Random Acts Of Crazy (24 page)

Your Mama told you to watch out for me

Your God told you to walk away

Your Daddy said nothing, for he was gone

And you weren’t sure what to say

The night you found me, wandering and lost

Naked by the side of the road

My guitar shattered, my body bereft

You fought everything you were told

And the chorus:

When a naked soul finds you

You don’t have a choice

You have to stop and pause

You can turn away and never look back

But it will yank you back, because

Random acts of crazy draw you in

Random acts of kindness draw you in

Random acts of love draw you in

A hushed, glowing silence filled the room, couples leaning on each other, a few people holding up lighters like at a big concert, people swaying to and fro at the beat. My heart was in my throat. I was more naked right now than I had been two days ago when Darla found me.

And when I looked at her face as I strummed a few chords to give my throat a few seconds of rest, I saw all the random acts of love I needed.

Darla

Breathe. Breathe. Breathe
. Trevor was singing about me. About
us
. He had written a song for me.
For me!
Jerry’s turned into a wonderland in that moment, something so familiar and so surreal, for my favorite singer and the man I was falling for wrote me a love ballad and sang it – premiered it! – in our little local shithole and he wrote it for me!

Have I mentioned the part where he wrote me a God damned song?

Joe reached over and clasped my hand, our fingers intertwining. It wasn’t threatening; tears in his eyes told me he was moved, too, by Trevor’s song and seemed to be seeking some sort of connection, perhaps to spread the emotion around a bit. This was a loving, touching song that made the room change, made me change – made me feel like everything I’d experienced the past two days had been guided by the hand of fate.

Trevor felt it, too. And now Joe felt something that made him bridge the chasm between us, made him seek me out for emotional redemption.

Trevor finished the chorus and everyone sang it with him, the room filled with mostly working class shlumps all singing
Random acts of crazy draw you in
…. And when Trevor sang the last line, on the word
love
his eyes locked with mine, opening a thousand dimensions and tens of thousands of possibilities deep within, the roar of the cheering crowd and the scent of beer, aftershave and cigarettes fading out into a cloud of nothing but me and Trevor.

Joe squeezed my hand and smiled, his face so open and different from the man he’d been just hours ago. The room was like a lovefest, a happy, rowdy group of people I’d known my entire life charmed and impressed by a man I’d known for two days – and who I wished I could know for a lifetime.

Hot breath on my ear made my heart race even faster, my throat closing with the suddenness of Joe’s heated presence against my neck. “He’s right. Random acts of love draw us all in.” His thumb began to stroke the back of my hand, each caress like a tidal wave of nerve endings throughout all the newly swelling parts of me. “And you’re the random act of everything, Darla.”

Trevor began to climb offstage, finding Steve and giving him back his guitar. I saw the younger man talking excitedly with Trevor, and that made me choke up, knowing that Steve was learning from and even being a tiny bit role-modeled by Trevor. All these different parts of my life were touchstones in a never-ending (
I hoped, viscerally, suddenly, breathlessly
) game of tag, each person responsible for passing on another little piece of love and hope that would resonate through tough times, lending light in darkness.

Trevor

Darla.
I needed Darla
now
. The thrumming power of being on stage was like an aphrodisiac that made me love the crowd, but the lyrics I wrote and performed were all for her, and she was all I wanted now. Kissing that mouth and smothering her sharp tongue with my own, hands full of her curvy ass, our bodies smashed together and sweaty, grinding out the fear and the hesitation and the –

There she sat, holding Joe’s hand, his face next to her ear, whispering.

Two different Trevors responded, both devils inside me.

One said:
He’s stealing her
.

The other said:
You can share her
.

To this day I have no idea why I listened more to the latter, ignoring the former with such ease it felt fake, as if I were sublimating the thought because it was too hard to consider. Bullshit.

Joe let go of her hand and stood, and Darla threw herself at me, squee-ing like a fangirl. Her words were unintelligible but somehow I managed to catch words like
I can’t believe
and
That was incredible
and
Holy fucking shit you wrote me a song.

My legs were tired and my throat parched, so we squeezed into the booth across from Mike, while Joe wisely grabbed a chair from an abandoned table and positioned himself at the end. He looked at me with a cagey expression, trying to size up what all of this meant.

“You’re the naked guy by the side of the road,” Mike said to me as we settled in. I grabbed what I thought had been my abandoned beer and chugged it greedily, grateful for the lukewarm liquid to help my poor, dry tonsils.

“Yeah. I’m the guy in the song.” Darla squeezed my thigh and kept grinning. I loved it.

“No, I mean you’re the naked hitchhiker I picked up back in Albany.”

My jaw dropped. “What?” Darla stared at Mike with her mouth hung open. We must have looked like twins.

He laughed. “You were standing by the side of the road where I-90 and I-87 join, wearing only a guitar and something around your neck, sucking on a baby pacifier and holding a chicken under one arm.”

“A chicken? Like a rubber chicken? A rotisserie chicken?” Joe asked, leaning forward casually and propping his chin in his hand.

“No. A live chicken. I wouldn’t let you bring it in my cab – chickens can be nasty motherfuckers when they’re enclosed like that – so you kissed it on the lips and called it Mavis. Started crying and said you’d be back to marry it someday.” Mike completely ignored Joe.

“Chickens don’t have lips,” Darla pointed out.

“Don’t get technical. The man kissed a fucking live chicken and proposed to it in front of me, Darla.” Mike drained his water and the waitress popped in with a new one, as if telepathic.

“Marrying a chicken isn’t legal in New York. Not even Massachusetts,” Joe deadpanned.

“Not yet,” Mike added. That made Joe cough up half the beer he was chugging, his chest wracked by hacking coughs. Darla climbed out of the booth and began pounding on his shoulder blades. It didn’t help. Batting her away, he stood and hacked his lungs out, trying to get some relief.

The waitress cruised by and Joe ordered another Rolling Rock. Red-faced from coughing, it didn’t stop him from finishing what he had as he recovered and sat back down, except this time he slid into the booth, just past where I’d stood in case he needed help. Darla got in the booth next, turning this into a Darla sandwich as Joe made her and me squeeze in.

“Once you picked me up, did I say anything? Tell you where I was from and what I was doing?” Unfuckingbelievable. How the hell did I get from Sudborough to Albany? That would mean getting to I-495, down to the Mass pike, and out to Albany – about a 5-6 hour drive. And then to make it to Ohio by nightfall?
Wha?

“You were naked and crying about the love of your life. Hell, I thought
your
name was Mavis at first, but then you told me, with tears running down your cheeks and a straw hat that came out of nowhere covering your,” Mike gestured vaguely at my crotch, “privates, that Mavis was the best damn lay you’d ever had and how you couldn’t really talk right now.”

“Lay? I would never call it tha – and I don’t fuck chickens!”

We all burst into laughter, though mine tapered off fast.

“Chickenfucker,” Joe gasped.

Darla wiped the corners of her eyes with the backs of her hands and took a sip of a soda. “I hope you bought her dinner first!”

“And sprung for something nicer than KFC,” Mike added.

New round of giggles. Fine. Let them laugh at my expense. It wasn’t the first time. I just wanted to know what happened to me.

“Give the man a break,” Mike said, drinking the rest of his coffee. “He was prepared to make an honest hen of her.”

“Don’t egg him on,” Joe added.

“Maybe Trevor got on the road because he didn’t want to be cooped up,” Darla choked out.

“How were her breasts, Trev?” Joe sputtered.

That did it. No one could talk for three solid minutes.

“Alright, alright, simmer down,” I said to everyone at the table, pushing my palms down through the air in a quieting gesture. “You’ve all had your laugh at my expense.”

“Oh, we’re not even close to done,” Darla said. “We’re madly hatching more puns.” That started a new round of sputters and snickers. What could I do? I just shrugged and waited them out.

My body buzzed from the injection of power that being on stage gave me. This, though, was different, it was gentler than how it felt to play with my full band. Just me, a guitar, and a rapt, focused audience once I got over their initial skepticism. That felt good – that felt
great
, a victory you couldn’t quantify with a test, or a perfect social skills interview, or some sort of dry run through a law school internship day at the office where they were feeling you out to decide whether to let you join the team or not.

All of those things, now, paled in comparison to the fact that with my voice, with my presence, and with my music ability I had gotten an entire barroom full of people who wouldn’t look at me twice on the streets of Southie, to cheer for me. And it was all thanks to Darla. No way was I going to get up on that stage and she chided me, nudged me, practically blackmailed me. As we sat there, my body half in the booth, my leg pointing out, my whole left side pressed up against her body, Joe on the inside looking loose, a little drunk, and very, very calm.

A crack inside me widened. On one side, there was the person that my parents insisted that I had to become and on the other side, there was the person my soul was begging me to let loose. In the middle, that crack, that’s where Darla stood, pushing as hard as possible on either edge. At some point, though, she’d falter and slip down so I needed to make a decision damn fast so I could pull her out and rescue her the way that she was rescuing me.

I had had enough of this chicken talk, though. “I did not fuck a chicken,” I declared.

“How do you know? You have no memory of anything,” Mike challenged.

“I just know I would never fuck a chicken. It’s not even biologically possible!”

“I didn’t see scratches anywhere on his hips,” Darla added. Mike narrowed his eyes and she smiled wider, raising her eyebrows.

“Because I don’t fuck chickens!” Now I was getting mad and desperate, turning to Darla with a deep plea inside me that she know that I’m not a hen fucker. “You believe me, right? I just wouldn’t.” A shudder ran through me, disgust and anger and a tinge of fear in there.

“Let me get back to my story,” Mike insisted. He was definitely sobering up while Joe polished off his beer and ordered yet another one. I decided to switch to soda like Darla because if that BMW could be fixed tonight somebody would have to drive, and no way was it going to be Joe at this point.

“Leaving Mavis behind, possibly pregnant and a disgraced chick – ” Mike’s statement couldn’t go unchallenged.

“Pregnant!” I shouted.

Joe came to my rescue. Or so I thought, at first. “Trevor would never do that!” he insisted.

“Right!” I charged.

“He would use a condom,” Joe added. A sucker punch to the throat was the least he deserved, but he used Darla as a human shield. Asshole.

“ – was just the beginning of picking up Trevor here,” Mike said, smirking.

“So what happened next?” Darla asked, nudging me. I hated everyone at the table right now, with the exception of her.

“Well, we got back on the road and I told you that I was going all the way to Chicago.” Mike looked at Darla and said, “You know, that long New York to Chicago route they got me on sometimes.”

She nodded. “So I was coming up New York from the city and I hit that juncture and found you and I told you I’m going to Chicago when you asked me where I was going and you said….well, actually, you didn’t say it. You started singing it. Some song about Old Lady Leary and a lantern?”

“
Old Lady Leary left the lantern in her shed
,” Joe sang, cackling. Oh, man, he had a lot of beers in him.

“Yeah, that one,” Mike pointed, nodding. “And then I told you that’s as far as I can take you and please don’t get any body fluids on my seat. You let me give you a towel which you put under your ass, leaving your body completely naked, not understanding at all what I was asking you to do but I did appreciate that you were polite enough to make sure that no fluids got on my seat.”

Darla started shaking with silent laughter, making her chest bob and my body bounce a bit too; it was simultaneously annoying and erotic. I tried to focus on Mike, licking my lips which were dry. I drank most of my glass of water and the waitress came over with a pitcher, filling everyone’s cups sloppily, little puddles of water now dotting the scarred tabletop.

Mike clearly enjoyed his audience and he continued. “So, we got through Syracuse, headed into Erie and that’s when you announced you were hungry. Now, I could tell you had nothing on, completely barefoot, had some straw hat, a collar and a guitar…that was it. Any money you had was pretty much in the form of Mavis, which you might have been able to trade for a cup of coffee and a sandwich somewhere so not only did I make you give up the love of your life back there in Albany but I also made you lose your only form of currency.”

“Was it a German chicken?” Joe asked.

“What?” I turned to him.

“Because maybe if it was a German chicken you could have gotten deutsch-bwaks for it.”

We all groaned. “That was really bad.”

“I know,” he laughed.

“No, that was really
bad
, Son,” Mike said and cut his eyes back to me and Darla. “In Erie we stopped at a truck stop and got you a grilled cheese sandwich with thousand island dressing and Maraschino cherries.” That made me gag. Darla made a gurgling sound in her throat and Joe was blissfully unaware.

“Maraschino cherries and Thousand Island dressing?” Darla asked me. “Ew!”

“I don’t remember it.” My stomach chose that moment to growl, which made everybody chuckle again. I guess my stomach liked it.