The Waiting Room

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NOVELS:

STRANGE SEEDS

BOUNDARIES

THE CHANGING

THE DEVOURING

NON FICTION:

THE INTELLIGENT MAN'S GUIDE TO U.F.O.s

UNABRIDGED AUDIOBOOKS:

A MANHATTAN GHOST STORY – NARRATED BY DICK HILL

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With love and thanks to my mom

MARIEANNE AUBIN

For her much-needed letter of encouragement, my thanks to Stacy Horn. for his continued support, my thanks to Jeff Zaleski. And, as always, my gratitude to my editor, Harriet P. McDougal.

And one person deserves acknowledgment merely for being the marvelous woman that she is—Barbara Doherty.

My name is Sam Feary. I have a friend named Abner W. Cray. Sometimes people call him "Abner Doubleday," either because they think it's funny or because they're hard of hearing and they really believe that's what he's called. He hates it, though.

Abner and I have known each other since we were kids in Bangor, Maine. I'm a year and a half older, probably fifty I.Q. points smarter, and I'm not nearly as clumsy as he is with women. Take that stupidity with his cousin Stacy, for instance, and the unholy mess he made of things with Phyllis Pellaprat, which, of course, he couldn't have helped—when the love bug bites Abner, it bites him hard, right through the skin and into the blood. It happened more than once in Bangor, when we were in high school together.

~ * ~

I came to Manhattan, and I stayed here, because I like it. I like people—all kinds of people. Everyone's interesting as far as I'm concerned, everyone's got some great story to tell, even if he's not aware of it. So I came to Manhattan, I got myself a job with a construction company, set myself up in a small apartment on Second Avenue, near 1lth Street, bought myself a pet boa constrictor—which has since gone the way of the carrier pigeon—met a woman named Leslie, whom I rapidly fell in love with, and started to live.

I like living. I get a kick out of touching and tasting, out of going into an Italian deli---there's one not far from here—and taking a giant whiff of whatever gritty aroma wafts my way. And I like to dance, though I'm the first to admit that I've got three left feet and fifteen big toes. And except for country western, I like music, too—pop, rock, classical (if it's not too sleepy). If it's got a beat, I'll listen to it and enjoy it. There's very little in this world that I don't like, in fact. Except the
New York Post
, and the memory of Idi Amin and Joe Stalin and Richard Nixon (because he got me into so much damn trouble in Viet Nam), and commercials for Charmin toilet paper, and a lone fly buzzing me while I'm trying to eat, and two radios playing different stations at the same time, and the smell of peanut butter sandwiches mixed up with the smell of ironing.

I had to grow up with that. In Bangor. I had to come home from school at lunchtime, because
the
school I went to had no lunch program, and invariably I'd get fed peanut butter sandwiches and milk while my mother finished up her morning's ironing. I didn't think much about it while it was happening. I think I may even have enjoyed it—those two smells mixed up together. I started hating it later, in Nam, I think. I'm not sure why. Maybe I had a thing for my mother, I don't know. Maybe I had a thing for peanut butter sandwiches, or fresh ironing, I don't know. I'll probably never know, because what I've learned about myself over the years is this: There's a stranger living inside me, and sometimes he's a damned ignorant bastard.

~ * ~

I had no idea Abner was here, in Manhattan, when I got here. The last time I'd seen him, I was two days away from catching a Greyhound bus to Parris Island, in South Carolina, where some asshole D.I. was going to try and "mold" me into a Marine. Abner was drooling over his cousin Stacy then; he was going on and on about her "incredible body," and I remember saying to him, "Christ, Abner, she's practically your sister, and here you are talking about putting it to her."

"Putting it to her?" he asked. I didn't know then that Abner was a virgin. I thought that anyone older than fourteen had a constant hard-on and was lying in wait for whoever happened to back into it. "Put
what
to her, Sam?"

"Your thing," I answered. "Your little ding-dong. You know—put
it
to her, have
sex
with her."

"With Stacy, Sam? Naw. She's too smart for that. She's smarter than I am, for sure."

Abner was fifteen then, maybe sixteen. And it wasn't that he was homely, or smelly, or stupid. He was just plain scared of girls. Especially girls like Stacy. This was 1965, remember, a full ten or fifteen years before people finally figured out that, male or female,
everyone
likes to get it on. In 1965 all of us guys
knew
that only men liked to get it on, and that it was the full-time job of women either to prevent it or to grin and bear it. So there was Abner, fifteen or sixteen, horny, and scared. And there was Stacy, fifteen or sixteen, smart, stacked, and enticing, which, as far as poor Abner was concerned, added up to obscene intimidation.

~ * ~

Abner and I broke into a mausoleum once, when we were kids, shortly before I got called up and shipped away to Viet Nam. Breaking into the mausoleum was his bright idea right from the start. He said something about wanting "to see how the dead ticked," which, I told him, was just about the dumbest thing I'd ever heard anyone say. "The dead," I told him, "
don't
tick anymore, Abner."

He shook his head, squinted, pursed his lips, tried to look befuddled. It's a pose he uses quite a lot, especially when he realizes that something incredibly stupid has just come stumbling from his mouth. Then he explained, "Well, I guess 'tick' isn't the right word, is it, Sam? But it really would be a neat thing to do. I mean . . . you could bring that cat skull you've got—"

"It's not a toy, Abner. That cat was my friend."

"Sam, you dug her up, Jees—
you
dug her up—"

What could I say? The cat was named Flora, and I
really did love her, if only because the original Flora was a girl I'd taken to a couple of horror movies and had fallen hopelessly in love with because of the way she clutched at me in panic. Then she moved from Bangor to Oshkosh or Hoboken or some such place, and I was devastated. The cat itself was pretty much just a cat; she was nothing special (and it comes to me that my father once pointed out that Flora was a male, which, because the cat had long, thick black fur was not something that was easy to spot, and since he had a soft, feminine face, I assumed that
he
was
a she).

I said to Abner, "I dug her up only because we were close. If we do this thing, if we break into this mausoleum, Flora stays home. Okay?"

He shrugged.

But, at last, I did bring Flora's skull, if only so Abner wouldn't sulk. And I brought some candles, too, and a dozen Mallo Cups, because I had something like a craving for them then, which has since vanished. I have no real cravings anymore. I have needs, and desires, and passions. I'm pretty much like anyone else.

~ * ~

We all grow up. We lose our craving for Mallo Cups, we stop being afraid of thunder, we turn out the night-light, we go down into the cellar to change a fuse, we peek into the attic, and we end up being proud of ourselves for it. We say we're adult and rational, we say there's really nothing to be afraid of anymore besides IRS audits, slippery roads, and canned vichyssoise. But I know one thing about that damned
ignorant bastard living inside me: I know that he's about ready to piss in his boots every time the fuses blow, and that if he's got to move around with me on some dark street, then he'd just as soon curl up and go to sleep.

Even now.

Even after all this time with my friend Abner W. Cray.

Even after so much black water has passed under the bridge.

~ * ~

Right up front, let me tell you a little of what this story is about, so you won't come back later and say I'm perverse or mixed up or that I've got a memory like a sieve. This story is about
people
, it's about
love
, it's about
friendship
. That's what it's mostly about.

But it's about traffic flow, too. The same kind of traffic flow you'll find on I-490 or Route 66 or on the New Jersey Turnpike. Traffic flow. Getting people from one place to another without too much hassle and delay. No one's got it down to an exact science. Sometimes it works, but most times it doesn't. And you know why, of course. It doesn't work because of
people
. On the expressways and the turnpikes it would work just fine if none of those cars had
people
in them, if each car were programmed to go exactly where it should go. But those cars do have people in them, people with brains and souls and aches and pains and likes and dislikes and habits, et cetera, et cetera. So when everything is moving along beautifully, one of those people decides he's going to go rent a videotape before heading home. But the video rental place is in Weehawken, and Weehawken is off that exit there, coming up at fifty-five miles per hour, and only one hundred feet away. And he thinks,
Hell, there's still time.
So he jams on the brakes and swings into the exit lane like Mario Andretti. And behind him, the poor slob who's been following a bit too close has fishtailed and been hit broadside by a semi. The traffic flow didn't work.
People
screwed it up.

Iworked in construction for two months, in January and February this year. I never actually built anything, because buildings usually don't get built in the winter. I dug some trenches for sewer pipes, I operated a forklift, I hauled bags of cement from one place to another. And I helped demolish an ancient red brick apartment building on East 80th Street.