Waylaid

by Ed Lin

  “I want to get laid this summer,” I explained.

  “I gotta boyfriend so I can’t fuck, but I can give you a hand job.”

  “Can’t you at least blow me?”

  “No, I don’t wanna cheat, you know?”

  “Can you give me a hand job now?”

  “Wait until I finish my soda. Let me wash my hands, too. We hafta make sure nobody comes in.”

  “Should I wash also?”

  “No, you don’t have to. I just want to clean my hands right now. They feel gross.” She sipped the last of her soda from her straw, and I could hear the can bottoming out.

  We went behind the counter, and I put my elbows up against the wood shelf next to the grill. Her hands quickly unzipped my shorts. She was holding a wad of dry napkins in her right hand as her left hand pumped away.

  “You’re going to make the girls really happy,” she said, pulling and twisting. I came in about 10 seconds. She wiped me off with the napkin and threw it away.

  “Can I see your tits?” I asked. The pool area was full, but no one was coming into the reopened snack bar. Anne-Marie smiled.

  “No, you can’t, I have a boyfriend. Well, you can feel them.” I put my hands up against her breasts. They were a lot softer than I thought they’d be. I squeezed and saw her nipples straining against the tight fabric. I pressed her left nipple.

  Anne-Marie moved in her arm and brought my hands down with a sweep of her elbow. “That’s enough now.”

  My eyes moved down her front to the zipper of her shorts. There were a few loose threads fringed around her thighs.

  “I know what you’re thinking,” said Anne-Marie. “And the answer is ‘No.’”

  All we ended up making that day was $2.50 when some Benny bought two orders of fries.

  That night, I was so excited about my first hand job, I jerked off two more times. Let Vincent call me a fag now.

  The health inspector dropped by the stand in the middle of the week, before we could open for the next weekend. He looked like a giant walrus with his puffy cheeks, mustache, and beard.

  I wrestled the lock open and flipped all the light switches on.

  “Where’s the supervisor?” he asked.

  “Down in the crawlspace,” I said. The inspector wrote this down.

  In the routine checkup that followed, he found seven “severe” violations. He was mad that there was no soap at the sink where we were supposed to be washing our hands. He stopped checking after seven, because four alone would shut a place down. I saw the phrase “walls greasy to the touch” on his report pad.

  “When are you people going to learn…” he muttered as he left the hamburger stand.

  “You’re so fucking gay!” I yelled after him as he walked stiffly to his van. He came back with a sign and taped it to the door.

  “Now lock this place up and don’t touch that sign, you little son of a bitch!”

  I went into the basement and found my father, who was fixing a stack of metal bed frames fresh from the demolition company. Some of them had metal coasters, some had swivel wheels, and some used to have swivel wheels.

  “The health inspector came and shut down the hamburger stand,” I told him.

  “Did he take keys?”

  “No, but he put up a big notice saying that we’re closed by order of the Department of Health and Safety.”

  “Open burger stand not a good idea,” he said. “Not my idea.” He would never say more than about four words in the presence of my mother, but when we were working alone, we would sometimes talk.

  “Now we have to eat all the leftover hamburger buns.”

  “Bring back to store and get money back.”

  “It’s only about $10.”

  “You think $10 is nothing? These bed frames are $10!” I went back upstairs to the kitchen and got the receipt. But I decided to wait before going back. I was too embarrassed to return the food in front of Miss Creach.

  The following day, my mother called Nancy and told her the stand was shut down for good and that Anne-Marie didn’t have to come back. Listening to that phone call broke my heart.

  As the summer drew to a close, the days grew shorter and more humid. The Bennys put on a brave face, sweating out their last shot at getting a tan.

  The dying sunlight lingered just above the horizon, stretching the shadows of the coniferous trees surrounding the hotel longer and longer until they were shady, swaying fingers waving good-bye to the Bennys. Business thinning out in the middle of the week meant that the hotel only reached full capacity on the weekends. It also meant fewer women. My already slim chance of getting laid at the hotel was shrinking even more.

  I sat behind the hotel desk, staring out across the lawn that sat in the middle of the U. As it grew darker, the grass I had neglected to cut for the past few weeks dimmed into a shiny black. A light breeze sent it streaming in waves. The lawn looked like the surface of a deep, murky sea full of secrets.

  Dinner smells and sounds of eating drifted in from the kitchen, but I was full since I’d already eaten three slices of pepperoni pizza from one of the rooms. We never ordered out because it was too expensive, so finding pizza in a room was almost as good as finding hard-core porn with a blonde in it. The pizza box had been open, lying on the bed like another suitcase to pack. I checked for cigarette ashes or butts in the box before taking a bite. The slices were cold, colder than room temperature. Oil from under the scab of cheese dripped down onto my socks. After three stiff slices, I felt a sharp, greasy pain in the right side of my stomach that moved slowly downward.

  I was mentally preparing myself for another night in the crawlspace with my father, who was eating a small herd in hamburger meat. He ate a lot of meat because he said it helped him work hard.

  With fewer people at the hotel, the end of the summer was the best time to get renovations done. And there was a hell of a lot of work to do. When it was busy, bathroom fixtures and parts of the floor stayed broken for practically the entire summer simply because the rooms were never vacant long enough to fix up. Angry or drunk men liked to punch holes in closet doors or kick in the sheetrock walls. These were pretty easy to fix with a little putty mix, but we wouldn’t repaint the patches until September. Then I would go around with a pail and a dropcloth, getting all of them in one shot. In the meantime, some rooms looked like they had been draped in giraffe skin because there were so many patches.

  I yawned and cringed at the pain in my stomach. I hoped the pizza had been okay to eat. I made a fist with my left hand and punched the spot hard twice. I’d learned that trick from Vincent. He used to run track in high school, and whenever he cramped up, he would just beat it out.

  “It’s a psychological thing,” he said. “When the pain from the punches goes away, it don’t hurt as much. If it still hurts a lot, it means you have to punch harder.”

  When I heard the dreaded sound of the sink and clanking dishes, I knew dinner was over and it was time to work again. I’d be glad when school started again because then I’d have a good excuse not to work late every night. I went to get the flashlight, the lantern, and two pairs of work gloves.

  My father and I were under Room 37. The wood in the bathroom floor had rotted away. We could see the telltale concentric rings of discoloration in the panels above us. I was squatting in the dirt, holding the lantern up. The orange electric cord snaked off into the darkness. The crawlspace was long and wide, but only about four feet high. If you crouch-walked too fast through it, you’d knock your head against a faucet or a bend in the pipes that ran across the top of the crawlspace. I had to hold the lantern up at an angle, otherwise the vertical slats of wood would cast shadows on the work area.

  My father tore at the rotted wood with the claw end of a hammer. His face, which was illuminated from below, looked meaty and sweaty. I could smell charred beef as he breathed through his mouth in time to the hammer swinging. Sometimes he had to put the hammer down to rest.

  Pieces of wood flicked o
nto my face like insects onto a light bulb at night, and damp flakes went down the front of my shirt. I nearly lost my balance when a fat splinter fell against my eyelid. The lantern swung crazily and landed on its side.

  “It’s just wood,” said my father, handing the lantern back to me. “Don’t worry about it. Just pieces of wood. Who cares?”

  “But it’s rotten. It might make me sick.”

  “Don’t be a fool,” he said, as his lips and eyebrows, exaggerated by the lighting, shifted between incredulity and annoyance. “Wood never make anybody sick.”

  “I won’t be able to do this when school starts in two weeks.”

  “Then you got a lot of work to do in next two weeks. You have to finish putty holes in even-number rooms. You have to measure the windows in Number 23 and Number 25 and get glass from hardware store. There some other things I wrote down you have to do, too.”

  “I know, I have the list in my bedroom. You taped it to my closet door.”

  “Next year I show you how to use blowtorch and soldering so you can make copper tubing we need for sinks. Very easy.”

  “All this stuff you’re showing me you don’t even need to go to college for. Doing this makes me forget everything I learn in school. Doing this makes me stupid. I don’t want to work here the rest of my life.”

  “You have to have some practical knowledge. You don’t want to learn Chinese, you don’t want to eat Chinese food, so you can learn how to fix floors. I only wish I learned something about car repair so I don’t get cheated.”

  My father hated being cheated, and always felt that everyone was out to trick him. He had taken his transistor radio apart and put it back together again so he could figure out how to fix electronics and not be fooled by technicians who charged more for labor than parts. Then they started using those modified screws that you needed a special screwdriver for. That was when my father stopped buying electronics. Our stereo consisted of an old radio and a turntable built into a bulky wooden cabinet upstairs. We only had two records — the sound-track of the original cast of “Oklahoma!” and Johnny Cash’s “I Walk The Line.” Johnny Cash was the first music I’d ever heard.

  I reached with my free hand for a clean new plank of wood and handed it to my father. Rotted wood, looking like strips of beef jerky, lay strewn around us on the floor, along with bent nails, pieces of cut-off pipe, and crushed beer cans from repairmen the previous owners had used. No one else was crazy enough to try to fix the place themselves.

  “See here,” said my father, tapping a plastic pipe over his head. “Repairman used plastic, not copper. Try to cheat.” It made him happy that no plumbers, electricians, or construction crews would be down here in the crawlspace while we owned the place.

  Two more new planks and the floor was fixed. We fixed five more floors before he let me go to sleep.

  Labor Day weekend was the traditional last hurrah for the Bennys. I saw Vincent as he was stuffing t-shirts into his car trunk. Patty, who had endured another summer and was still his girlfriend, was sitting up front on the passenger side.

  “Tough luck, no score for you this summer,” said Vincent. His eyes were red, and he was moving slow.

  “I got a girl to jerk me off,” I said.

  “Yeah, that’s a start. Something to build on. Just find some chick in school this year. They’re curious when they’re young.”

  “I got someone in mind.”

  “Who’s this?” he asked, wrapping an arm around my neck and walking me backwards. “Some unfuckable ugly-ass bitch?” Vincent was play-choking me, and his beer breath was knocking me out. He switched arms and shoved my nose into his sweaty, smelly armpit. Patty leaned on the horn. He loosened up on me.

  “This girl, she’s beautiful.” I stammered. The horn sounded a second time. Patty screamed something but the windows were up and she sounded like she was under water.

  “This shit again,” muttered Vincent, releasing me completely. “I tell ya, I come back next summer, that cherry on your cock better be gone. I’m not fuckin’ around, you know!”

  He dipped into a foam cooler and fished out an open can of beer.

  “Hey, you finish this,” he shouted at me, shoving the can into my gut. It was about half-empty. “Drink it!

  Don’t look at me like that. Fucking drink it, pussy!” I choked down my first beer. It tasted like foamy metal. “Thought I was going to have to lock you in the trunk

  to get you to drink up,” Vincent muttered as he stepped into the car.

  When the last day of the Labor Day weekend hit, the summer season was over. The town looked like a tornado warning was in effect and a massive evacuation was underway. Bennys piled into their cars and pointed them North for the fall, winter, and spring. Cars with New Jersey and New York license plates were lined up, smashed headlight to dented trunk. That was when the town released all its anger against the Bennys. Locals would line up along the highway that led back to the city with signs reading, “GO HOME, BENNYS!” and “GET THE HELL OUT!”

  I walked along the highway to the hardware store to get the type of AC adapter that screws into a light-bulb socket. My bike tire was out of commission, and I didn’t feel like fixing it now. There was too much broken glass on the road, and I was repairing so many flats, I felt like I was running a bike shop.

  A local man, wearing a Pac-Man Fever baseball cap, a tank top, and a tank-like belly, shouted across the bot-tled-up highway at me.

  “Hey, you fucking chink, you get the hell out of my town!”

  I stopped and stared at him. He smiled at me a little, then waved and turned back to the Bennys.

  My new teacher in the fall was Mr. Hendrickson. In the summer, he worked as a rent-a-cop pounding the boardwalk. Mr. Hendrickson showed authority as he weaved through pedestrian traffic, his huge frame sweeping through the boisterous crowds by the boardwalk games. I’d see him moving through people like a shark fin above water when I stopped at the boardwalk for a game of Berserk! or Space Invaders before going to the hardware store.

  But he also had to sweep up broken bottles, popsicle sticks, and other trash. That wasn’t too different from what I had to do. When he was young, he probably would have fit right in with the Bennys. Now, his sixfoot-six frame looked more bloated than brute. But there was no doubt that the man could do some damage, even in his overweight and graying state.

  About a week before school was going to start, as the Bennys were having their last shot at destroying our town, a mini-brawl had broken out on Mr. Hendrickson’s turf. Three shirtless, drunk guys were grappling with each other, knocking over folding chairs by the lemonade slush and cheesefries stand. Mr. Hendrickson stepped in and grabbed a Benny with each hand, but that left the third guy free. Mr. Hendrickson woke up flat on his back with two other rent-a-cops standing over him and a gash on his face that required stitches.

  I’d read about the incident in the paper. They’d put the story on the same page as the television listings. The name “Hendrickson” stood out because I knew he was going to be my teacher that fall. I saw the scar the first day of school. I thought a broken bottle would leave a circular mark, but instead there was a thin, crusty scab about two inches long that ran from the center of his forehead to the top of the bridge of his nose. The skin around it was puffy like a caterpillar.

  Mr. Hendrickson had a big St. Bernard’s head, jiggling jowls, and eyes that dripped behind glasses smudged with greasy fingerprints. He reeked of alcohol and cigarette smoke, like one of our hotel rooms, only we tried to cover the smell up with air fresheners. For some reason, he thought that nobody could hear what he said when he took his glasses off.

  “Now this is Greece and this is Italy,” Mr. Hendrickson said, circling all of Europe and the northern part of Africa with the skittering tip of his wooden pointer. “The Romans and the Greeks had philosophy and art. Sometimes they had to fight, too. They were some of the world’s most advanced civilizations ever. The United States has been around for only two centuries. We
probably won’t last as long as the Romans and the Greeks. We’ll probably be conquered by Japan or maybe even Mexico someday.”

  Then his glasses came off, and he rubbed each lens with his tie, muttering, “Goddamn, fucking bullshit. Tired of this shit.”

  The glasses popped back onto his face, as simple as on a Mr. Potatohead, and the lecture continued.

  “Mexico was the last country to invade the United States, not England, in the War of 1812. A lot of people don’t know that. It was Pancho Villa. And a lot of people talk about the bombing of Pearl Harbor. Hawaii wasn’t even a state yet! The next time the japs bomb the U.S., it’ll be San Francisco or Seattle. Definitely something on the West Coast.”

  The first week, all the kids were terrified by Mr. Hendrickson’s Dr. Jekyll/Mr. Hyde routine. But we soon realized he was harmless, and got used to it.

  I ignored the lectures because I read the right stuff in the textbook. The only thing that changed through the year with Mr. Hendrickson was that his scar healed into what looked like the fake stitches on a Nerf football.

  School was well underway, but summer wasn’t truly over until it was time to drain the pool. I sat in a battered pool chair next to Peter and Mrs. Fiorello, watching the noisy pump chug out water and flood the lawn.

  “What are you studying in school?” asked Mrs. Fiorello.

  “Greece.” It was only the second week, so I was really only fitting on book covers cut from shopping bags.

  “Yeah, the Greeks were the first civilized people in this world,” said Peter. “The buildings they put up back then are still standing now.”

  “How old are they?” asked Mrs. Fiorello.

  “Millions of years, from when dinosaurs were still around.”

  “The dinosaurs died out before there were people,” I corrected. Peter threw his hands up in the air. A small clump of ash from his cigar skittered across his bare chest.

  “Who’s to say, no one really knows,” said Peter. “It was way before I was born and way before you were born. They’ll be here long after we’re dead.” Steady splish-splashes from the pump continued to sound in the background.