Budding Prospects

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Authors: T.C. Boyle

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PENGUIN
BOOKS
BUDDING PROSPECTS

T. Coraghessan Boyle is a native of Peekskill, New York. He is the author of the novels
East is East
(1990),
World’s End
(1987, Winner of the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction),
Budding Prospects
(1984),
The Road to Wellville
(1993), and
The Tortilla Curtain
(1995), as well as four short story collections,
Descent of Man
(1979),
Greasy Lake and Other Stories
(1985),
If the River Was Whiskey
(1989), and
Without a Hero
(1994). His fiction has appeared in most of the major American magazines including
The New Yorker, Esquire, Harper’s, The Paris Review
, and
The Atlantic Monthly.
He currently lives near Santa Barbara, California.

Budding
Prospects
A
Pastoral
T. Coraghessan Boyle

PENGUIN BOOKS

PENGUIN BOOKS

Published by the Penguin Group

Penguin Books USA Inc.,

375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, U.S.A.

Penguin Books Ltd, 27 Wrights Lane, London W8 5TZ, England

Penguin Books Australia Ltd, Ringwood, Victoria, Australia

Penguin Books Canada Ltd, 10 Alcorn Avenue,

Toronto, Ontario, Canada M4V 3B2

Penguin Books (N.Z.) Ltd, 182-190 Wairau Road, Auckland 10, New Zealand

Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices:

Harmondsworth, Middlesex, England

First published in the United States of America by Viking Penguin Inc. 1984

Published in Penguin Books 1985

20  19  18  17  16  15  14  13  12  11

Copyright © T. Coraghessan Boyle, 1984

All rights reserved

EISBN: 9781101573860

Grateful acknowledgment is made to the following for permission to reprint copyrighted material:

Bug Music Group:
Lyrics from “Semi-Truck,” by Bill Kirchen and Billy C. Fallow. Copyright © 1980 by Ozone Music (BMI). Administered by Bug Music.

Ice Nine Publishing Co., Inc.:
Lyrics from “Truckin’,” music by Jerry Garcia, Bob Weir, and Phil Lesh, words by Robert Hunter. Copyright © 1971 by Ice Nine Publishing Co., Inc.

Jobete Music Company, Inc.:
Lyrics on pages 8 and 9 from “Money (That’s What I Want),” words and music by Berry Gordy and Janie Bradford. Copyright © 1959 by Jobete Music Company, Inc. Used by permission. International copyright secured. All rights reserved.

MCA Music:
Lyrics from “Satin Sheets,” words and music by John E. Volinkaty. Copyright © 1972, 1973 by Champion Music Corporation, New York, N.Y. Rights administered by MCA Music, a Division of MCA Inc., New York, N.Y. Used by permission. All rights reserved.

Screen Gems-EMI Music Inc.:
Lyrics from “So Much Trouble,” words and music by B. McGhee. Copyright © 1952, 1978 by Screen Gems-EMI Music Inc., 6920 Sunset Boulevard, Hollywood, California 90028. Used by permission. All rights reserved.

Taco Music, Inc.:
Lyrics from “Beat on the Brat,” words and music by The Ramones. Used with permission of the publisher, Taco Music, Inc.

Viking Penguin Inc.:
An excerpt from
Death of a Salesman
, by Arthur Miller. Copyright 1949 by Arthur Miller. Copyright renewed © 1977 by Arthur Miller.

Zora Delta Music:
Lyrics from “Farm Blues,” words and music by Robert Williams. Copyright © Zora Delta Music. All rights reserved. Used by permission.

Printed in the United States of America

Set in Janson

Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

This book is for my horticultural friends.

Plough deep, while Sluggards sleep; and you shall have Corn to sell and to keep.

Benjamin Franklin,
The Way to Wealth

“Why, boys, when I was seventeen I walked into the jungle, and when I was twenty-one I walked out. And by God I was rich.”

Arthur Miller,
Death of a Salesman

PART
I
Preparing
the Soil
Chapter
1

I’ve always been a quitter. I quit the Boy Scouts, the glee club, the marching band. Gave up my paper route, turned my back on the church, stuffed the basketball team. I dropped out of college, sidestepped the army with a 4-F on the grounds of mental instability, went back to school, made a go of it, entered a Ph.D. program in nineteenth-century British literature, sat in the front row, took notes assiduously, bought a pair of horn-rims, and quit on the eve of my comprehensive exams. I got married, separated, divorced. Quit smoking, quit jogging, quit eating red meat. I quit jobs: digging graves, pumping gas, selling insurance, showing pornographic films in an art theater in Boston. When I was nineteen I made frantic love to a pinch-faced, sack-bosomed girl I’d known from high school. She got pregnant. I quit town. About the only thing I didn’t give up on was the summer camp.

Let me tell you about it.

Two years ago I was living alone. I woke alone, flossed my teeth alone, worked at odd jobs, ate take-out burritos, read the newspaper and undressed for bed alone. The universe had temporarily pulled in its boundaries, and I was learning to adjust to them. I was thirty-one. I sat at the lunch counter with men of fifty-one, sixty-one, eighty-one, slurped tomato-rice soup and watched the waitress. Sometimes I had dinner with friends, shot pool, went to the aquarium, danced to a pulsing Latino beat in
close, atramental clubs; sometimes I felt like a bearded ascetic contemplating the stones of the desert.

On this particular night—it was in late February—I stayed in. I was reading, absorbed in an assault on K2 by a team of Japanese mountaineers, my lungs constricting in the thin burning air, the deadly sting of wind-lashed ice in my face, when the record—
Le Sacre du Printemps
—caught in the groove with a gnashing squeal as if a stageful of naiads, dryads and spandex satyrs had simultaneously gone lame. I looked up from my book. Rain knocked at the windows like a smirking voyeur, small sounds reverberated through the house—the clank of the refrigerator closing down, the sigh of the heat starting up—the fire crackled ominously round a nail in a charred two-by-four. At that instant, as if on cue, the front buzzer sounded. It was after twelve. I gave the tube a rueful glance—zombies in white-face drifted across the screen, masticating bratwurstlike strings of human intestine—put down my book, cinched the terrycloth robe round my waist, and ambled to the head of the stairs. Insistent, the buzzer blatted again.

My apartment was a walkup on Fair Oaks, three blocks west of the Mission. The house was a Victorian, painted in six colors. I had four rooms, a deck, a hallway and a view. Before the intercom went dead, the signal had become so weak and static-jammed I wouldn’t have recognized my mother’s voice—or Screamin’ Jay Hawkins doing “I Put a Spell on You,” for that matter. I stood at the head of the stairway and pressed the door release, more curious than apprehensive, and watched three shadows dodge in out of the wet.

There was a flash of lightning, horns and violins shrieked and reshrieked the same tortured Slavic measure like a tocsin, they were coming up the stairs,
thump-thump-thump.
For one nasty moment I stepped back, cursing myself for so blindly buzzing them in—gray forms, strangers, junkies, Mexican confidence men—when I saw, with relief, that it was Vogelsang. “Felix,” he said.

“Hey,” I responded.

He had a girl in tow, her hair clipped short as an East German swimmer’s and bleached white. Behind her, three steps down,
a guy in his late twenties, wearing rubbers and a yellow rain slicker that gave off a weird phosphorescent glow in the dull light of the hallway. All three of them looked as if they’d jumped off the Bay Bridge four or five times: noses dripping, hair plastered, water dribbling from collars and shoes. Vogelsang was grinning his deranged grin. “It’s been a while,” he said, clapping my shoulder.

It had been two months. Vogelsang lived in splendid isolation in the hills above Bolinas, making money nefariously, practicing various perversions, collecting power tools, wood carvings, barbers’ poles and cases of dry red wine from esoteric little vineyards like Goat’s Crouch and Sangre de Cristo. He also collected antique motorcycles, copper saucepans, espresso machines the size of church organs, sexless mannequins from the fifties (which he painted, lacquered and arranged round the house in lewd, arresting poses), bone-handled knives, Tahitian gill nets and a series of cramped somber oil paintings devoted to religious themes like the decapitation of John the Baptist or the algolagnic ecstasies of the flagellants. Every few weeks he would descend on San Francisco to prowl junk shops, cruise North Beach and attend sumptuous mate-swapping parties in Berkeley. Norman Mailer would have loved him.

At this juncture, he maneuvered the girl forward. I noticed that she was wearing a delicate silver ring through the flange of her right nostril, and that her toenails were painted black. “This is Aorta,” Vogelsang said. I labeled her instantly: sorority girl cum punk. She was probably from Pacific Heights and her real name was something like Jennifer Harris or Heather Mashberg. She gave me a hard look and held out her hand. Her hand was as wet and cold as something fished out of a pond. I ducked my head at her and sucked back the corners of my mouth.

“And this,” Vogelsang was saying, gesturing toward the slickered figure three steps down, “is Boyd Dowst, a friend of mine from Santa Rosa.”

The rain slicker seemed to erupt in response, and a big bony hand lunged over the top of the rail to grasp mine. I was staring into the face of a Yankee farmer, angular, big-eared, eyes the color of power-line insulators: “Now living in Sausalito,” he said,
clawing at his dripping hair with his free hand. The other hand, the friendly one, was still pumping at mine as if he expected my fingertips to squirt milk or something.

I was barefoot, my bathrobe was dirty, the skipping record ripped at my nerves like a two-man saw. I invited them in.

Vogelsang strode into the living room, unzipped his sodden jacket and draped it across the back of a wooden chair, characteristically brisk and nervous in the way of a feral cat attuned to the faintest movements, the tiniest scratchings. He smelled of rain and something else too, something musky and primal. It was a minute before I realized what it was: he reeked of sex. When he’d arranged the jacket to his satisfaction, he turned to enlighten me on this and other matters, pausing only to produce a plastic vial of breath neutralizer and squeeze off two quick shots before launching into a monologue describing his recent acquisitions, touching on improvements to his property in Bolinas and the progress of his investments in the commodities market, and giving a lubricious play-by-play account of the urbane orgy he and the girl had attended earlier in the evening. He spoke, as he always did, with a peculiar mechanical diction, each word distinct and unslurred, as if he were a linguistics professor moderating a panel discussion on the future of the language.

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