street once more and then unzipped his pants. He began
urinating on the driver’s-side door handle, then raised his aim
and sent his golden arc streaming through the open
window.

And then one morning Ralph
found a for sale sign in the front yard. When he tried the front
door he found it was locked, something of a first. Ralph tried his
key, and every other key on his key chain, to no avail. He circled
the house, pounding on the locked doors and windows, and calling
out for Alice Ann, to no avail. Ralph’s next-door neighbor, that
nosy old goat, came out onto his porch and stood there with his
hands on his hips glaring at Ralph. Ralph ignored him, lit a
cigarette, and flopped down heavily on his front stoop. After a
time the neighbor went back into his house shaking his head, and
Ralph pulled out the pint he had in his coat pocket and took a
pull. What came to Ralph’s mind was that John Cheever story where
this poor fellow gets unstuck in time, where somehow in the course
of strange events one day the poor fellow in the story arrives in
the future only to find that he has no place in it. The poor fellow
arrives at his house after a day of terrible misadventures only to
find it locked against him, and apparendy long empty, and his
lovely wife and children apparently long gone. It was as though
that poor fellow’s future had vanished without a trace.

Ralph jumped up and ran over
to the for sale sign. He pushed it back and forth, jerked on it,
put his arms under it, and heaved with all his might. When he could
not uproot the wretched thing, Ralph stepped back and kicked it. He
kicked it until the board broke, and then he stomped on that
wretched sign and kicked it in the teeth while he had it down. When
his nosy neighbor came back out onto his porch, that perfect
asshole who would as soon call the sheriff on Ralph as look at him,
Ralph pulled his pint out for all the world to see. He waved the
bottle toward the nosy neighbor, then took a long pull. Ralph
smacked his lips mightily, then stuck out his tongue at that nosy
neighbor.

There came a day when Ralph
had about three bucks and some change to his name. While Ralph
shaved that morning, he mulled over his options. Who had he not
already borrowed from? His mom wouldn’t even answer her door. When
he heard the drone of a low-flying plane overhead, Ralph stopped
shaving and simply stood there looking at his wretched kisser in
that cracked mirror. What he wouldn’t give to be on some flight
out. Clean-shaven and wearing his freshest shirt, one which had but
a single coffee stain on its front, Ralph braced himself to face a
new day. He dribbled the last drops from his last pint into a few
cold swallows of yesterday’s coffee. He carried the cup and his
change out into the hallway to the phone on the wall.