Serenading Stanley

By
J
OHN
I
NMAN

N
OVELS

A Hard Winter’s Rain

Hobbled

Jasper’s Mountain

Loving Hector

Serenading Stanley

Shy

N
OVELLAS
The Poodle Apocalypse

Published by
D
REAMSPINNER
P
RESS

http://www.dreamspinnerpress.com

Published by

Dreamspinner Press

5032 Capital Circle SW
Ste 2, PMB# 279
Tallahassee, FL 32305-7886

USA

http://www.dreamspinnerpress.com/

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

Serenading Stanley

© 2013 by John Inman.

Cover Art

© 2013 Aaron Anderson.

[email protected]

Cover content is for illustrative purposes only and any person depicted on the cover is a model.

All rights reserved. This book is licensed to the original purchaser only. Duplication or distribution via any means is illegal and a violation of international copyright law, subject to criminal prosecution and upon conviction, fines, and/or imprisonment. Any eBook format cannot be legally loaned or given to others. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without the written permission of the Publisher, except where permitted by law. To request permission and all other inquiries, contact Dreamspinner Press, 5032 Capital Circle SW, Suite 2, PMB# 279, Tallahassee, FL 32305-7886, USA, or http://www.dreamspinnerpress.com/.

ISBN: 978-1-62798-192-7

Digital ISBN: 978-1-62798-193-4

Printed in the United States of America

First Edition

October 2013

For E.N., who gave me a chance to be what I always knew I could be.

T
HE
sign hung crooked atop the six-story apartment building. It read “BELLADONNA ARMS.” The sign was rendered on a rusty metal frame with old-timey neon tubing, and nothing looks tackier in the daylight than old-timey neon tubing on a rusty metal frame. Stuck in the dead grass by the front steps leading up to the entrance of the apartment building was another sign. This one was handwritten on a slab of cardboard and stapled to a wooden stake pounded into the ground. The lettering on this
sign was rendered in pink Magic Marker. It read “VACANCY.” And under that, this time scrawled in magenta Magic Marker and sprinkled liberally with glitter, were the words “TO APPLY PLEASE BE CUTE.”

The young man reading the sign turned away to take a gander at his reflection in the nearest car window, trying to see himself as a stranger might see him. In faded blue jeans, flip-flops, and Van Halen T-shirt, his reflection was not encouraging. He seemed to recall a trick once telling him he was cute, so that was encouraging as far as it went. Of course, the trick was so drunk he had ended up vomiting in his own sock because he couldn’t find a paper bag. Poor guy. Our young man took a half turn to check out the reflection of his ass. Yep. Still there. And still pretty much his best feature, or so everyone always told him. The pricks.

Facing the car window again, he licked the palm of his hand and slathered some spit over his cowlick, trying to make it lie down. Didn’t work. He figured the best thing he could do to improve his appearance was to remove his geeky black glasses and spit on them instead. So he did. Then he wiped them dry with the tail of his shirt and stuck them back on his head all nice and clean.

The young man’s name was Stanley Sternbaum. On this particular morning, he was twenty-two, stood five foot seven, had blue eyes and reddish-blond hair (with a cowlick;
two
actually) and weighed one hundred thirty pounds with a hard-on. Oddly, without a hard-on he still weighed one hundred thirty pounds. You’d think you’d weigh less, wouldn’t you?

He knew he should put on a few pounds. He knew because his mother told him so every time she saw him. But let’s not get started on Stanley’s mother.

For now, Stanley decided to stop staring at himself in the car window and take another look at the Belladonna Arms.

Did he really want to move into this joint? It wasn’t seedy, exactly, but it certainly wasn’t chic, not that this bothered him. Stanley wasn’t chic either. In fact the Belladonna Arms and Stanley Sternbaum seemed to have one spectacular commonality. They were both resoundingly dorky. The Arms, with its tacky old neon sign and dead grass, and Stanley, with his geeky glasses and recalcitrant cowlicks.

The Arms was built in the shape of a box. Perfectly square and perfectly centered atop the only hill in downtown San Diego. A scraggly eucalyptus tree standing at one corner appeared to be about to topple over from age and ennui. It must have been one of the first botanical emigrants to migrate its way up the globe from Australia. That one lonesome tree was all the decorative foliage the Belladonna Arms had to boast of.

Not that there wasn’t lots of color splashed around. The color came from the dozens of curtains dangling in the windows that overlooked the street. There were twenty-four windows on this side of the building in neat little rows, six up and four across. Stanley counted them. And every one of them had a curtain dangling in it. It was the gayest, gaudiest collection of curtains Stanley had ever seen in his life. And on this white-hot August morning, those curtains hung limp in their open windows like so many varicolored tongues panting for a breath of fresh air.

Stanley could hear Tejano music blasting through one of the windows. He couldn’t tell
which
window. Interspersed between the strains of Selena crooning her Mexican version of the blues was the wailing counterpoint of some Latino dude with no musical skills whatsoever, singing along in a god-awful screeching falsetto that made the hairs on Stanley’s forearms wave around like cockroach antennae. The invisible atonal singer also seemed to be operating a vacuum cleaner as he sang. The vacuum cleaner was actually more on key than the man running it.

Stanley couldn’t help but wonder if the singer was the one who sprinkled the glitter on the sign. He certainly sounded gay enough to glitter-bomb
something
every now and then.

And now that Stanley thought about it, the whole apartment building looked a little gaily Tijuana-ish, with its loudass curtains dangling in the sweltering morning air and the loudass Tejano music pouring out onto the sunbaked street through those multicolored orifices.

Stanley craned his neck to look at the neon sign overhead. The Belladonna Arms. He wondered if whoever it was who named the building had known the belladonna plant was actually poison, a toxic little fucker that could kill you dead in twenty minutes? Or had the owner simply thought it sounded romantically Italian, so he slapped it on his roof as a cutesy moniker hoping to draw in tenants?

Tearing his eyes from the sign for a minute, Stanley did a slow 360-degree turn to scope out the view of downtown San Diego offered by this one out-of-place hill Mother Nature had stuck here on the coastline.

To the southwest, Stanley could see the gray Pacific, looking still and somnolent on this hot summer morning. And just an eye flick to the left, he could see the blue sweep of the Coronado Bridge, connecting the city proper to Coronado Island. At that particular moment, there was a Navy destroyer, flags proudly flying, sliding through the water beneath the bridge, heading for a berth at the 32
nd
Street Pier, where most of the Navy ships resided between tours. Stanley saw every one of those ships from his vantage point now, with a hundred gray masts poking out of a hundred gray superstructures like a spindly thicket of dead trees.

Turning to the right, Stanley had a wonderful view of the San Diego skyline. Countless high-rises were scattered here and there, standing tall, reaching proudly into the cobalt sky as if eager for the sun to warm their waking heads after enduring the coolness of the coastal night. Some offered high-end office space and others offered high-end living space and every one of them was well out of Stanley’s low-end price range.

Next, Stanley’s gradual spin showed him the curve of a freeway, packed with cars at this time of day, the hum of which could be heard even here, half a mile away. Beyond the freeway, somewhere on the horizon, Stanley knew, the museums and prados and quaint haciendas and cardboard shacks of Tijuana sat perched, visible only at night, really, when the lights blinked on and the Mexican nightlife began to stir.

Stanley sucked in a great gulp of blistering hot air and wiped the sweat from his brow. Yep. It was a hell of a view.

Then he turned in the final direction available to him. East. At the very foot of the hill he was standing on sat the meandering complex of Beaumont University, a rather elite institution of higher learning that Stanley had long wished to attend.

With his bachelor’s degree in anthropology securely under his belt after four years at San Diego State, it was at Beaumont Stanley had chosen to chase down his master’s degree in archeology, specializing in Mesoamerica. He would also be pursuing several unit hours of fieldwork on archeological digs pertaining to local Indian traditions and had signed up for a series of lectures on the Cahokia Mound-Building Culture of the Mississippi Valley as well as the Hopewell tradition of mounds in central Ohio, courses unavailable at San Diego State.

The proximity to Beaumont University was, of course, the reason Stanley set his sights on the Belladonna Arms to begin with. Much to his mother’s horror, he might well add.

He could still hear his mother now, from that morning as a matter of fact: “Why in God’s name would you want to live in that hovel downtown when you can stay here in the condo with me? It’s not like I’m annoying or anything. And by the way, here’s five dollars. Go get a haircut. You look like a hobo. And where did you get that shirt? If I’m not mistaken, it was your father’s, God rest his philandering soul—or not, I’m sure it’s all the same to me. But that shirt is older than you are, Stanley. Here’s another five dollars. Go buy yourself a shirt too. And get something with a collar, for God’s sake. A T-shirt is not a fashion statement, Stanley. It’s fucking underwear.”

Oh, no. The woman wasn’t annoying at all. Plus, she cursed like a sailor. Fuck this. Fuck that. Which was okay, except when it was your mother doing it.
Shudder
.

After he finished shuddering, Stanley stood in the frying-hot sun in front of the Belladonna Arms and giggled. Only his mother would think he could buy a shirt and get a haircut on top of it for ten measly bucks. The woman lived in an alternate universe, and most of that alternate universe was centered around her only son, Stanley. Stanley loved her for that, he truly did, but after twenty-two years of smothering, it was time to come up for air. And that’s exactly what Stanley was doing. His mother no longer needed to pay Stanley’s college tuition, and one would think she’d be grateful for that. But no, she still wanted Stanley stuffed in her purse where she could get at him anytime she wanted, like her ever-present pack of Marlboros.