by Steve Bloom
“Kind of, if you count a two-second blow job. Her mom barged in.”
For some reason The Murf finds this hilarious. Laughing, he thwacks with renewed energy. I eagerly jump in. We pound in syncopated unison.
“Actually more like one,” I admit sheepishly above the rising din. “When I got home, I had to pour ice cubes down my pants to get rid of an extreme case of raging hard-onitis.”
“You dog!” The Murf howls, delighting in my misery. We beat our buckets faster and faster, then he slows up again. “You still could have told me, Brooks.”
I look away uneasily. He extends his forty to me. I take a long pull.
“It’s this whole Columbia thing,” I maintain. “It’s got me all crazy.”
We cheerily pound away for awhile. From our high vantage point, I notice a bunch of little kids at the other end of the Reservoir playing hockey where they shouldn’t, where The Murf and me once played where we shouldn’t have too. Back when the Future was a non-factor. Could it really have been just a few short years ago?
“How is the college derby going?” The Murf asks, making conversation.
“Pretty much stuck at the gate,” I say.
Closer below, a crooked rusted sign protrudes above a thin frozen sheen about twenty yards or so from the shore, warning in big red letters: “DANGER! THIN ICE!” Every two or three winters some yahoo drowns in the Reservoir, usually when loaded out of his mind. It’s kind of a Pritchard tradition.
“Hey, it ain’t over ’til it’s over,” The Murf says by way of encouragement. “And there’s always Rutgers. It’s a friggin’ good school. I mean, I couldn’t get in there if my life depended on it.”
“No, it’s over, Murf,” I state conclusively, giving up, giving into the moment. We continue thwacking our overturned buckets. Our palms sting from the impact. We’re cooking, our beat tight, complex, and furious.
“Why’s it mean so much to you, Brooks?” The Murf asks. “What’s out there that we don’t got right here in Pritchard?”
I grimace. This is where me and The Murf unapologetically part ways. I may be going nowhere fast, but at least I’ve got my eyes open and know what’s what. I can’t settle for less like The Murf even if I wanted to, which, now more than ever, I desperately don’t.
“Oh, c’mon, Murf, Pritchard’s a shithole,” I say in exasperation.
“True.” He laughs ruefully. “Pritchard blows the big one. What am I saying?”
We pound harder, each of us turning inward. Across the Reservoir, the kids whoop and holler, skating back and forth. The tilted sign flashes at me like lit-up neon. “DANGER! THIN ICE!” An idea forms and grows with each thump on my can. If my life depended on it, The Murf said. A dastardly, diabolical notion, one that I shouldn’t even let myself consider, but one that just might work.
“Well, if there’s anything I can do, I’m here for you, dude,” The Murf vows.
“Well, actually there is something,” I announce, suddenly galvanized with evil purpose.
The Murf looks at me, a little startled that I’m so rapidly taking him up on what he thought was a token offer.
“I need you to let me save your life.”
The Murf stops drumming, stunned. “What?”
“You fall through the ice, I rescue you,” I explain rapidly before principles and reason can set in. “I guarantee you’ll be totally safe. You just have to look like you’re in mortal jeopardy. Five minutes, ten tops!”
“Are you off your nut?”
“I need an update on my application. Something major, to put me over the top.”
The Murf looks down at the sign, then back at me.
“Like now?”
“You mind? The updated forms have to be postmarked by Monday.”
---
“It’s no good if nobody sees us,” I brief The Murf as we slither through the gaping hole in the chain link fence, which everybody uses and which has never once been repaired in my lifetime. “So yell like crazy.”
We emerge on the slanted concrete lip of the flat, open reservoir. A long, rectangular lake of ice expands before us. It looks pretty thick and secure except for the soupy patch around the rusting sign. Only a complete imbecile would go out there. Or a best friend.
“You’re really going to make me go through with this?” The Murf asks uneasily.
But I’m not listening. Instead I’m playing the video clip in my mind:
“I saw the whole thing. It was righteous, man,” an adorable bundled-up little kid on skates tells an off-screen interviewer. “The dude ran out and saved the other dude,” another one chimes in. “He was like a superdude!” Then we go to me, shivering, coatless in the bitter cold. “I never thought about my own safety for an instant,” I state. “My only concern was for my fellow man, right Murf?” Quick shot of The Murf, wrapped in a thermal blanket, lips blue, skin pasty, sipping a hot cup of coffee. “R-r-r-ight,” he chatters. Back again to me because I’m the main story. “It was nothing,” I shrug modestly. “Really.” Then Chuck Spencer, our local burnt-orange, toothy anchorman, steps up beside me, blocking out The Murf. “Brooks Rattigan,” he resonates deeply into his microphone. “Pritchard’s own superdude.” Superdude, cute touch, huh? I mean, where’s the harm? Take that, fucking Columbia!
“Couldn’t we just say we did it?” The Murf equivocates, tugging me back to the immediate situation at hand.
“Oh, don’t be such a pussy.” I shouldn’t, but it is Columbia at stake, so I shove The Murf way out to sea. He careens across the ice, sliding to a stop about ten feet from the sign. The slick surface creaks precariously under his weight.
“Stomp on it!” I direct, darting a look at the little kids skating.
The Murf does a little hop. The ice splinters, then cracks beneath him into an intricate spider web of fractures but, remarkably, stays intact. Bummer. He looks happily back at me.
“Okay, I stomped!” He scuttles back toward shore. Suddenly, he slips, flails in midair, and crashes backwards on his ass. The ice shatters. The Murf goes under. Excellent!
“HELLLLLPPPPP!!” The Murf shrieks, spurting like a seal back up into view. I glance at the kids. They don’t notice. How could they not notice?
“Louder!” I command The Murf. “Act like you’re drowning!”
“WHO’S ACTING? HELLLLLLLPPPPP!!!” The Murf splashes frantically in a crater of frigid water. He keeps trying to grip the ice to climb out, but it keeps breaking off. Talk about dramatic. But those idiot kids still haven’t noticed. At wit’s end, I holler:
“HEY, YOU LITTLE DIPSHITS!! HELP!!!”
This gets their attention. They stop their collective pursuit of the puck.
“MAN DROWNING!!” I announce, pointing at The Murf thrashing in the ragged hole of icy water. Here’s my cue to spring into heroic action.
“HOLD ON, MURF!” I proclaim, stripping off my coat, which I plan to use as a rope while remaining comfortably safe and dry. “I’M COMING! I’LL SAVE YOU, PAL!!”
I race out across the ice to the edge of the crater of swooshing gray water. But when I get there, there’s no Murf. Just shards of floating ice.
“Murf?” No, God no. Not The Murf. What have I done? “MURF?”
I dive headfirst into the crater. The churning liquid’s the consistency of just-mixed cement, the cold instant and excruciating. The next few seconds are a dull blur. I can’t see a thing but am somehow able to reach out and latch onto something somewhat solid. An elbow. Lungs bursting, I sink, touch bottom, and launch back upwards. At this temperature, the water doesn’t even feel wet, it’s just a searing cold sensation. Pulling The Murf by the arm, I thrash through gelatinous murk. Finally, just as I can take no more, we jet up through the surface, into light, into chilling, polluted but still life-sustaining air. Gasping, gulping it in, I grip The Murf’s limp, petrified figure, making myself his personal flotation device.
“I GOTCHA, BUDDY! I GOTCHA!”
Frantic, I shake him, unsure if he’s really
dead or merely comatose. Then both his eyes flip open and his pupils lower from his head. Glory be! The Murf lives! The Murf grabs my neck and starts choking me. The ingrate throttles me.
“HELLLPPPPP!!!” I splutter.
The little kids have skated up. Mostly boys, a few girls. All miniature, like Munchkins, around six or seven years old and indeed adorable, straight out of Central Casting. Gathered around us, they raptly watch our titanic, life-and-death struggle.
“Far out!” one exclaims.
“FUCK FAR OUT!!” I shriek at the pipsqueaks as The Murf tries his feeble, sluggish best to shove me back under. “DO SOMETHING!!!”
“Spread out!” their fearless leader orders. Instantly the little kids skate into line.
“HURRY!!!” I yelp.
“Sticks!” The little kids extend their hockey sticks. Each clutches the blade in front of her or him, thereby doubling the length of the rescue chain. A nifty maneuver, if I do say so myself. At the head of the line, the commander, gripping onto the stick behind him with one mitten, extends the curved portion of his tiny hockey stick with the other so it’s just able to reach a few inches beyond the perimeter of the open, surging crater.
Grabbing The Murf by the collar, I propel him toward the hook. He clamps a petrified claw around it. In turn, I lock onto his ankle. He tries to kick me loose.
“GO!!!” I shout.
“Hey, I give the orders around here!” the leader glowers at me. “GO!!” he shouts at the others.
Holding onto the sticks between them, the string of little kids skates cross-foot in perfect step backwards. Turns out they’re all members of the same Cub Scout troop and have just earned merit badges in teamwork. If I wasn’t barely clinging to survival and The Murf’s foot, I’d be saluting the good ol’ red, white, and blue.
Our frozen hides are dragged out of the water across rock-hard ice. My head clunks up and down on the jagged surface and I almost black out. But we are saved. When The Murf regains partial use of his vocal cords, he tells me if I ever talk to him again, he’ll kill me.
I figure he’ll cool off once he thaws out, but he doesn’t.
Going Public
Spring has sprung, buds are budding, sprouts are sprouting, but for me it might as well still be cold stark winter. I have no home, no safe place to rest my weary brow, just a demilitarized zone I co-inhabit with Charlie. My bestest, closest pal in the world has expressed the fervent desire to kill me. I will never again partake in the perfection that is Shelby Pace and, most tragic of all, I have no edge with Columbia. My money-market account with 0.093 percent interest does continue to steadily climb, however, as in a show of blind faith I continue to take any gig that comes over the transom. Paramus. Cherry Hill. Piscataway. None, thankfully, are particularly memorable.
Basically I’m a wreck. I can’t sleep, can’t concentrate. I exhibit sundry physical symptoms too. Wisps of hair float at my feet when I shower. There are dark circles under my eyes. My gut’s doing flip-flops. Don’t want to get too graphic but, doctor, I’m all bloated and gassy and haven’t had a satisfactory bowel movement in what seems like months. That’s why I’m on the throne, losing at Angry Birds on my iPhone, huffing and puffing, when I get the call. Recognizing the number on the display, I eagerly click on.
“Dr. Lieberman?” I announce in surprise.
“Hope I’m not getting you at a bad time,” Harvey says.
“Not at all,” I claim, calling it a day, reaching for the TP.
“It appears we have another birthday party. A Cassidy Trask. This Saturday. I’m calling because the invitation was addressed to you and Celia both.”
Cassidy Trask. Why in God’s name would Cassie Trask invite me and Celia Lieberman to her birthday party? She detests us. There’s only one obvious answer. Shelby. Shelby put her up to it. She still lusts for the old Rattigan bod. It ain’t over. There will be another inning. Hope glimmers at least on one of my horizons.
“I’m on the case, Dr. Lieberman.”
We hang up after agreeing on the usual terms. I am smiling. My mood has lifted and so, apparently, have my intestines. Oh, sweet relief!
---
The next few days and nights are filled with dancing visions of me and Shelby doing it in an amazing variety of exotic locations and positions. Then a new cloud descends. For there looms, I realize, a most inconvenient complication. Celia Lieberman. I can’t connect with Shelby as long as Celia Lieberman’s part of the picture. I can’t two-time Celia Lieberman. My conscience and sense of business ethics, slender as they are, forbid me from exposing her to embarrassment and scandal, however illusory. If Shelby and I are ever to reach the next level—which we must—Celia Lieberman has to be deleted from the scene. Ergo, I must break up with Celia Lieberman.
As I nose up the Garden State Parkway to collect Celia Lieberman, I rehearse how I will gently break the devastating news to her. I plan to use a few of the old standbys. It’s not her, it’s all me. I don’t want to be unfair to her. She deserves better than the lowly likes of me, which she does. The fact that we’re not actually going out barely registers.
---
Celia Lieberman clops out the front door in high heels as the Beast rattles up the driveway. Adorned in Gayle’s latest hideous, poufy approximation of high fashion, she’s seriously regressed since our last meeting. We convene in the front seat of the Prius.
“What are you wearing?” I blurt in horror. “I thought . . .”
“Mommy Dearest insisted and I didn’t feel like getting into it with her bitchiness,” she cuts in breathlessly. I activate the golf cart and back out. We glide down the street. “It’s not that bad.”
It is. It is that bad. It’s horrible.
“Jesus, Celia,” I say. “When are you going to stand up for yourself?”
“Never mind that. We have to talk!” She brushes me aside, apparently having more urgent matters to discuss.
“I agree,” I say, summoning my tired litany of excuses for our impending permanent separation. “Ladies first.”
“We have to break up!” she announces, eyes shining.
“Exactly!” I beam until the indignity of it hits me. “Let me get this straight, you want to give me the ax?”
“Franklin’s jealous!” she exclaims, all aglow. I’ve never seen her so aglow.
---
She tells me the whole sorry tale. Apparently it happened late Wednesday afternoon at Chess Club practice. I know, Nerd City. Celia Lieberman’s humoring Franklin, letting him think he’s winning as usual. Then, after gleefully taking one of her castles, Franklin finally speaks.
“You look different,” he says. “What have you done to your hair?”
Celia Lieberman brightens. It’s the most Franklin’s ever said to her. I know, pitiful.
“It’s the new me,” she informs him. She tells me she was wearing one of her recently purchased vintage dresses, a short, kind of turquoisey one, which she had taken in and was feeling quite très cool, if you please.
“You like?” Celia Lieberman asks Franklin.
“I hate,” he grunts.
“You hate?” she says, crestfallen.
“You’re trying to fit in,” he states. “I liked you better before.”
“You liked me better before?” Celia Lieberman sneak-attacks and decimates Franklin’s bishop with a knight, then smacks her timer. “You never said two words to me before! Check!”
Franklin stares at the board, aghast. He’s in deep doo-doo.
“It’s that guy you were with at the mall, isn’t it?” he says, frantically protecting his king, then taps his timer. “He’s the one turning you into a mindless clone!”
“After three years, this is your idea of a first conversation?” Celia Lieberman thunders, her queen pulverizing his king. “To demean and insult me!”
Franklin goes white as a sheet as he fully realizes the fix he’s in. He’s trapped, hemmed in, and besieged by Celia Lieberman’s rampaging forces on all sides. Without releasi
ng his hand, he makes a rapid series of theoretical moves, before deciding to shift a pawn one measly space.
“Franklin, sometimes you are such an asshole! Checkmate!”
Franklin stares total, crushing defeat in the face. He was doing so well. How did it all suddenly go so wrong? Grabbing her stuff, Celia Lieberman storms away.
“Celia, wait!” Franklin whimpers, rushing after her. Fade to black.
Needless to say, I’m delighted by this latest development. But more than that, I’m profoundly gratified. I mean, it didn’t go down exactly the way I planned, but you can’t argue with results.
“Am I a genius or am I a genius?” I boast.
“Don’t get cocky,” she grins. “Franklin hates what you’ve done to me. He considers you an evil influence.”
“Hey, I got the job done, didn’t I?”
She laughs. Like I said, I’ve never seen her so glad.
“What about you?” she asks, now that her item’s been dispensed with. “What did you want to tell me?”
My item on the agenda’s just been preempted by her item. Fine, she can delude herself that she’s the one breaking up. My ego, fragile as it is, can take it. So instead I merely state, “No biggie. Just if I don’t bone Shelby Pace soon, I’m going to spontaneously combust.”
I know, in retrospect, probably not the best choice of words. But since when are Celia Lieberman’s sensibilities so delicate? I mean, you’ve heard her. The girl has a mouth on her like a fucking truck driver.
“That’s terrific, Brooks,” she says, the smile gone. “Guess we’re both getting what we want.”
---
We putt up to the entrance of the country club and, strutting out like a fully paid-up member, I toss the key to the parking guy. Although I’m raging with heightened expectations for the evening, I politely motion Celia Lieberman ahead of me.
“Then it’s agreed,” she says, roughly taking my arm, propelling me with her into the revolving door. “I dump you tonight. Publicly and dramatically.”
“Sooner the better!” I rejoin enthusiastically.
All of the sudden, Shelby, in tears and in a dress that’s mostly slits and missing slots, sweeps past in the rotating glass door going in the other direction. My target sights spin and lock on her. I’m telling you, I’m ripping, raring to go, a snorting bull unleashed at last to awaiting female pasture, but still, exercising remarkable discipline, ever the gentleman, I turn back to Celia Lieberman.