The New and Improved Romie Futch (9 page)

BOOK: The New and Improved Romie Futch
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“And you swear on this hallowed square footage that the girl's name was Rocky Revels?” I said.

“Cross my heart and hope to die. Her name was Rocky Revels. She had a wondrous ass, bleached hair the color of polar bear fur, the pallor of which was heightened by her orange suntan. We were groovin' to Steve Miller out on her trailer porch, watching a meteor shower.”

“Aw shit, dogs,” said Trippy, for we'd started up on women again, our longing heightened by the late evening hour and our delightful reintroduction to inebriation.

Each of us had, stashed in the sacred cabinet of his chest like a nesting doll, some Laura, some Beatrice, some Lady Dulcinea del Toboso, beauteous beyond compare. I had my Helen, the face that
launched a thousand ships. Skeeter had Rocky Revels, a girl he did drugs with during the late '90s, who eventually left him to rot on a sagging sofa while she got her shit together and earned a paralegal degree. Trippy had Lady L, a DJ from Atlanta who'd interviewed Prince, a club hopper too sophisticated for the Trippy of that era, three shades lighter on the color caste hierarchy, suburb-bred and college-educated. He was a small-town hustler three weeks off a Greyhound when he'd first laid eyes on her dazzling form. He still carried her pic in his wallet. Would pull it out and raptly gaze. Showed it to me once and only once: a 1980s shopping-mall glam shot, immortalizing Lady L in a teal blazer.

He let me gawk for two seconds before snatching it from my hand.

“Part of the reason I subjected my sorry brain to this overhaul,” Trippy said quietly.

Al was more cryptic about his true love, shrouding her nebulous image in dry-ice fog. For weeks he'd kept her cloaked in the mists of abstraction—
pulchritudinous
,
incandescent
,
ethereal
—wispy as a succubus, until, tongue loosened by Pep, he finally revealed that his succubus was an incubus, one special air-bear named Will Jones.

“Your boo's a bo?” said Skeeter. “You gay? It's all good.”

“Not exactly,” said Al, who adhered to Foucault's formulation of homosexuality as a medicalized identity invented during the nineteenth century. “There's no such thing as a homosexual, only homosexual acts.”

“Bisexual, queer, trans?” said Trippy.

“I'm done with binaries, though I don't want to reaffirm their dichotomies with some lame attempt at deconstruction either,” said Al. “I'm just me.”

We were discussing whether or not maintaining straight identification while dabbling on the do-lo was heterosexist when in
walked Vernon Lafayette Hooper III, ne'er-do-well and squanderer of trust funds. A debauched prep from Beaufort, South Carolina, Vernon had spent a year at Wofford partying but never managed to grace a classroom with his presence, or even officially enroll. He'd blown his daddy's money on intoxicants instead.

“Greetings,” said Vernon.

Man boobs pressed voluptuously against the fabric of his lime polo. His plaid shorts boasted a chartreuse element. Like a broiled ham freshly removed from the oven and glossy with grease, his face burned above his green attire. Vernon's DTs were still in force, long after the rest of the
BAIT
crew's had subsided. He was still twitching, still had that clammy quality of a dude sweating out poisons.

I gave Trippy a look that said,
Should we share our Pep with this booze fiend?
And Trippy gave me one that said,
Let's keep cool and play it by ear at this present point in time
. So I smiled a fake smile and took a discreet sip of my drink.

“What's up, Vern?” said Skeeter.

Now, Vernon's replies were often long-winded, going above and beyond in the purple-prose department, intentionally cryptic, somewhat incoherent, but, for the most part, decipherable. Tonight was a different story.

“Gouty sniffles,” said Vernon. “Always already impervious, gleety, sleety, and bloated with testicular quintessence.”

“Say what?” said Trippy.

Vernon plopped down on the red egg chair with a sigh that seemed to go on and on, air leaking slowly from his puffed physique. He snorted. Crossed his legs. Squeezed them together and uncrossed them again, spreading his knees wide as though to air his genitals.

“The existential ylem of evil eely voles,” he attested. “Midnight precipitation of chthonic swagger. Hark! Mine bladder. Hark! Mine bonnets. Oozing into the Pleistocene.”

“I feel you, man,” I said, going along with Vernon's coy new game, thinking he was highlighting the uselessness of verbal communication, the slippage between signifier and signified. Which was cool. But still.

“Gerbilisms,” Vernon hissed. “Difficult to parse. Dirigible oblong peasant follicles in blooming obscene granite.”

“What's with the jabberwocky, bo?” inquired Skeeter.

Vernon didn't even glance Skeeter's way. He groaned with Shakespearean theatricality and pounced to his feet.

“Trollish and ecclesiastical!” he cried. “Tumid as rain! Geiger gravy in herniated perpendicularity!”

Strolling out of the lounge, Vernon mumbled something about the “ectoparasitism of baroque unshaven cantaloupes” while shuffling his strangely tiny feet, which were shod in ancient, tattered Top-Siders.

•  •

The next night at supper, Vernon didn't sit with the
BAIT
crew in the cafeteria as he usually did but, after piling his plate with nothing but salad bar carrots and croutons, plopped down randomly at a table of touchy roughnecks, which happened to include my dear roommate Needle, plus a few other meth-corroded bastards of his ilk. We could hear Vernon going at it two tables over—“the silly hegemonic dentistry of bioluminescent hominids”—in a breathless rasp. Meanwhile, Needle scowled, consuming his cheeseburger in grim silence while a couple of his fellow troglodytes tittered.

“Pantomimic regurgitations and pre-Copernican vicissitudes of elephantiasic lace,” said Vernon.

Needle actually growled, squashing a french fry with his fork.

“Zoological farthingales discombobulated by poontang,” opined Vernon.

One of Vernon's tablemates, finally recognizing a word he knew, hooted in appreciation.

“Phallogocentric gorgons of diabolical hirsutism,” argued Vernon, “silurid and whiskery with malicious obfuscation.”

“Shut the fuck up,” said Needle, who, I'm almost sure, assumed that Vernon was taunting him with scholarly riddles beyond his ken.

Language had become a touchy subject with Needle. When forced to spend time with him, I was careful to use the simplest diction possible—the syntax of toddlers, the grunts of Neanderthals—so as not to set him off.

“The quiddity of quidnuncs and squid,” ejaculated Vernon. Speaking louder, he went on: “Bamboozled by syphilitic logodaedalians.”

Seemingly unaware of his surroundings, he spewed words, mostly obscure Latinate polysyllables. His voice grew louder, more annoyingly rhythmic, a tad more high-pitched. By this point, Needle was clutching a plastic fork in his white-knuckled fist. Al and Skeeter had both risen tentatively from their chairs, sensing that some violence was afoot but not committed to thwarting it just yet. In the blink of an eye, Needle's fork prongs were impaled in Vernon's neck. French fries were flying through the air. The cafeteria echoed with Vernon's shrieks, the clatter of falling trays, the buzz of male voices crying out in what-the-fuck bewilderment.

There were guards, of course, haunting the shadowy margins of our cheerful cafeteria. And they rushed into the light, darkly uniformed, reminding us that this was no vacation, no summer-camp jaunt, but an institutional operation, hierarchically structured, equipped with surveillance cameras and a well-trained security staff in keeping with that of a correctional facility. And we were
just a bunch of thugs. We were low-life losers prone to violent episodes, each of us gridlocked into his particular subject position—race, class, gender, sexuality—squirming like some pathetic pinned insect. Kingdom, phylum, class, order, family, genus, species—the archeology of knowledge pressed heavily upon our socially constructed souls.

One of the guards put Needle in a headlock. Two others took Vernon's arms, gently lifting him as they guided him toward the exit. Although his stab wound trickled enthusiastically, it didn't appear to be in a fatal place.

And still he muttered, swiping absently at his gory neck. “Heliotropic hamadryas hurtling toward heinous hootenannies,” I thought I heard him say as he was escorted from the premises.

•  •

After supper, Vernon didn't drop by the Nano Lounge as he usually did. It was the same gang of four as the previous night, until Irvin Mood arrived to make it a quintet.

“What it is, youngbloods?” he said. “Who's got the skinny on Vernon?”

Irvin had been AWOL the previous night and all day that day. He was over a decade older than the rest of us—fifty-four—and occasionally spent mealtimes and evenings noodling some reggae-funk fusion on his horn, a process that had not been significantly enriched by his downloads, because, according to Irvin, the kind of bullshit lollygagging they stuffed our heads with didn't have jack to do with real art.

“My roommate was at that table with Needle and his jiggy crew,” Irvin said. “Told me Vernon got shanked with a plastic fork. Said he was jive-talking too much grandiose bull.”

“I'm pretty sure it was just gibberish,” said Al.

“I don't know, bo,” said Skeeter. “Maybe he's in deeper than Derrida, or James Joyce during his
Finnegans Wake
stage. Maybe we ain't advanced enough to decipher his shit—not on the first read, at least. Dude needs footnotes, marginal annotations, exegetical appendices.”

“Or maybe his brain just busted out,” said Trippy. “Stuffed beyond his cognitive capacity.”

“Jelly brain,” said Irvin.

“Maybe he caught a virus,” I joked. “And some kind of bug lacing one of the downloads is fucking with his hard drive, wiping out data, sabotaging the language centers of his brain.”

Every man in the room turned a shade lighter.

“Wack,” said Trippy. He glanced toward the security camera. He whispered, “How the fuck is it that with all the nights we spend in here tripping on dialectic, the concept of a brain virus has not
once
entered our discourse?”

“Maybe we been engineered
not
to think of it,” I said.

“But where would a virus come from?” said Skeeter. “If the Center rigs its own downloads like the contract says.”

“That's no safeguard,” said Irvin. “And not necessarily straight either. Even if they
are
using in-house bio components for everything, the actual data has to come from someplace, right? E-books, electronic indices, even the lawless World Wild West of the Internet, all of it converted from old-school digital into wetware.”

“Vernon was a freak to begin with, though,” said Al. “Never been good at a two-way convo of the collaborative sort. Thinks he's smarter than the rest of us because he almost went to college. Wears his white privilege on his oxford sleeve.”

“Totally,” I said. “Maybe his brain was always already too fried; no infrastructure for the data to stick to.”

There we sat, sipping our Pep like medicine, our buzz deeply spooked. I was pretty sure that, just like me, the others were imagining rogue nanobots wreaking havoc in their brains, GM amoebae running renegade, munching through neurons like Pac-men. I was pretty sure they also imagined microscopic parasites mutating, changing their function, releasing terrorist electric signals, and slurping up neurochemicals. Maybe, as we sat there in the Nano Lounge drinking our crunk Dr. Pepper, we were changing into new creatures: posthuman cyborgs with no self-reflexivity, dupes of the Power Structure, thoughtless patsies of the Matrix.

“Mucho wackoid,” said Irvin. “We got to find Vernon. See what they're doing with him. See if he's got anything solid to say.”

•  •

First, we swung by Vernon's room, where a poker game was in progress. Vernon's roommate, Frankie, held court, chewing a cinnamon toothpick into splintery goo.

“Haven't seen him since supper,” he said. “Didn't come back after he got shanked.”

“When did you start noticing his peculiar behavior?” asked Skeeter.

“From day one.” Frankie squinted over his cards, his lazy right eye caught in a mild tic. “Always been a weirdo. But two days ago is when he started up with the nonsense. Sounds like he's reading the dictionary.”

Next, we hit the infirmary, where Big Eduardo, a sprinkler-installation consultant from Vienna, Georgia, was getting an ingrown toenail looked at.

“I seen nobody,” he said. We checked the laundry facilities, the reading room, every nook and cranny where ice or vending
machines were stashed. We roved the dorm halls, knocking on the door of every last room, eighteen total, and asked questions. Nobody had laid eyes on Vernon Lafayette Hooper III since he got shanked.

“Should we hit up Barney Fife?” asked Skeeter, referring to the residence hall monitor who manned the dorm security desk, a fellow who vaguely resembled Don Knotts (a hint of comic panic in his bulging eyes).

“You know he'll just be evasive,” said Trippy. “And immediately inform Dr. M that we're sniffing around.”

“You think they took him to the hospital?” said Al.

“How about the
BAIT
Lab?” asked Trippy. “We haven't scoped that.”

So we headed downstairs, skirted past the cafeteria, and made our way through the eerie, empty halls toward the business end of the Center, the so-called Right Lobe, that warren of labs and cubicles where Dr. Morrow crammed our brains like sausages each day. The main door was locked. But when we pressed our ears against the reinforced stainless steel, we thought we heard rumblings, officious shuffling, muffled tech speak. We sensed the animal presence of human bodies. Huddled in an unlocked janitorial closet, we waited for almost two hours, slumped on the floor, breathing in disinfectant cleaner fumes. We whispered witticisms, sputtered with laughter, and devolved into scatological humor as we lost our Pep buzz, until, at last, we heard someone emerge from the lab complex and walk right past our door.

BOOK: The New and Improved Romie Futch
10.22Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads

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