by Luke Geddes
Never again would he feel the thrill of discovery, that drunk, jittery feeling of being confronted with something totally new, like when he finally found a copy of 1/2 Gentlemen/Not Beasts at an ex–college DJ’s garage sale in Allston after only ever having read or heard about it for years, or when a friend gave him a scratchy cassette dub—maybe eight generations removed from the source—of the Shaggs’ Philosophy of the World. He was the human embodiment of the Trouser Press Guide, with a massive collection, a vast network of fellow collectors, and an eBay account awarded a green star to signify over five thousand positively rated transactions. But nothing surprised him anymore. Nothing was new or unknown. He liked everything but enjoyed nothing.
Lee grabbed an old shoebox of mixtape relics from the backseat and steered with his knee as he sorted through them. It pained Seymour to see them now, the too-cute and half-clever titles he’d given them—Fuck Songs: Pt. 69, Notes and Chords Mean Nothing to Me, Battle Hymns for Swingin’ Bachelors—scrawled in his own scratchy hand, like looking at high school yearbook photos. He leaned out the window and shot the bat signal at a darkened window. The house lights turned on and a suspicious pair of eyes, glowing like a cat’s, peered from behind the blinds. There it was again, the Wichita Scowl.
“What kind of kid listens to Lionel Richie anyway?” Lee shoved a tape into the deck: insistent yet inept drums, out-of-tune guitars. It was the Shaggs. Seymour had forgotten, it was Lee who’d given him the tape way back when, before they’d even started hooking up. They’d been in rival bands who frequently played together at house parties inevitably broken up by cops, crumbling unlicensed clubs with barely working electricity let alone functional plumbing, Lee playing saxophone in local favorite Tears in the Birthday Cake, a postmodern doo-wop band, Seymour playing tambourine, theremin, and a broken four-stringed guitar in Foxy Nazi, an almost universally reviled (Lee was their only fan) anti-funk group whose constantly changing member base spent more time mixing pill cocktails before each performance than practicing. For Seymour, this pre-show routine was not just to curb stage fright but also the anxiety of sharing a bill with Lee, who back then had an air of both guru and grizzled veteran. At least a decade older than Seymour or anyone else in his artsy-fartsy orbit, if the rumors were true he’d done time in pretty much every band that had ever broken big out of Boston since “college rock” had been a genre. Something about him was impossible to pin down; he wasn’t punk or weirdo, he often came to shows dressed business casual because unlike most in the scene he had a straight day job (that he refused to talk about), but he wasn’t totally square, either. Wholesome and seditious at once, Andy Taylor meets GG Allin. His mysterious past was subject to much speculation, and as far as Seymour knew, not even his bandmates had ever known about his stint as a would-be Tiger Beat centerfold; Lee only told Seymour about the Sodashoppe Teens after they’d been living together for a year, and it caused him more anguish, Seymour guessed, than coming out to his oppressively Christian family.
Lee drummed on the steering wheel, though it was impossible to match Helen Wiggin’s manic arrhythmia. After such a long time together, it was hard for Seymour to remember there had ever been any mystery to him. “So what do you know about this show? The Mark and Grant show?”
Seymour soughed through his teeth. “Pickin’ Fortunes? Guh. Just a tacky reality show for bored suburban housewives. Think I’ll take a pass when they come to Heart.”
“Since when have you had a problem with tacky?”
“Camp, kitsch, tasteless is one thing. Tacky is another. Can you imagine us on that Home Channel tripe? They’d edit us into a couple of Queer Eye queens or something. Oh, what the gang back home would say. I’ll pass, thank you.”
“Do you even talk to anyone ‘back home’?” Lee stared straight ahead for a moment, as if he were concentrating on driving, then continued carefully, “I don’t know. I think it could be good. Promotion-wise, I mean, for the eBay and Etsy accounts. ‘As seen on TV,’ or whatever. And don’t act like you’re not a natural performer. It could be fun.”
“You kidding? Have you even seen two seconds of this show? My god, I think those Mark and Grant guys are centerfolds in the Ladies’ Home Journal swimsuit issue. Having to live here is humiliation enough.”
Lee could not hide the wound in his voice. “I’m just thinking of it from a business angle. It could be a lot of money just for putting our beautiful mugs on TV for thirty seconds.”
Seymour didn’t feel like talking about it right now, or ever. Maybe when he was younger he was attention-hungry enough to mince around for the Home Channel demographic, but the thought of a permanent broadcast record of his pathetic middle age made him physically ill. He squeezed Lee’s knee. “So bony,” he said, changing the subject. “Look at the way it sticks out. Freaky monster kneecaps.”
“You’re uglier,” Lee said. “Forehead like Frankenstein. Rings around the eyes. Shady-looking, like a criminal.”
“Tiny bird legs.” Seymour tickled under Lee’s knee. “Like in the Road Runner cartoon. Big stinking feet. Disgusting to look at. Just unnatural.”
Lee held Seymour’s hand. “Disturbed looks for a disturbed mind. The neighborhood task force ought to be searching your garage. Terrible things you’ve done to her.”
“She’s in pieces.” Seymour said. “I was jealous of her beauty. I’m sewing her piece by piece onto my own body so that I may become one with her.”
Lee simpered. “You’re sick. You’ve got her tiny little-girl arms stitched to your nipples.”
“Her face grafted to my neck.”
“Eyeballs as earrings.”
“Her belly button on my chin. It’s an outie.”
“Psycho,” Lee said, pounding the brake. He’d nearly run into someone’s bumper. The search was winding down. Flashlight beams died. Lionel Richie’s croon faded. Cars were pulling out of the mobile disco and into driveways. Thank god, Seymour thought. Tonight was starting to feel surprisingly like a sex night, and anyway, there was an auction for the rare private press J Ann C Trio at Tan-Tar-A LP ending on eBay in a few minutes that he intended to snipe. Sure, in theory he was in the process of downsizing, but this record came along so rarely that whether he actually wanted it or not was irrelevant. He was acting automatically. He’d decided when the listing alert hit his in-box that it was his, and now he would go through the motions of attainment.
They neared their house, but Lee drove past.
“Where are you going?” This was a surprise. It’d been a long time since they’d last had car sex. It was unlike Lee of late, so paranoid about upsetting the scowling Wichitans’ sense of neighborly decorum.
“To the meeting,” Lee said as if he’d mentioned it long before and they’d both agreed on it.
“Meeting? Like the neighborhood watch meeting? Are you kidding?”
“It wouldn’t be the worst thing in the world to make new friends.”
“With these people it would be. Friends? We’re too old to make new friends.” Seymour held the flash-gun to his head.
“There’ll be ice cream.”
He pulled the trigger.
They ended up at College Hill Park after circling the perimeter searching for a legal parking space even though their own driveway was mere blocks away. The ice cream was the cheap kind grade-school kids had been getting as a snack since time immemorial, bland vanilla with chemically dense chocolate or strawberry swirls in little plastic cups with attached wooden spoons, distributed from a cooler with the words GO SHOCKS! painted on its side.
It depressed Seymour that he recognized so many faces after barely a week in Wichita. Let Lee do the mingling. He helped himself to a third cup while Lee introduced himself to people he’d introduced himself to previously but who pretended not to remember him for some weird, passive-aggressive reason. Keith Stoller, wearing a T-shirt with Lindy Bobo’s face on it and standing around with a bunch of bored Heart of America dealers, waved Seymour into his circle. “Just to be clear,” he
said, his big red forehead furrowed apologetically, “the discount only applies to one of your booths.”
Seymour was surprised to find Ellie standing beside him, flashlight in hand. “I wouldn’t have guessed this was your scene.”
“You know the kids these days. We’re all about taking ecstasy and online bullying and volunteering for search parties,” she said. “Especially if there’s a cash reward.”
Behind Ellie, Lee held court in his own circle. He called Seymour over with a tilt of his head and put his arm around his waist as he went on: “… lived in Boston but actually I grew up here in the little house on Waterman,” Lee was saying to a disinterested couple who kept their small son harnessed in one of those dog leashes for children. He never failed to mention his childhood home when chatting with the neighbors. Someone asked Seymour if he, too, was from the area. Seymour bit into the wooden spoon and broke it in half. He was never good at this kind of thing—small talk, party chatter—not even at the house parties he’d played with Foxy Nazi. He could go on and on about mediocre Estonian post-punk bands for hours, but everyday pleasantries about the weather or current events clammed him up. In Boston, his friends had all been collectors like him, people whose personalities he didn’t actually like but at least they shared his arcane interests; they were friends by default, as no one else could understand or even stand to listen to them prattle on to each other about variations of Quisp cereal boxes or argue over which issues of Playboy contained Kurtzman and Elder’s Little Annie Fanny serial. “… And we just thought it was time to move back home.”
Seymour smiled mirthlessly. Lee gave him that disapproving look like he knew Seymour was going to say something inappropriate, something honest.
Lucky for him, Veronica Samples, self-appointed leader of CHAANT, spoke up. “Okay, everyone.” She waved her hands over her head like a schoolteacher trying to capture the attention of an unruly class. The men and women of the task force, wooden spoons in their mouths, gathered around. They were serious, earnest people who could live their lives not making a difference to anyone or anything so long as they participated in something seemingly important at least once in a while, when there was nothing good on TV. Seymour hung back. He felt like he was watching some cultic religious ceremony. Veronica baptized each congregant with a stack of flyers. “I’m glad we’re all having a good time, and thank you, Lydia, for the ice cream. But I can tell you all there’s one person who’s not having a good time tonight.” She held up a flyer, stuck her finger on Lindy Bobo’s button nose. “Think about her tomorrow as you post these around your place of work or worship, anywhere we haven’t covered yet. It’s time—past time—to move the search outward!” She spoke with unnecessary emphasis, pausing as if waiting for some sort of applause.
Keith offered a hoarse cheer, more suitable for a homecoming game than a neighborhood canvass possibly for the slaughtered remains of a would-be JonBenét. “Forget tomorrow! We’re not going home till we find her. Right, folks? I mean, come on, this is some serious shit.”
Veronica nodded. “Thank you, Keith. This is serious. Something you may not know about me,” Veronica was saying, “is that I’ve been in Lindy’s place. I know what it’s like”—she wiped a burgeoning tear—“to be little and scared and alone, to be someplace strange and to wonder if I’m ever coming home.” It was something everyone knew about her by now. In each of the few interactions Seymour had had with her, she never neglected to mention that she’d been nabbed by one of her mother’s ex-boyfriends when she was twelve. Seymour had looked up newspaper articles about it online. She was missing for all of eight hours. The police found her and the guy at an indoor Putt-Putt place at the local mall. She’d effectively gotten the day off from school and the guy told the cops, “I’ve been a father figure to her for the past six months. Why does breaking up with a lady mean you break up with her daughter, too?” This city was full of lonely people incapable of rationally dealing with being alone with themselves. Maybe Seymour was one of them. He shuddered.
The crowd, humbled by Veronica, gazed down at Lindy’s photocopied yellow face in one hand while with the other they licked the last bit of syrup from their ice-cream lids. Except for Keith, who applauded and said, “Hell, yeah! Let’s get out there and find this fucking kid!”
“Your enthusiasm is wonderful,” Veronica said, “but please, Keith, there are children here.”
The group returned to mingling but with graver purpose. No more polite chatter about TV shows or day jobs or home improvement projects. The subject was Lindy Bobo and nothing else. Lee turned to Seymour, waving the flyers like a fan. “Have you left any of these at the bookstore? Or by the high school?” he said. “There’s a lot of foot traffic there.” He was deliberately speaking too loudly, wanting to be heard, wanting the approbation of the task force, of Veronica.
“Yeah, well, all the flyers in the world aren’t going to bring a corpse back to life.” Seymour also spoke too loudly.
At once the Wichita Scowl, an especially virulent strain, surrounded him. There was even a bit of it on Lee’s reddened face. Veronica had her arms crossed, her whole body somehow a scowl, her cat-eyes arched devilishly.
“You make that kind of remark when morale is so important to our efforts. A girl was kidnapped. A little girl. You’re right. She could be dead. She could be abused, tortured. She could be raped. The College Hill AMBER Alert Neighborhood Taskforce doesn’t require your participation. But if you do participate, at least take it seriously.”
Seymour’s smirk was gone. For once he had no rejoinder. It all became even more awkward when Veronica’s anger dropped with such suddenness that her glasses slid down the tip of her nose and she began to cry. Shoulders stooped, she was a shuddering little girl again. The task force gathered around, Lee included, and mumbled words of hope and consolation, turning their heads back to offer Seymour brief but penetrating glares. And it used to be so charming when Seymour said distasteful things at large gatherings.
It was time to exit. “My joke was better,” Ellie whispered as he passed by. Feeling the task force’s resentment hot on his back, he resisted the urge to turn around and gauge the damage on Lee’s unhappy face, to attempt an expression of contrition. Apologies sounded the least sincere when Seymour really meant them.
Lee had the house keys, so he’d have to hide till the meeting ended and Lee went home. And it would be easier if he waited till after Lee was asleep or was pretending to be. Seymour had left his wallet in the car, too, so it wasn’t even an option to go the few blocks to the old-man dive bar across the street from the grocery store. Anyway, he didn’t want to get hassled for walking around at night as usual. Following the park’s dog-walking path, he crossed a concrete bridge overlooking a small ravine littered with soda bottles, cigarette butts, and potato chip bags. Someone had scratched the words THE CLASH and IGGY into the parapet, surely the hippest person to ever live in this neighborhood. Hell, maybe it was Lee’s work.
Seymour wondered what it must have been like to grow up here. He imagined Wichita in the sixties as, illogically, quite like the Old West: Lee riding to school on a covered wagon, racing the tumbleweeds down the cacti-strewn roads. But the reality, he knew, was as banal as to be expected. Breakfast at the diner every Sunday after mass—Lee had mentioned this to Seymour once and it made him immeasurably sad. He was sort of relieved that Lee’s parents had disowned him since before they met, just because he never had to go through that awkward meet-the-parents ritual, never had to do the home-for-the-holidays thing. In photographs, they looked like stern types who’d cross to the other side of the street rather than face Seymour in his punk look: all Mohawk and torn clothing with extra zippers, a leather jacket stencil-painted with dirty words.
He shouldn’t be so judgmental. It wasn’t as if his own childhood in suburban Baltimore was so glamorous or bohemian. When he thought of it, he mostly pictured his after-school ceremony: the key under the mat and the empty house, the TV on (cartoons and syndicate
d sitcom reruns), a bowl of mac and cheese atop a Donald Duck lunch tray, a Little Debbie Cosmic Brownie unwrapped and set on a plate for no good reason other than to fool himself into thinking it was homemade. He wondered where that Donald Duck tray was now.
Seymour was used to being alone, had learned to embrace it. He could see now that even back in their band days, when Lee would get hopped up on amphetamines and slam dance till he passed out or break so many noise ordinances at a Tears show that a high-level police officer threatened to have him formally banned from the city of Boston, it was just about fitting in with Seymour’s crowd. The unspoken thing that all their fights lately had been about was this: it was Seymour’s turn, finally, to fit in with Lee’s crowd.