Pat Boone Fan Club (9 page)

Galveston Island Breakdown

Some Directions

The Neon Penises of Galveston, Texas

Fall in love with a man who drives a blue Chevy convertible.

You and he—along with his wife and a group of friends—are dancing at the Kon Tiki, a gay bar just off The Strand, across the street from the apartment you share with your husband. You’re here because the Kon Tiki has the best disco music, the best dance floor: clear Lucite underlit with neon penises. They flash on. They flash off. Red, green, blue penises strobe to the beat. “Stayin’ Alive.” Tonight, caught in the melodrama of the moment, you think,
The penises strobe in time to the
aching
beat
. Or, better yet,
The
aching
penises strobe in time to the beat
. This amuses you. Of course, you’ve been drinking Seven and Sevens all night long, you, in your jivy platform sandals, cutoff jeans, polyester tank top. You’re also celebrating April fourteenth, your birthday, your husband out of town on business.

Don’t consider that marriage—blue Chevy convertible’s or yours—an impediment to falling in love. Especially here on the Gulf Coast past midnight, just drunk enough to believe he dances like John Travolta in
Saturday Night Fever
, a movie you’ve seen upwards of twelve times. Thirteen times. Since in your present condition nothing is an impediment, slither against blue-convertible man during a slow number. Whisper “let’s fuck” into his ear.

When these two short words—
let’s fuck
—slam together, blue-convertible man ditches his wife for you.

You and he drive thirty-two miles to the west end of Galveston Island—with a bottle of Seagram’s to go. The convertible top is down. Music from
KILE
blares on the radio. You cross the San Luis Pass bridge, cruising the curve of the Gulf Coast, distant towns lit like radioactive dust. He stops in Matagorda, the Paradise Motel, its neon rendition of paradise consisting of a palm, a seagull, a sun.
You
have read
Paradise Lost
(or at least the Cliffs Notes). He’s maybe read
Jonathan Livingston Seagull
. Or
Love Story
. Or at least seen the movie. But why
can’t
paradise be neon palms, seagulls, suns? Why can’t paradise be the strobe of neon penises? Why can’t it be a motel room with humid sheets?

In fact, why can’t paradise, why can’t love, be like Sylvester Stallone’s line from
Rocky
since, right before you fall asleep, blue-convertible man whispers, “I’ve got gaps. You’ve got gaps. Together, we fill each other’s gaps.”

Don’t dwell on exactly what each other’s gaps are. Tonight, your synapses crackling from the fire of alcohol, you’re sure your gaps are manageable. It’s only later you realize your gaps are gaping.

When the weekend is over and he returns to his wife, counsel yourself:
This love of your life lasted less time than you spent alone in the movie theater watching John Travolta dance.

Dancing the Quadriplegic Two-Step

By May, alone, answer an ad in the
Galveston Daily News
for a furnished apartment. Drive your un-air-conditioned green Volkswagen bug to a Victorian house on Market Street. Paint peels from loosely hinged shutters and galleries. One window pane is repaired with corrugated cardboard. The three-foot brick pier on which the house stands is cracked—many houses having been elevated above sandy swamps after the 1900 hurricane. Ring the doorbell. A disembodied voice, booming over an intercom, intones, “Door’s unlocked.”

Enter a parlor where a quadriplegic man lies hoisted onto a hospital bed with pulleys, buttons, buzzers situated so he can
raise and lower his bed with a flicker of movement. His massive bald head rears from an obese body covered with a sheet, soggy with sweat. In his static stare, not even his lids blink. His protruding eyes x-ray your heart.

You are too sober to speak. Your first impulse is to stick a fork in your eye before you even see the apartment. Nevertheless, take the second-floor apartment, sight unseen. The rent is cheap. You’re broke, desperate.

Carry your one canvas suitcase up the outside steps. Before you open the door, you know the apartment’s archaeology of scents: stained undershirts, empty ice-cube trays, faulty electrical wiring, chipped lead paint. Sit on the couch, the plastic upholstery reminding you of the seats in the blue convertible. Across from you is a bright square of wallpaper where a picture must have hung for years. From age, sun, neglect, the remaining wallpaper is the color of water-stained magnolia petals. A solitary cobweb trails from the ceiling. In the bathroom, rust corrodes the toilet, the sink. The mirror’s silver backing is tarnished. Avoid looking at yourself when you open the medicine chest. Dry mercurochrome smears one of the shelves.

A toaster, leaking crumbs, is plugged into a scorched socket in the kitchen. Open the refrigerator to discover an empty, washed mayonnaise jar, even the rim wiped clean. Remove, from your suitcase, a small slab of roast beef wrapped in aluminum foil. You brought it from the apartment where you lived with your husband, ten blocks away. Place the beef in the fridge beside the empty jar.

Open windows. Across the street is a rooming house. A man’s arm leans on the sill in a second-story window. In the lowering sun, you barely see his shadowed face. But you know a frayed rope belts his stained jeans. He eats deviled ham out of a can for dinner. He thinks it still costs three cents to mail a letter. Dry skin cracks his heels. You want to wave but know that’s not a good idea.

That evening walk to the seawall. Another day slips into the gulf, below water. No longer believing in romantic sunsets, enter the first club you pass, the Jean Lafitte; believe in the permanent neon night of bars instead. Slide onto a stool. Order bourbon and fries. One by one, dip them in ketchup. Glen Campbell sings “Galveston,” an obvious jukebox favorite. On the dance floor, not nearly as interesting as the Kon Tiki’s, sailors sway the Texas two-step, girls wearing western shirts with plastic, pearlized buttons. Ceiling fans churn cigarette smoke. Inhale it. Deeply. Glance at the pay phone by the front door. Think about calling blue convertible. Or your husband. Think about returning to the apartment you shared with him. But across from that apartment is the red door of the Kon Tiki. It would only be a matter of time before, lonely again, you watch neon penises flashing off and, better yet, on.

Besides, while you suspect what’s wrong, you don’t know how to explain it—to your husband or to yourself. You don’t quite know how to say that you once had a good job on Capitol Hill. But you left it, as well as your friends and your apartment, to move here to be with him . . . where he has a job directing a project to restore The Strand and the Victorian residential neighborhoods. Whereas you have no job at all. Nor do you know how to say you are angry he works long hours and weekends. At times, he doesn’t seem to remember he’s married. You might as well be a table or chair. He never says “I love you.” Nor can you explain your confusion as to why he never bought you an engagement ring or a wedding band. He ignored you during your wedding reception, dancing with virtually everyone else but you. He never apologized. But remember that love means never having to say you’re sorry.

Now what to do? Return to
DC
? Work on your marriage? File for divorce? Buds of indecision bloom—all you’re able to grow.

A drunken sailor approaches your bar stool. His face and clothes are wrinkled from salty air, alcohol, age. Halfheartedly, he at
tempts to pick you up, but you’re both too far gone to give it anything but a feeble try. Still, perhaps in his sadness as to what might have been—another night, another year—he generously produces a twenty-dollar bill from his wallet, shoving it into your hand. Think about refusing.

Back outside, walk along the seawall lined with palms, wind-whipped fronds permanently molded in a northerly direction. Motorcycles roar along the strip. Teenagers blare music in Trans Ams, headlights and taillights dim portholes through night. Down on the beach jellyfish, washed ashore, lie strewn across sand like discarded wedding veils. Oil rigs, out in the gulf, flicker more brightly than stars, melting in the humid sky. Think about throwing yourself into the harbor. Instead, watch waves surge and collapse until you’re exhausted by their constant, useless movements.

That night, lie atop the chenille bedspread in the valley of the mattress, still in tank top and cutoff jeans, the edges frayed. Worry the sheets haven’t been washed since the Eisenhower administration. From downstairs, pulleys and levers whir as the quadriplegic lowers himself to sleep, while his breath bubbles from watery lungs. Imagine his soft, slug-like body. No. Don’t. Fumes from your own mattress rise around you. Be afraid to yawn or close your eyes. Be afraid, if you move, tethers will shred. You’ll slide deeper into inertia. Think about the man who lives in the rooming house across the street. Feel the breaths of all three of you becoming gossamer—or fog.

Through the double-hung windows, humidity swells the night with longing. Display the sailor’s twenty-dollar bill on the dresser, a memento of your first night alone in Galveston.

Stalking for Love in All the Wrong Places

One dusk a week later, strolling the east-end neighborhood, see the blue convertible. The car isn’t parked outside his own house. This is not the street where he lives. Feel a tremor behind your knees. Stumble on a magnolia root that cracks the sidewalk. Glance at
surrounding windows and doors. Guess which one. Think about ringing the doorbell, calling his name. Instead, sit on a seesaw in a playground at the end of the street, watching for him. You want to say something, though you’re not sure what. Maybe you and he can try again. Maybe he can still save you, though you don’t know from what. Your need is indefatigable as waves.

He still hasn’t appeared by eight o’clock. Lights have gone on in windows. Off. On and off in all the Italianate, Carpenter Gothic, Victorian houses being restored—part of your husband’s project—the yards dense with pin oaks and crape myrtles. Retrace your steps to the blue convertible. Glance through the windshield to the upholstery where you once sat driving to Matagorda, pretending he was John Travolta, though a short, blond, nearsighted John Travolta. Recall that the inside of the car smells of plaster casts and distilled alcohol from the hospital where he works. But now the scent would seem foreign. You don’t understand the dislocation of time—how you sat in this car thinking you’d be part of it forever—whereas now his car and he are a distant vibration of memory.

Follow your instincts. You know what he is doing and what you will watch him do. Drag a porch chair down a narrow path between two Greek Revival houses. Stand on it. Lean forward, palms against the frame of a dimly lit window. Sheer curtains cast a faint pall on bodies. He is naked. So is she, where they lie together on a rumpled bed. Roy Orbison sings “Blue Bayou” . . . and you inhale the slow decay of cypress roots, the stagnant tremble of muddy sludge. Your own pulse deepens, to blue. His fingers trace her skin. Feel it on your own, small eruptions that ache. Your breath mists the window. Palm fronds rustle like words spoken a long time ago.

Place your own fingertips on the pane. Your prints are smudged evidence of all that’s tangible of you—as if there’s no “you” behind your skin. Even your skin feels like a filigree of foam . . . you, yourself, transparent water draining down panes of glass.

Watch the apartment you shared with your husband in one of the restored iron-front buildings at the corner of Tremont and The Strand. Here, the third-story arched windows are dark. Picture the marble tabletop you and your husband bought in Portugal. Miss the sunflower plates, the silver candleholders from Mexico, your pretty dresses hanging in the closet—even though you don’t want to claim any belongings. Rather, you want your old life to be a museum, as if a ghost of you still lives there.

Glance across the street. A spotlight illuminates the red door of the Kon Tiki. The soles of your feet feel the bass disco beat, neon penises throbbing.

At Thorne’s, a new restaurant a few blocks away, stand on the sidewalk gazing through floor-to-ceiling windows. Candlelight flickers on forest-green walls, white tablecloths, the mahogany bar. The ornate mirror behind the bar reflects bottles of liquor. Your husband, holding a Black Russian, sits with couples who used to be your friends, before you caused a scandal by running off in a blue convertible. Now they no longer speak to you.

Reflected in the window, see yourself superimposed on the room. But imagine the way you looked when
you
dined here. You wore long skirts, silk flowers in your hair. You sipped Sambuca with a coffee bean garnishing the bottom of the crystal glass. All evening your husband talked about the restoration project. He loves these buildings . . . and, sure, you love them, too. But you want him to love you more.

Leave before anyone sees you lurking.

Back in your apartment open the refrigerator. See the roast beef in shiny aluminum armor. Peel open the package. Smell the meat’s greenness.

On the Lam without a Thing to Wear

By September, almost broke, consider what illegal act to commit in order to be locked up either in jail or an asylum. Don’t be fussy, don’t care which. Free room and board. Except you’re not
sure how to pull it off. Recall that for the past year an arsonist has set fire to a few buildings on The Strand. Some were razed. Others can still be restored. Maybe you should buy matches.

Instead, drive to the air-conditioned Rosenberg Library for relief from the heat. Glance through
Crime and Punishment
and
Notes from Underground
, books you read years ago. You’ve always admired the dramatic gestures of Russian novelists, authors who know how to pull out all the stops. Both war
and
peace. Crime
and
punishment. On a grand scale. The beating of chests. The pulling of hair. The whole shebang. On the first page of the library copy of
Crime and Punishment
is a faded smear of blood. Someone else with the same idea as you? Someone who takes her Dostoyevsky literally? But consider yourself on the seedy Gulf Coast, wailing country-western. Wilting beaches instead of frozen steppes. Shiner beer instead of Stolichnaya. You’re not sure you have the fortitude, the depth of character of Raskolnikov or the underground man.