Chicken (6 page)

‘What in God's name is wrong with you?'

Then I plunge like a deep-sea diver into the Sugar Coma Ocean. I see the ballerinas, with their long plastic legs and sad stiff faces. They're desperate, pregnant, and virgins. They want to stay in my manger. I tell them I don't have a manger. I want to help. I just don't know how.

I lie awake with a thick layer of goop covering my mouth and throat like a mucus overcoat, a nasty black cumulonimbus cloud filling my head, and thunder clapping through the veins in my brain as a lactic sucrose hangover pulses through me.

K
RISTY WEARS
quite tight blue jeans and a very loose mechanic's shirt with the name
RUSTY
on her Immaculate Heart College breast. There's something so unrotten about her. So un-Sunny, Kristy's what I should be doing with my life, that's clear.

Stop. Go over and talk to her, my brain screams, which jump-starts my legs, which take me to Kristy.

‘Hah, Rusty! At radiator hose come in yet?' I smile like a cracker drawling at a crawdad hole.

She smiles. So far so good.

‘Yeah, but it's gonna cost ya …' Is Kristy flirting with me? I think she is. Then again maybe not. It's all so confusing. That's one of the things I like about the chicken work. It's straightforward. You give me this, I give you that. Badda bing badda boom.

‘So, uh, we're having a, uh … party …' I could talk all night if she was paying me for it, but when I'm doing it for me it's like eating taffy with no teeth.

‘Okayyyy … party? When? Where? Is this an actual invitation?' Kristy's funny.

‘Yeah, absolutely. Invitation, right, yes, Friday night, my house. Well, my roommate's apartment, actually, but I live there, so, yeah …' I can barely get it out.

‘Sure.' She smiles. Then she walks away.

This girl just buckles my bones. And she's coming to my party Friday night.

I'm the oldest. I was always the oldest. That's how it is when you're the oldest.

I spend my first years in New Jersey. My mother's two sisters have four kids each, just like us, and they live on a dirt road with a lake for a backyard where we spend weekends feasting at a long picnic table on cornonthecob and bangers, burgers and spotted dick, baked beans and Bless This Mess. We swim, we play ball, we have a real good time.

My mother and her two sisters are an inseparable three-headed bundle of child-rearing English immigrant Geordie lassie, finishing one another's sentences, sharing sibling secrets, and laughing in one girlie soprano.

Even their father parked darkly in the corner can't spoil it.

Not for want of trying.

‘Well, David, I want to congratulate you. Our client was very pleased. She'd like to see you again. And we have another job for you, Friday night, eleven, in the Hollywood hills … and this's a two-hour job!' Mr. Hartley's papa proud. I
am
a lover-studguy after all.

Then it hits me. Friday. Shit. Party.

‘Friday?' I don't sound all excited like I should.

‘Is there a problem?' Mr Hartley asks, surprised.

‘No. Friday … That's … great. Sorry, I had, um, a thing, but I can change it. This is great.
Thanks
…'

‘Okay, well, good. And I may have something for you Sunday, I'm just waiting for a confirmation. Any problems?' Mr Hartley's making sure my wig is not flipping. I like Mr Hartley. The man's a true professional. I'll never see him again, but I'll always remember that voice.

‘No, no, everything's… great.' I hear that coming out of me, but I don't feel myself saying it.

Mr Hartley gives me the four-one-one. Then he's gone.

Shit. Friday night. Kristy, party, two-hour job.

I can hear the gods laughing in the background.

Oh, what an exciting day it is. I'm four, and my mom and dad are taking me to Yankee Stadium.

I love the Yankees as only a four-year-old can: the Mick, all power, speed, and ease; Roger Maris, the tortured dark prince; Yogi, the swami, number 8, the symbol of infinity sitting on its head; the quirky lefty Whitey Ford, with the most American name in the world – Whitey – Ford; the melancholy, hardworking black catcher Elston Howard; the goofy support group led by Moose Skowron.

Today we're going to Yankee Stadium.

Kristy's in a flower dress, with little white socks and penny loafers that have real pennies in them. Seeing her walk in my door on this Friday party night reminds me of Sally from the first grade. Makes me want to ride my bike really fast up and down in front of her house. Or maybe I should whisk her into my shithole bedroom and kiss her all over and tell her I'll quit all my crazy shit if she'll let me be hers.

This level of fantasy grips me constantly. It's like my board of directors has walked out en masse, and everyone's running around like chickens with their heads cut off.

I can't walk over to Kristy too fast, or she'll know how bad I want her. On the other hand, it's ten o'clock, and I have to leave in forty minutes for my big two-hour job, so I can't play it too cool.

‘Hey, can I get you a beer, or a drink, or… you know, whatever?' I try not to smile, but I can't help myself.

‘Oh, sure. Cup of whatever.' Kristy seems to have no trouble smiling.

‘I like your dress. I have one just like it in my closet.' That one just eases out nicely. I have to leave in forty minutes. Everything tightens up. God, I want to kiss her.

I take her through the small hall that's crammed Paris-metro-at-rush-hour tight, and into the tiny kitchen swarming with Friday-night college party bees. I pour her a cup of punch. As the Beatles
sing about Mother Mary, and words of wisdom, and times of trouble, I lead Kristy into my roommate's bedroom. It's less crowded in there, and I sure as hell don't want her to see my nasty-ass hovel.

She sips her punch.

‘How's the whatever?' I ask.

‘Excellent. You're not drinking?' she asks.

Seems like the perfect opportunity to feed her my lame excuse about working tonight. But that might just put the kibosh on the whole thing. Maybe I should have my thirty-eight minutes of fun and slip off into the Lone Ranger night. Thinking too much. Just say something, for God's sake.

‘No, I got a thing that just … came up tonight.'

‘A thing?' She looks at me askance. ‘What does that mean exactly? A thing? You get more interesting all the time. What are you, a CIA operative? A heroin dealer? A hit man?'

The full irony of this will be revealed soon. Right now all I'm thinking is that this girl slays me.

‘Actually it's FBI, coke, and money laundering.'

‘Nice.' Kristy looks at me like now she really does want to know what my thing is. And I really want to spill my beans all over her. But I can't. My beans are locked tight in the cupboard, and I've misplaced the key.

‘Welllll…?' she asks.

If I don't give her some reasonable answer, I can forget the whole Kristy thing.

‘Oh, I have to work tonight. One of the drivers is sick. I'll be done by one or so. I didn't know about it until today; somebody got sick and they asked me to cover for him.'

Kristy thinks for a second, then nods. We talk easy, about nothing, really, just thisandthat. At twenty till eleven I tell her I've gotta go. I don't do it well. I want to kiss her. I think she wants me to kiss her, but I'm not sure. I'm never sure with her. I keep waiting for her to say, ‘Oh, just come over when you're done, I'll leave the light on.'

But of course she doesn't. In the end I tell her I'll call her, and she smiles in that incredible way girls who've just become women do. After that I leave with a limp in my hump and a hitch in my giddy-up to face the piper and blow.

Entering Yankee Stadium, I quiver with a religious ecstasy of the kind I imagine a young man who grows up to be a priest feels when he first walks in the Vatican. That awe at the vastness of God and the grandeur of man. That feeling of having found something profound and beautiful to believe in.

When I rise with my mom and dad, and forty thousand other Americans, to sing the National Anthem, my dad looks down at me and smiles.

I sit behind one of the pillars in Yankee Stadium, hoping against hope that Yogi will hit a foul ball I can snag. I love peeking out from behind the pillar at all that excitement, an invisible peeping boy.

Mickey Mantle slams a home run in the ninth to win the game and does the coolest limptrot around the bases, while America goes crazy. And I go crazy with it, right next to my mom and dad.

I limp for about a month after that, trying in vain to perfect that wounded hero Mick thing.

The Hollywood sign looks close enough to touch from the deck of the house standing on stork legs anchored into the earthquaky hill. It's just before eleven Friday night, and the air weighs more than normal as a storm gathers its forces off over the ocean and heads my way. It never rains in Southern California.

I'm trying to find my breath as I wait for it to be eleven o'clock. Trying not to think about kissing Kristy. Trying to see that hundred-dollar tip Georgia gave me.

Ring the doorbell. Stick your finger out and ring the doorbell. Stick it out and ring it.

Somehow the doorbell rings.

A white-skinned freckle-filled woman with long red hair, wearing a pink kimono, answers the door. She looks me up and down like I'm a side of pork she wants to carve up. I smile. She does not smile. Stop smiling! She lets me in.

On a long brown couch sits a jet-black-haired woman wearing a blue kimono, holding a rose champagne glass. A gigantic plate-glass window stares like an unblinking Cyclops eye at the City of Angels, twinkling its billion stars. Janis Joplin's singing my favorite song. She's already dead.

‘Say hello to the boy, Baby,' says the jet-black hair in the blue kimono.

‘Yes, Sweety. Hello,' says the redhead in pink.

‘Tell him where the money is,' says Sweety.

‘The money's on the table.' Baby points.

Two hundred-dollar bills sit butch under a fifty.

‘And there's another fifty if you play your cards right.'

I pocket the two-fifty. Hot hot hot.

‘Tell him to put on the outfit, Baby,' says Sweety.

‘Put on the outfit,' Baby says, handing me a sheer black see-through apron.

Okay, I can hang with that. I start to put the apron on. It's like a costume the sexy maid might wear in a wacky French farce.

Sweety and Baby whisper and giggle. My head gets red-hot, like when my dad shaved it too tight and I got sun poisoning of the scalp.

‘Tell him he has to take his clothes off before he puts the apron on,' Sweety says with moneyed condescension.

Baby translates.

What is it about seeing boys naked that grown women love so much? I wonder as I strip and put on the sheer black see-through French maid apron, the burn turning worse.

‘Tell him to polish the silver, Baby,' says Sweety.

‘Polish the silver,' hisses Baby.

I had imagined so many loverstudguy scenarios when I walked in here: multiple breasts; mouthwatering mouths; sixes and nines; slipping myself in willy-nilly. Polishing silver in a black see-through French maid's apron was not even close to making the list.

The customer's always right. So I stand there with my ass hanging out and I polish the silver, while out the corner of my eye I spy Sweety and Baby swallowing each other like two snakes.

‘Tell the boy not to look at us, Baby.' Sweety looks at me like I'm beneath scum.

‘Don't look over here!' Baby snaps at me.

‘I wasn't—' I start to say.

‘Tell him not to talk.' Sweety's from Money.

‘Don't talk, just polish the silver.'

Baby's cold on cold.

So I don't talk. I don't look. I polish the silver. And the thing is, the silver doesn't even need to be polished. It's so clean you could eat off it.

A Yankees game's coming on TV, and excitement bounds around the walls. I'm five. The living-room couch swallows me whole. The TV looks as big as a drive-in movie screen. The National Anthem starts playing, so when my mom and dad stand up, put their hands over their hearts, and sing the National Anthem with the crowd on the TV, I get up, put my hand over my heart, and sing.

A couple weeks later, I'm at Billy O'Connell's to watch a game with some friends. The National Anthem comes on. When I rise, put my hand over my heart, and start to sing, I'm drowned out by the roars of derisive laughter from Billy and his jackals.

I sit quick, burning, horrified at being exposed as an outsider. I never get invited back to Billy O'Connell's.

A red amoeba of hair spreads out over the blue kimono-clad lap of the jet-black-haired Sweety, who holds Baby's carrot-top in her hands between her legs, whispergasps, guiding the red head into her, left, then right, like it's her personal joystick.

I've been vacuuming a salmon carpet for about twenty years. I stare out at the storm over Hollywood. L.A.' s one big Friday-night party. There's even a party at my house – well, the place where I live – and Kristy's dancing with some Joe College guy, which is what I should be doing, as opposed to vacuuming this salmon carpet that's already cleaner than clean, while wearing a see-through black maid's apron, trying desperately not to look at Sweety and Baby giving each other women's orgasms.

I can actually smell them now, the whole room saturating with love snuff, causing severe muscle memory cramps, cuz that perfume is telling my body sex is coming, and my Pavlov dogs are panting, barking, and humping the air.

Earlier I dusted with a feather duster where there was no dust. I Windexed pristine mirrors. I scrubbed the heart of immaculate kitchen floor grout on my knees with a toothbrush, like some lame softcore Cinderfella.

It's all I can do not to walk over and try to get a guest shot in the Baby and Sweety love show. But of course I can't. I'm the houseboy, guest of honor at this week's meeting of the Man Haters' Club. I scowl as I clean, while these women feed on my misery. I want to trash the big folding Japanese screen, shatter the glass window, smash the vagina painting that's laughing at me.