LIBERTY PANCAKES by Geoffrey Becker
I was hyper-aware of everything: my dad’s thick black beard; the uncomfortable, Danish modern chairs with black cushion seats that exhaled audibly when you settled onto them; the dark oil painting of a man in a hat and suit, some ancestor, staring at us from over the sideboard. I hadn’t thought ahead to dinner and now here we were. My mother was telling us about the trip her Feminist Forum group might take.
“Seneca Falls,” she said. “Or maybe Florida.”
We’d been to Florida once when I was little, but I had no memory. All I knew was that every winter, a box of grapefruits arrived from my great-grandparents, who vacationed there. Indian River, it said on the side, with a picture of a canoe.
“A trip,” said my dad. He was forty, a historian, expert on WWI, a quiet, conflict-averse man who took excellent care of his shoes. My mother, who had earned a PhD and now had nothing to use it for, was one week older. An aspiring writer, she stayed up all night typing at things: plays, poems, stories. She got up late, drank black coffee, left lipstick on the white cup. Many years ago, she’d been in a college production of A Doll’s House. I’d seen pictures. In a few weeks it would be 1974. She expected liberation.
I excused myself. I was four hours into my own trip. Through the kitchen, down four steps to the family room-TV area, then down a short hallway and left into the tiny powder room across from the door that accessed our two-car garage. I stood, hands gripping the sink, grateful for the silence. I was flickering like a bad bulb. Ed and I had each swallowed one purple barrel after school, right before band practice at Montcalm’s. Ed was fifteen, a year older than me, played bass, had shoulder-length hair and a girlfriend, Linda, with whom he had regular sex. He’d tripped before. I said I had, too, when I was hitching with Charly Sand back in August, but it wasn’t true. I lied about many things, including my age. I looked a lot older, and because of this I’d been skipped a grade in middle school (I was already in a multi-age classroom). Most people – if they didn’t know otherwise – assumed I was sixteen or seventeen.
The stages so far: Apprehension (the walk to Montcalm’s); Hilarity (rehearsal); Electric Mind Fog (the walk back home through town with my pulse racing and Ed saying “fuck me” over and over for no reason); and now, Interminable Bad Movie (possibly foreign). Band practice had been the funniest thing ever, like the room was filled with nitrous. We were in tears. “Wait,” Montcalm said, at one point, wiping his own eyes. “Are you guys high?”
“Nope,” Ed said. “What a crazy insinuation.”
Montcalm was as giggly as us just from proximity.
We all took a deep breath, the only sound for a moment the 60- cycle hum of Montcalm’s amp. “You still dating that Janis chick?” he asked me.
My face in the mirror was red, almost sunburnt; I looked like an Italian Renaissance portrait of someone with a skin disease. The walls were pink, as was the sink and the toilet paper roll. I washed my hands, dried them with a light-blue hand towel while looking at the small drawing of Provincetown that hung on the wall to my right, the work of my great aunt. There were people in the drawing enjoying themselves on a sunny day, rough sketches of them, jagged lines that somehow came together enough that you could understand what you were looking at, and in the distance the Pilgrim Monument.
I returned to the dinner table, where my sister was talking about something wrong with her horse. I had never seen this horse – it lived in the country, and she got driven out to take care of it a few afternoons a week.
“Thrush,” she said. “They will have to clean his hooves every day with an iodine solution.”
“That’s a shame,” said my dad.
“Thrust,” said my mother. “Lust.”
“Plush,” I added. We liked words.
The horse had been a gift from our grandfather in Connecticut. The main thing I knew about horses was that they were expensive to keep, and I was sure we were living beyond our means, with our new house, our new car. Our other animal was also my sister’s, a grey cat, Simon, who lived in her room when he wasn’t hunting birds in the yard. For a few months when I was ten, I’d had a puppy, but my mother had let him out in the front yard of our old house unattended and with no tether, so he wandered into the street and got hit by a car. He was a long-haired dachshund, from a kennel with papers and everything, and the rules were that when I was at school, he stayed in my room. But he’d barked and barked, and she got tired of the noise.
“Iodine shouldn’t cost much,” I said.
“He can’t be ridden for at least two weeks,” my sister said, enjoying the authority that came with knowing bad news.
“Is there garlic in this?” my father asked.
The red, green, and yellow stew on my plate vibrated in the candlelight.
“There’s shit in it,” said my mother. “How about that?”
I focused my eyes on the weave of my dark blue placemat, which ended in knots at the edge. We’d eaten off these mats my entire life, it seemed. I remembered playing with one when I was small, pretending it was a flying carpet.
“Could be some rain coming through,” said my dad. He took a swallow of iced tea. “It’s uncertain at this point. And of course, if it gets cold enough, that could turn to snow.”
After dinner, as usual, we all headed to our separate areas. Our new house was a split-level with a decent yard, built fifteen years earlier, and much larger than the bungalow we’d lived in before, with its cramped bedrooms and creepy basement where centipedes regularly invaded the carpet. My room was downstairs adjacent to the front door, small, wood-paneled, with a front-facing window. I could slip in and out without people knowing.
My sister and I settled in front of the television and watched a show about a magician that starred Bill Bixby. I couldn’t follow the plot, but I enjoyed the colors – we had our first color TV, now, too, a Sony Trinitron, and even stupid shows made for interesting viewing. I thought I was myself in another, equally unfunny show about aliens taking over the bodies of a suburban family. When it was over, my sister went upstairs to her bedroom and I retreated to mine, closed both doors, and did pushups until my arms hurt. I lay on the bed and opened my paperback anthology of science fiction short stories and tried to read, but the sentences bounced meaninglessly off my eyes and back onto the page. “Cabot stepped down from the transport.” “All religions had long ago faded from memory.” “My first voyage to Mars was as a stowaway.” I looked down at the floor. The carpet – a fake Persian – had shapes I saw as scary portals. I stared at the drapes, which were Colonial-themed, with liberty bells and cannons. My dad’s idea. They were something he’d have enjoyed in his room back when he was a kid, so he’d bought them for me. The dresser and night table were Colonial as well and smelled of wood stain.
I dug out my February 1970 copy of Debonair and flipped through the familiar photo spreads, the redhead posed in various ways around a ladder in an unfurnished room with paint cans and drop cloths, the blonde with the enormous breasts lounging next to a swimming pool. Nothing. The pictures might as well have been of cornfields. It’s speedy acid, the mutton-chopped senior who’d sold me barrels had said, and now it occurred to me that he hadn’t meant you’d feel it quickly, but that it had actual speed in it. So, I’d probably done two new drugs. I tried thinking about Janis, the strawberry smell of her hair, her taste when we kissed last Wednesday after school in this very room while supposedly doing homework together, the way her right breast had felt when I’d slipped my hand under her shirt at the matinee of Gone with the Wind the previous weekend. I want you, she’d whispered, and I’d been replaying the words ever since.
I turned on my radio, an ancient brown Zenith from my father’s college days, and waited for it to warm up. The rock station out of Philadelphia was getting interference tonight, possibly from Comet Kohoutek. I closed my eyes and watched patterns behind my lids leap and rearrange themselves.
***
I had a hard time getting through the next day on almost no sleep. There was also an incident in a stairway between classes where a greaser named Jonny Tkacs called me a freak and kicked me from behind, sending me stumbling into the wall. High school came with an almost constant threat of violence. With my center-parted pup tent of dark, frizzy hair, army jacket, red eyes, and general aroma of smoke, I was an obvious target. Six feet tall and 130 pounds, I looked, not unintentionally, like an R. Crumb character. I had a nickname, too, one I’d chosen for myself, Lucky, after the cigarette brand.
I walked to Nicole’s house, and we smoked her hash out of a zebrawood pipe. Nicole was the fattest person I’d ever met. Her dad was a policeman. My eyes kept shutting as I watched Oscar the beagle repeatedly lick his paw. Nicole and I had been friends since last summer when she’d cast me as the Tin Man in the Youth Theater League’s production of The Wizard of Oz. Charly Sand was the Wizard. I was looking for any excuse to get out of the house, even if it meant being in a play. We had gotten high together a lot, the three of us, in the parking lot behind the building where YTL held rehearsals. Sometimes, Nicole led us through Beatles tunes. She was a good singer and knew about harmony. That’s how I had first gotten to know Charly Sand, singing “This Boy” with him.
“Your parents still going to the shore Friday?” I asked.
“They are.”
“I need a place for me and Janis.”
“Cheerleader Janis? Go-o-o team!” Nicole took another hit, exhaled, coughed uncontrollably for twenty seconds, then rubbed her eyes and blew her nose into a Kleenex. “What do I get?” Nicole had dropped out of her first semester of college in St. Louis and was now biding her time until she could enroll locally at Rider, where she would study theater.
“What do you want?” I picked up the hand grenade cigarette lighter from the coffee table and flicked up a two-inch flame. I could never get over partying in a policeman’s house. The album finished, leaving us in silence.
“Why do you look half dead, anyway? And what happened to your lip?”
“I fell. And I was up most of the night tripping.”
“Get lost. Can you get me some? What are they?”
“Purple barrels. They have speed in them.”
She wore dramatic eye makeup and fake lashes, probably to draw attention to her face and away from her body. Her outfits were always the same: oversized, white, button-front shirts, and blue jeans. “Get me some,” she said, “and you can use the house. It will, in fact, be an honor. Mi casa es su casa. Think of it! Your first time!”
***
Charly Sand and I had run into each other downtown around noon on a humid Thursday in August, the last weekend before school was to start. An hour earlier, my mother had thrown open the door to my bedroom and yelled at me for practicing guitar, screaming, “Stop that noise. It sounds like dying mosquitoes.” She was still in her robe and without makeup.
“Why don’t you leave me the fuck alone,” I muttered. I stood and tossed the guitar – a $35 classical I’d been given when I was eleven – onto the bed and picked a random paperback off the bookcase and paged through it, making a point of ignoring her. Infuriated, she slapped me across the cheek. She’d hit me before, but I surprised us both this time by slapping her back. I did it with the hand that had the book, so what hit her was a copy of Steal This Book by Abbie Hoffman, which I had obediently stolen from a drugstore rack. Her eyes grew wide and there was a red mark on her right cheek. She started to laugh. Then, I replaced the book, pushed past her, and left the house, slamming the front door as hard as I could behind me. I didn’t know where I was going, and I didn’t care. Downtown for a slice of pizza made sense. It was lunchtime, after all.
Charly had just finished his own slice. He was headed west, he said, Gonna hitch. Wanna come? I didn’t even ask where west. I got my slice to go, on a white paper plate. The Wizard and the Tin Man, hitting the road.
Hitching proved miraculous. You stuck out your thumb and people stopped. Certain people, at any rate. We smoked fat, ragged joints with strangers in the back of a VW Microbus to the distorted sound of Crosby Stills and Nash playing through cheap, nailed-up speakers. We went to a showing of Beneath the Planet of the Apes, then slept on the floor of an unlocked church in Frenchtown, New Jersey, because Charly, whose dad was a minister, said it was always okay to go into a church. We made up obscene song lyrics and sang them at the cars that passed, talked about the rock opera we would write together. We didn’t even have a map. Our destination was St. Louis, to visit Nicole. A bearded guy in a pickup truck left us on a rural road that paralleled I-80 outside of Hazelton, Pennsylvania. “Best I can do,” he announced. “This is where you get out.”
“It’s cool, man,” said Charly.
And it was. We goofed around. We sang “This Boy.” We tried to do “Niagara Falls” (“Slowly, I turned, step by step!”). But I was tired, and this was a terrible spot. The few cars that passed by didn’t even slow down, and sometimes no cars appeared at all for as long as ten minutes. After three hours of holding up the cardboard sign we’d made still yielded nothing, I said we should turn around. I said I needed to be back for school.
“School?” Charly said. “You can miss a couple of days of school.”
“That and we don’t have money. And no one wants to pick us up.”
“Loser,” Charly said, and I could tell he meant it. “Chickenshit.” But unlike me he had no immediate place he had to be. He had either graduated or been kicked out of Landon Academy, a school in the area that catered to problem kids – I wasn’t sure which. Also, it had become clear that he had not told Nicole he was coming.
“We’re stuck in mud,” I said. “We don’t even know where we are.”
“Like that matters,” he said.
At a gas station phone booth, I made a collect call home and got my dad, who wanted to know where I was. “Pennsylvania,” I told him. “I’m headed home, though.”
“I’ll come get you,” he said. “We called the police. We’re worried.”
“I’m fine,” I told him. “I’ll be back in a day.”
We walked until it grew dark, then knocked on the door of a farmhouse where the family – a mom, a dad, two young daughters – fed us dinner and let us stay the night. They didn’t ask us questions. They even had a spare room with two twin beds. There was a picture of Jesus on the wall and one of those little girls with the enormous eyes. The air smelled vaguely of mothballs. Before we went to sleep, the mother knocked and brought us two glasses of milk and two oatmeal raisin cookies. We thanked her and ate them in silence.
“I’ll bet you wish you had a toothbrush,” Charly said, finally, like it was another failing on my part.
“I can use my finger,” I said.
In the morning, we had corn flakes and the father drove us to an access spot for the interstate eastbound.
“Don’t know how the hitching will be on a Sunday,” he said, “but good luck.” He shook both of our hands.
“‘For some have entertained angels unawares’,” said Charly in his Wizard voice.
We made it home in two rides, the first a real estate agent from Port Jervis in a yellow Ford Capri, and the second a swimming pool installer from Trenton in a blue Impala. He talked about Terry Bradshaw for a while, then put on country music and whistled to it. “I’ll drive you right into town,” he said. “I don’t care.” He dropped us off twenty yards from where we’d met up three days earlier, and we thanked him. I walked the mile or so back to our house. It was after dinner already. My mother stayed in her office. My dad said he was glad to see me. He said he wished I wouldn’t do this sort of thing. I took a hot shower and went to bed.
I didn’t see Charly after that. But a week later, he set out again, this time in a car he’d “borrowed” from his parents. He drove to New York – to buy drugs was the story I heard – and smashed into the back side of a parked maintenance vehicle on the Goethals Bridge. After three weeks in a New York hospital, he was transferred closer to home. Supposedly, he was out now. Nicole had been to see him at the rehab place. She’d quit school after less than a month. “It wasn’t for me,” she said. I’m a Jersey girl.”
***
Headachy from Nicole’s hash, I rode my bike uptown, picked up my papers and delivered them. As an experiment, I had recently stopped wearing underwear. The result was a certain feeling of freedom, but also considerable chafing.
I had the worst paper route in town, with only 30 customers, almost a third of whom didn’t answer the door when I rang to try and collect, so that not only was I out of the running for the incentive prizes offered to paperboys, I owed the company fourteen bucks. When I finished my route, I continued riding. I’d taken this job because I thought it would please my parents to see me working and being responsible, and to make up for the scare I’d given them. They seemed unimpressed. The Trenton Times was a bad paper, so maybe they were embarrassed, but there weren’t any delivery routes for the New York Review of Books. It was cold out and I’d lost my gloves. There was something else, too, an almost religious feeling left over from the acid, like I’d been scraped and repainted inside, like I’d been reborn.
I returned to the first house on my route and saw that the paper had been taken in. Same at the next. I continued cycling; I didn’t want to go home yet.
The business district downtown: Carousel Diner, Vito’s Pizza, Thrift Drug, the bank, the paint store, the Hobby Shop, the toy store where I’d bought my chess set with the badly made board. I saw everything as if for the first time. I passed Montcalm’s father’s office over T&C Meats. Mark Rosen was an architect. Rosen was Montcalm’s real last name, but Montcalm, whom I knew from Hebrew school and who had let me and Ed join his band, had invented himself a new name that he liked better. In the shop below, a muscular bald man in an apron wielded a cleaver against an ancient wood chopping block.
Through the front window of Liberty Pancakes, with its painted outline of a cracked bell, I saw Janis and Montcalm sharing a plate of pancakes, their faces pasty in the restaurant’s overhead lighting. They hadn’t seen me. They had sodas, too. Wholesome, like a date from Archie comics. Liberty pancakes weren’t good pancakes, but you could get them any time of day. I stood for a while, ghostlike, watching. Montcalm seemed to be doing most of the talking. The bus to New York rumbled past on the other side of the street, picking up speed with its loud, diesel breath. I thought how I could just as easily be on it, right now, reading a novel in the yellow light, or just watching the passing landscape, my nose against the window.
***
I saw Janis at school the next day, but she was with friends and in a hurry. I called in the evening after dinner and her father answered. “Janis?” he repeated, suspiciously. “Just a minute.”
My parents were upstairs screaming at each other, possibly about money. The phone was in the kitchen, but it had one of those extralong cords on it, so I could get all the way down the four steps to the family room and take the receiver to a relatively quiet corner, next to the sliding glass door that led to the back yard.
I waited. My reflection in the door anticipated me. It raised one arm and so did I. It stuck out a leg and I did, too.
“Hey,” said an unfamiliar voice. “What’s up?”
“Nothing,” I said.
“Me, neither.”
“Okay.”
“Not at all,” said the voice. “Dull, dull. Yawn.”
This was followed by a long pause, then the sound of something falling. “Hello?”
“Hello?” I asked. “What . . .?”
“Nothing,” the person said, and this time it was Janis. “It’s okay.”
“My friend’s house is cool for Friday.”
“All right,” she said. “Yes. That will be fine.”
She had to be careful, of course – perhaps her father was standing there. I gave her the address and told her eight o’clock. Then I snuck the phone back to its place on the kitchen wall. So what if she’d eaten pancakes with Montcalm? I was the one she’d made out with at the movies; I was the one she wanted. My dad’s voice upstairs was louder now, and it had an anguished tone, a way I’d only heard him once before, when he slipped on the front steps and dislocated his knee and an ambulance had to come for him. “That is bullshit!” he shouted. A door slammed. When they divorced, who would stay in the house? Would anyone? I took my cigarettes and slipped out the back door into the yard.
Another cloudy, grayish sky – nothing visible. Comet Kohoutek was officially a joke, all that buildup and then nothing. Sly and the Family Stone played through a window from the Hastings’ house next door. I pictured Hannah Hastings, now back from her first semester at college, the way I always did, in her bright yellow bikini, the way I’d seen her over the summer, through the gaps in our wood fence, lying out by their pool, her long legs extended and shiny with oil.
When I got home from school on Friday, my mom was angry for some reason and I worried she might attempt to ground me. I assumed she’d snooped and found something – the bag of weed I kept hidden inside the Polaroid Swinger camera her mother had sent me for my birthday, maybe, or the magazines under my mattress. I had two more purple barrels from the senior, purchased at lunchtime with money I’d stolen from her purse. I did that a lot – she never noticed. “Last of the batch,” he’d said. “Four-way windowpane coming next week. Stay tuned.”
I examined the flat people in the New York Times on the kitchen table, grayscale adults. Another crossword begun and abandoned. A dried circular stain from her coffee cup. International, I read. Doris Day. The silence was a string drawn taut. She put away the groceries, and in doing so accidentally dropped a head of iceberg lettuce that then rolled along the floor.
“Jesus goddamn Christ,” she said.
The escaped vegetable was somehow my fault.
I picked up the lettuce and carried it to the counter. It was surprisingly heavy, although not, perhaps, as heavy as an actual head.
“I got an A on my English paper,” I offered. “The one on Tortilla Flat.” It was true. I had Fs in Math and Latin, a D in Chemistry, and a B in Choir, but I was acing English. “I wrote about parallels to Arthurian legend and the Knights of the Round Table.” My mom only nodded, her hazel eyes plastic buttons. I knew she took pills because I’d stolen some. I wasn’t sure what they were for, but I’d memorized their names: Nembutal, Placidyl, Librium. Last week, working over her blue bathroom sink, I had carefully emptied the contents of two fat green Placidyl caps into a pill bottle, then refilled the caps as best I could with flour and replaced them. I’d sold this powder to a tough character named Mike Russo at school for three dollars. He tossed it back into his mouth in the boys’ bathroom, scooped some tap water with his hand as a chaser. Seconds later, his grin turned to an expression of panic and he hurried into a stall and puked operatically for thirty seconds. I’d had to give Mike Russo, who was eighteen and owned a motorcycle, his money back. Placidyl appeared to be a made-up name, a combination of “placid” and “idyll.” I wondered if I was the only person ever to have noticed this.
“Go to your room,” she said. “I can’t cook with you here.”
“Why not?”
“Because.”
“What am I doing?”
“Being here.”
I didn’t want to be around, anyway, but now I could pretend that what I wanted wasn’t what I wanted, and that I was just leaving to make her – my insane mother – happy.
As I headed downstairs, she shouted after me. “I’m not insane.”
After dinner – tuna casserole – I reminded my parents that I was spending the night at Ed’s house. “We’re going to rehearse.”
“Your performance is Saturday,” said my dad, rearranging the glasses in the top rack of the dishwasher.
“Exactly. We need more work.”
He extracted a coffee mug, peered into it, then put it back. “And these are middle-schoolers?”
“Thompson Park Middle. We’re even getting paid.”
“Very nice,” he said. “Paid is good.”
I biked to Nicole’s, checked to make sure her parents’ car was gone from the driveway, then rang the bell. A light-up plastic Santa was affixed to the door and there were plastic angels in the small front yard. I gave her one of the barrels, which she swallowed immediately. Then we smoked a bowl in the living room and went outside and scanned the cloudy skies.
“Is that it?” she said, pointing in the direction of a neighbor’s oak. “I think I see it!”
“Could be.”
She grabbed my hand and the two of us stood looking up for a bit. The truth was, I didn’t see anything. But I didn’t want to tell her that.
“I’ve got snacks and root beer and there’s a bottle of Popov. We have another TV in the basement. You won’t even know I’m here.”
Back inside, we listened to records. At 8:20 pm, Nicole pointed to the phone on the kitchen wall. “Call,” she said. “What have you got to lose?”
“And if her dad answers? What do I say?”
“Hang up.”
“I’ll wait a while longer.” In my jeans pocket I had one bluepackaged Trojan, stolen from the top drawer of my dad’s dresser. He kept a box of them right next to his stack of laundered handkerchiefs. When I was ten, because I had bad allergies half the year, he had tried to turn me into a handkerchief person, but there was no way I wanted to put one of those things back in my pocket after using it.
Nicole got chattier and chattier as the acid came on, pointing out that Janus the Roman god was two-faced, which didn’t necessarily reflect on Janis the high school girl. “Transitions, doorways, beginnings, borders,” she said. “January looks both forward and backward, right?”
At 9 pm, we turned on the Friday Night Movie, which was about a runaway train with a bunch of skiers on it, all convinced they were going to die.
“Oh, my god, this is the funniest movie ever,” she said, holding her pigtails straight out from the sides of her head like handlebars.
I got up to go to the bathroom. I noticed, not for the first time, how dirty things were: soap scum on the shower curtain and around the sink, battered-looking toothbrushes leaning against the inside of a plastic Flintstones cup like people on a hot air balloon ride, their brushy faces peering over the side.
Coming back down the hall, I stepped into Nicole’s room, which she had prepared for me with beige sheets that smelled of fabric softener. I lay down on the waterbed and stared up at her ceiling, the surface shifting noticeably around me. White squares, a water stain by the outer wall. A Mickey Mouse stencil over the doorway. I heard a rippling sound, like I was on a raft adrift on a lake. A cheaply framed photo of Charly Sand in his wizard costume sat atop the dresser.
I rejoined Nicole on the sofa. “Jeepers,” she said. “This movie is so bad. Fricking-A. What do you think, Oscar?”
Hearing his name, the dog got up off his towel and rolled onto his back.
We had a glass of root beer with Popov in it.
“I’m going,” I said. It was after 10:00 pm.
“You can’t. Come on. Pizza Bites? You know you want some. I’ll heat the oven.”
“I’m tired.”
“Her dad could have forced her to stay home. He could have figured it out. It might not be her fault. Or she’s working on a new cheer. If you go home, what will you tell your parents?”
“Nothing. They won’t care.” My mother would be upstairs by now, typing; my dad was probably grading papers.
“You gotta stay. I need a spirit guide.” She took my hand. “Check this out.” Nicole led me into her parents’ bedroom, where she lifted a pillow, revealing a revolver with dark metal and a wood handle. “Smith & Wesson, five-shot.” She pointed it at me. “Don’t worry.” She lowered the weapon. “He loads it at night, after he brushes his teeth. In the morning, he unloads it. The bullets are in the dresser, on top of his underwear.” She put the gun to her head, then returned it to its spot under the pillow.
We listened to her Bette Midler album. Side One ended with “Am I Blue,” and she sang along – she knew all the words.
“Nice,” I said. She could sing. “Did you quit school because of Charly Sand?” I asked.
“No. Why would you think that? I don’t give a sour grape about Charly Sand.”
“Me either. I mean, I’m happy he didn’t die.”
We sat there in silence, me imagining what it must have felt like to be in that accident and whether you’d even remember it at all, and her tapping her foot to whatever was going on in her brain.
“Jeepers. Fricking-A. Just go home,” she said.
***
Montcalm and Janis arrived for our holiday dance gig together, dropped off by Montcalm’s mom. Janis greeted me with a cheek-kiss. She was on a pure Montcalm high and it made her transcendently beautiful. She wore a very short red leather skirt and black boots that came to her knees. Montcalm wore a black shirt unbuttoned to midchest, a leather thong around his neck with a sea-shell pendant.
“Sorry, man,” he said with an apologetic smile.
The drummer Montcalm had found for us was a junior named Melvin with an Afro and freckles, and his T-shirt had a big blue star in the center. His younger brother, Reid, with shorter hair and darker skin, had brought his saxophone. These guys were good, and I was self-conscious about my guitar ability, since I’d only been playing a year and a half. Montcalm sang “Wake Me Shake Me” and “I Saw Her Standing There” and “Can’t You Hear Me Knocking.” At first, no one danced, but someone turned out the lights and a few brave kids ventured forward.
At the break, Montcalm and Janis disappeared together. Each had an arm around the other, and each had a hand in the other’s back pocket.
“I got herb,” said Ed, helpfully, patting the Sucrets can he kept in his front shirt pocket.
“No, thanks. I’m going to have a cigarette,” I said.
I went outside and then around the back of the building to avoid being spotted by the parents who were monitoring this event.
In the tiny playground area behind the building, I stood under a slide. After a minute a thin girl with long, straight hair parted in the middle and no coat on joined me. She wore a lowcut, sparkly black top and bell bottom jeans. “Got another?” she asked. One of her eyes was elaborately made-up, Clockwork Orange style. I recognized her as Julie Tedesco, Janis’s 13-year-old sister.
I gave her a Lucky and some matches, and after three tries she lit it, taking in a deep drag, then exhaling. Her ears, which stuck out noticeably, were pointed on top, like an elf’s.
“These are disgusting,” she said. “No filter?”
“They’re ‘toasted’. Whatever that means.”
She pulled tobacco off her tongue and flicked it. “I’ve heard a lot of bands. Kingston Road Blues? And Downtown Sheiks?”
“Yeah,” I said, although I’d only seen their posters.
“What’s ‘Beggar’s Velvet’?”
“You know the dust balls you find under your bed? It’s another word for that.” I’d found the name, which I was proud of, in the Dictionary of American Slang my parents had bought me for my twelfth birthday.
“Not under my bed. My bed sits on the floor.”
Julie Tedesco was telling me about her bed.
“If your bed is up off the floor,” I explained, “then dust accumulates under there. That’s the velvet. Aren’t you cold?”
She shrugged, then took another drag and blew a perfect smoke ring. “Blech. Sounds like ‘Beggar’s Banquet.’”
I’d never thought of this and found it embarrassing. The band name I’d come up with was almost identical to the name of a Rolling Stones record.
She moved closer. It had started to rain lightly, the drops tapping out a samba on the metal above us.
“Don’t feel bad,” she said. “My sister’s not cool. Not at all.” She dropped her cigarette and ground it out under her sneaker. “We can kiss if you want.”
Her mouth tasted of hot smoke. We stayed pressed tightly against each other, the rain stopping and starting on the metal overhead, for a full two minutes, stopping occasionally only to catch our breath. I figured the traitor Montcalm was kissing Janis, too, somewhere not that far away.
We took a break. Julie located a piece of gum in her pocket, unwrapped it, and popped it into her mouth.
“So, can I buy some acid? Frankenstein said you were holding.”
“Frankenstein?”
“Charly Sand? That’s what everyone’s calling him.”
I had one more of the barrels in my wallet, wrapped in tin foil, but I didn’t say so.
“I’ll pay you back, I promise. Three bucks? Four bucks?”
“No,” I said.
“Seriously?”
“I don’t. I promise.”
“I don’t believe you, but whatever. What songs are you going to play next?”
“The same ones we already did.”
She stared off into the distance, then turned and punched me in the chest.
“Ouch,” I said. “What was that for?”
“Bit of the old ultraviolence.”
She was an alternate, more volatile version of her sister, I thought, her own bright comet, skimming past Earth. “Should I call you?”
“You can try. My dad dominates the telephone. But give it a shot. Let it ring once, then hang up. Wait fifteen seconds, then call again. That way, I’ll know it’s you.”
We held hands for a few yards, before separating. The rain had stopped. She walked a few steps, then turned and looked back at me. “I play guitar, too.” She mimed playing for just a moment, then turned and jogged off. A group of other girls opened and assimilated her like some biological organism.
Beggars Velvet reconvened and re-played most of our songs, including “Jumpin’ Jack Flash” because it was requested for a dance contest. The real contest was between the dancers and us. My hands felt like they’d been run over from playing the same four-note riff over and over.
The gym lights came on. 9:45 p.m. We stopped, said goodnight, started to pack up. Worried parents rounded up their kids. Go Eagles, read the banner beside the ancient clock on the wall that peers out like a jaundiced eye from behind the cranked-back basketball hoop. The painted, chipping yellow brick walls echoed with voices and laughter. I looked around for Julie but she was gone.
I called home from the payphone across the street. After a while, my dad answered, sounding tired, and said he’d come get me. I waited outside with my guitar case and amp.
“Rock and roll!” a voice shouted nearly in my ear. It was Charly Sand, along with Mike Russo and another guy with a moustache I didn’t know. They carried beers and seemed wasted, although in his case it wasn’t just that. He was different. Charly Sand wore a long military surplus coat and had a cane in his hand. His movements were awkward and robotic, like important wires between his brain and body had been disconnected. “Didja get laid las’ night?” he said, loudly. “Hey, got a cigarette, Tin Man?”
I gave him one. Charly lit it with the vintage Zippo he always carried.
“Got anything else?”
“No.”
“That’s not what I heard. From our mutual friend.” He poked me in the same place Julie had given me the punch.
“Ow. Well, I don’t.”
“Check this out,” he said. He pulled a sword out of the cane and swung it a couple of times, the lit cigarette dangling from his mouth. “Errol Fucking Flynn.” He slid the sword back into the cane. “See ya ’round.” Charly and his friends continued walking in the direction of uptown.
It was colder now, the air damp and smelling like snow. I had to be up early in the morning for my Sunday route. I remembered the meal the family had served us in Pennsylvania: hamburgers, and fresh corn, and big, beefsteak tomatoes cut in thick slices as a first course, how we all had to join hands first. Charly had grinned at me from the opposite side of the table as if he were no longer mad, as if to say, Yeah, man, the adventure continues! Good people had opened their doors to strangers, fed them. There was grace in the world, and love. I had never eaten a tomato that way, and was surprised at how delicious it was, and how simple, a big red circle with salt sprinkled over it like stars.
Geoffrey Becker is the author of the novels Bluestown (St. Martin’s Press, 1996) and Hot Springs (Tin House Books, 2010), as well as the story collections Dangerous Men (University of Pittsburgh Press, 1995) and Black Elvis (University of Georgia Press, 2009). His stories have appeared in Beloit Fiction Review, North American Review, Ploughshares, Gettysburg Review, and The Best American Short Stories.