She didn’t seem to mind my first two visits, leading me into a distant closet where her boyfriend, the invisible caretaker, had been storing dirty jogging shoes for the better part of a decade. Four fuses sustained the whole edifice, as it turned out, and given the eccentric, crowded configuration of apartments in our happy home, I figured that my own blown fuse was enough to incapacitate thirty percent of the summer transients in town. My hostess’s name was Ella, and she cultivated that bored, sexy look familiar to any male who studied the women in magazine cigarette ads. I liked Ella because she was genuinely flattered by the way I found pleasure in the way she looked — wet and wrapped up in a towel. Even though she treated me like a kid, I felt a certain rapport. On my third trip back, however, she was getting tired of my pestering.
“If you want to look, I’m going to start charging admission. And what’s Huey gonna say when he sees you’ve used up all his fuses?”
Little did she realize that I had just come within inches of electrocution at the hands of that blasted toaster. I honestly thought I had unplugged it, but when I went rooting around for a lost screw with my Phillips head, I set off an arcing current that vaulted out of the toast slot toward the ceiling like ball lightning. It was starting to look like a dangerous day all around. I had clearly fried the toaster, one of the summer’s few luxuries. Brian, on his diet of bread and sauces, would be the one to suffer most. I would have to seek out a replacement.
“Look, slugger, call it quits with the appliance repair, okay? You just weren’t cut out for it.” Ella had popped open a can of beer. “Replace your bloody fuse, then sit down. It’s your lucky day. I’m open for free advice. Me to you. No charge.”
“Gee, thanks.” I tried to sound like a kid. That’s the way she wanted me to sound, so what the hell. Beaver Cleaver. I installed the last thirty-amp fuse, a full fifteen amps above fire code, but it was the only one there below forty. Had I lit up the toaster with one of those babes in place, I might not have been around to report all this.
“Well. What did ya wanna know?” Ella perched on a kitchen stool and crossed her legs.
“Okay, like, what does it all mean?” I wanted to start with the big stuff and work my way down.
“Jesus, don’t be a twerp. You want philosophy like that, you better look up Norman Vincent Peale. I was, like, thinking you just might wanna know some things, a young kid like you and an older woman like me.” I’m sure she was pushing twenty-four. She reminded me of Lauren Bacall in those old movies. She offered me a sip of her beer. I declined.
I had already confronted death once today, and life (the meaning of) seemed to be off course. “Tell me about the night showerers.” The rest of the apartment house was still a mystery to me. Even though the building was noisy at most hours of the day and night, I almost never saw any of the other tenants. They seemed to come and go by helicopter.
“We’re a funny breed of people, those of us who live here,” she began.
“My friends and I are not among your breed?” I asked cautiously, wanting to get my definitions straight.
“Shoot, no. Only nerds and cockroaches can survive in Apartment X. No human being would put up with it.”
“Continue, then.” I didn’t want to have to pin her down as to the category I fit in.
“Look, Freddy — can I call you Freddy? — it’s like this. We who live here, the night showerers you refer to, are a people who live life from the inside out.” She stretched her arms out from her chest, fists curled, tempting the towel to let go. I later learned that could never happen. She had been born with it; it was part of her anatomy. “Some people sit around waiting for life to happen to them. They let gravity do all the work. They go to bed early, they never drink too much, they save money, they have no debts, they get colds and take antihistamines. They don’t smoke dope, and they take continuing education courses in their spare time. Thumbs down?”
“Thumbs down.”
“Then there are the rest of us, who want to burn a hole into the night, every flaggin’ night of the year. We happen. We make it all happen. We burn hard and fast and long until it’s the middle of the goddamn night and we’re all burned out. Then we have to wash our dishes and take a shower. Just so we don’t stink.
“I’m not tryin’ to say that we’re better than most people. We just don’t like putting up with too much shit. And we don’t pay gravity his dues. Well, maybe a little. One p.m. comes around, I crawl out of this hall, walk three blocks to the beach, lie down on a blanket and fall asleep. By five o’clock, I’ve pushed gravity back into the earth, and I’m ready to eat fire.”
“How do you do it?”
“Basic training, my dear Watson.”
“Maybe I’ll learn.”
She shook her head and sucked on the beer. “No, you’re not one of us. You’ll never remain at 307½ Hibiscus. You’ll leave Apartment X behind you. You’ll go off to a concrete college somewhere with oak trees, you’ll think you fall in love, and you’ll do the inevitable. You’ll never return to this place. You’ll never live life from the inside out. Because you don’t know how. And never will. Look at you. You haven’t even tried to put the make on me. Enough of this shit. Too much free advice. Next time I charge.”
She stood up and walked toward me, put her arms out full length and began to march me to the door as if I were a little boy. “Goodbye, soldier. See you in the trenches.”
When we reached the door, I didn’t open it but turned around quickly, and her momentum brought us together up against the wood. I kissed her hard and somewhat inaccurately on the lips, and she stumbled backwards, blinking and baffled.
Then I was out the door, closing it behind me, afraid that she would collect herself and smack me in the face. I could still taste her breath of stale beer and cigarette ash, the necessary octane that helped her to live her life from the inside out. She shouted something at me: “Don’t let gravity get you, kid.” I returned below to the world of nerds and cockroaches.
The first thing I did was take a shower, clothes and all, on the way in. I used the stubs of soap that had been clogging the drain for weeks. A day showerer at heart and a despiser of laundromats, the combination was prudent and economical. I would then hang my dripping clothes on a line over the toilet bowl, where they would play Chinese music for several hours.
But as I slogged in the door, I found Richard bent over a bowl of corn flakes in the kitchen. Despair was written all over his spoon.
“VD?”
He shook his head.
“Lung cancer?”
He spooned onward.
“Don’t tell me the network has cancelled Star Trek?”
“Dump it off a cliff.”
“Sorry. I was just up to my eyebrows in close encounters. What happened?”
“My job. Kaput.”
“Firing squad?”
“No blindfold.”
I thought of the morning’s omen of spilled ointment. “Do you want to talk about it?”
Richard took another mouthful of soggy Kellogg’s and spit freely as he recounted the morning. “Murray was sick, and I was posted on 47th Street by my lonesome, with tanned, lithe bodies all around, the water too cold for swimming but the air hot, reeking of Bain de Soleil and squeaking with anticipation. Already three foxes had asked me for the time, two for the water temperature, and one wanted to know if there was an abortion clinic in town. To my left, however, spread like margarine and melting peanut butter along the sand, was the Unfailingly Flatulent Fat Family. They turned out to be Alderman Harold Geiss and his esteemed wife, Estelle, along with several garrulous offspring. Mr. Geiss, as we of course would not know until the climax of the drama, is a powerful man around the city council locker room and has something to do with setting in motion the writing of cheques to summer lifeguards.”
“The inevitable Mr. Geiss.”
“Inebri
ated as well.” Richard paused, slurped the remainder of the milk in his dish and poured more corn flakes from the rooster box into his bowl. At least the crisis had not prompted anorexia.
“I was all alone up there on my ivory tower watching the beach fill up for the day, humming a mantra from an old Jan and Dean album, when I saw Craig Laski, next block over, standing on his guard chair and semaphoring to me for something. I never did get the damn signals straight, but I tried to make out the letters. I removed my shades and leaned to starboard. Suddenly my feet slid away, and I was in free fall over spaceship earth with an alderman as the only available mattress.”
“Mr. Geiss was not receptive to your attentions?”
“Mr. Geiss apparently owned weak kidneys to boot. He peed himself. His pubescents were amused. He was not. I broke my frigging ankle as well. Caught it on the chair in the descent. Law enforcement was dispatched. They carried me to the hospital, then to my director’s office. Termination. Without honour. You are looking at a man unemployed.”
“I’m sorry.”
“‘Love is not having to say you’re sorry.’”
“And reality is a crutch?” I pointed to the cast around the ankle and foot, the walking props leaning against the stove.
So I sat around commiserating with Richard for as long as I could stand it, adjusting my dripping laundry as it played koto and lute. Richard began to stare deep into the charred slots of the burned-out toaster, so I offered to get drunk with him, but he declined, said he just wanted to sit in his room for a while, maybe tinker at the rust-seized engine with the black light on for a bit. For once I was confident that Richard’s ego could fit into his tiny bedroom.
“Come to the movie tonight, Rich. First night of Spider People from Venus.” I handed him a free pass. I had been looking forward to the movie myself. And, of course, Melanie. I would get to see Melanie again. I would get to walk her home and kiss her once in front of The Laurels. I couldn’t bring her home to the rat’s hole on a night like this. It would push Richard over the edge. But at least I could be with her for some of the night. Melanie. I searched myself thoroughly for the reassurance that I still loved her. It was still there but fading, like the last line of a Four Tops song repeated over and over until there was no sound but an insistent whisper.
Out at the curb, I successfully re-installed the tiny brushes into the alternator of my four-cylinder engine. I knew that Richard would be hard-pressed to find another job this summer, and the chances of receiving compensation for his accident seemed slim. I thought of sending him up to Ella but feared that she could be cruel and kick his ego further into the basement. And we had all questioned what could possibly exist beneath Apartment X. Packed earth, possibly, or a dark shaft direct to Hell.
Melanie, Behind Glass
A sour wind was blowing by evening, bringing in heavy, obstinate weather with the promise of rising tides, battered seaside bulkheads and flooded basements. Richard hobbled out to my Volkswagen on his wooden crutches. I had left both windows down, and the seats were soaked. We sat on old copies of MAD magazine that had been filed in the back seat, left over from the previous owner of the car, a friend of my mother’s who was moving to Calgary to start a new life as an electrolysis specialist. Apparently she anticipated a lot of unwanted facial hair in Calgary. I had paid her a mere hundred bucks for the German wheels and the complimentary five years of back issues of MAD.
Richard had become acidic and was in the mood for finding fault with the world. Who could blame him?
“What sucker named this road Hibiscus, anyway?” he asked the flickering street lights.
“Telephone poles littering the skyline. Look at all this crap. Two-bit town. I’ll sue the bastards.” The glove compartment flew open, spewing maps and spare carburetor parts all over his lap. “Freddy boy, this is quite the little rolling house of horrors you have here. One of these days you should buy yourself an automobile. Where’d you ever find this piece of shit, anyway?”
“Easy, buster. You’ll be out walking.”
“Me, walk? Hah! I’ll limp for the rest of my life. Cut down in my prime. Sexless. Joyless. Poke out my eyes, see if I care.”
“Cut the melodrama.” My left windshield wiper had fallen useless as I turned the corner onto Chrysanthemum Street. I had run this gauntlet before and knew what to do. I had to get out and tie my shoelaces to the wiper. I handed one strand to Richard through his window and pulled the other in on the driver’s side. We had to leave the windows down so we could pull the wiper back and forth as I drove. There were only a few more blocks to go, but we both got blasted by the storm where we sat until we were soaked and shivering. I turned the heat up full blast so that we could get the full effect from the heater tubes, which sucked hot air almost directly from the exhaust pipe. The Germans had done this on purpose, hoping to exterminate a whole generation of young North Americans too poor to own American transportation with hot water core heaters.
“Fred, you sure know how to treat a fella on a first date.”
“Screw you.”
“Never on a first date. Turn down there, Fred. A phone. I have to call home. My mother will wonder what I’ve been up to. And my pop, away in the Balkans negotiating international rights to North American patents. I need news from the hearth.”
So I stopped in front of a seemingly bomb-blasted phone booth and emptied Richard out into the night. The rain had stopped, and the wind was giving up. Everything glistened.
Richard plunked quarters and dimes into the phone, and then I heard him on the line talking to his mother. It was a tough part of town. Cheap bars, seedy little hotels, porno book shops and peep shows. Most vacationing suburbanites would drive miles out of their way to avoid this territory. A couple of probable pimps and/or drug pushers lined up at the phone booth. “Hey, stick man, you’re tying up our business phone.”
Richard was unmoved.
Finally he hung up, and the phone began to ring immediately. A tall, thin man in black corduroy bell-bottoms picked it up.
“Hopalong, it’s for you. Ma Bell says you owe a dollar.”
“Tell her to stick it in her ear,” Richard shouted back. It was his night for hostility.
“You heard your client,” Corduroy told the operator, then hung up. After three tries on my nearly dead battery, I got the car started, and we rolled off. The knot of hustlers by the phone whistled as we drove away.
“What’s new at home?”
“I missed lasagna for dinner. Fred, you Cossack, why did you tempt me away from my happy home life? What did I ever do to you?”
“It was your idea.”
“If I told you to jump off a building, would you do it?”
“It depends.”
Richard smiled. There was water sloshing around beneath the rubber mats as we drove through some flooded dips in the street. “Let’s change the subject. Look around you. The very dregs of humanity. Someday you and I will be out there, Freddy, in the city of parlours. We’ll be worldly. There’ll be a novel in it somewhere. We’ll sell film rights. And monsters. It would be easy enough to find monsters here.”
I wondered if Melanie had ever been far enough away from The Laurels to see this end of town. Richard was right about the parlours. Pizza parlours, tattoo parlours, massage parlours — even one with a large marquis that proclaimed, “The Medium is the Massage”: Marshall McLuhan on skid row. Beauty parlours offering wax treatments and hair straightening. Beer parlours and dark mysterious cocktail lounges. Was this the world that Ella’s people would slink off to in the night? I suddenly had a deep urge to become familiar with it, to make it my own. If I so decided, Richard would be right there with me. The future good life, down the tubes. I, too, would lose my job, become a sleazebag, spend my life lounging in lounges, parlouring in parlours, hanging around busted-up phone booths waiting to make some connection. It wouldn’t be hard.
“I know just what you’re thinking, and I’m with you.”
“No way, Dick.”
“When we’re old and civilized, you’ll be sorry.”
With that I gunned it straight to the Queen, arriving less than three minutes late. The hard-core first-nighters were queuing up. Melanie was behind glass. I rushed in, put on my uniform and checked the batteries in the flashlight. Richard said he just wanted to sit in the car for a while before going in. I saw him hunched down in the VW, looking at Melanie, waiting for the line to disappear. Waiting for a chance to get at her.
Spider People from Venus and the Night of the Holy Fender
Spider People from Venus starred Diane Proscuitto and Ricky Nelson, with Slim Pickens, my perennial favourite, as the Air Force colonel from Texas who tries to save the world and ends up blowing it to kingdom come. In truth, the spider people weren’t that bad, all things considered. They just happened to look and act like spiders, but they could sort of stand upright and talk to each other with voices that made them sound as if they were yapping through giant trash cans. They, of course, wanted to get off Venus, which was getting too damn hot for even their well-being. They wanted to live amicably among Earth folk. One male spider person, played by Michael Rennie, even fell in love with the tempting Diane Proscuitto, only to have seven of his legs shot off by Ricky Nelson, who followed the violence by singing a song we were all familiar with. (It was hoped that the film had a little something for everyone.) There was a goodly bit of love interest; all of the characters, except for Slim Pickens and an ill, aging spider patriarch, seemed to be teenagers with hairstyles right off Bandstand. There was, alas, no dancing in the film, a sore point for many in the audience. In the end, Slim Pickens ordered the launching of dozens of nuclear missiles aimed at Venus. Venus, however, in its newly eccentric orbit, was falling toward the sun anyway and didn’t need such charity from its sister planet. There turned out to be a few problems with the guidance systems in the missiles, both Russian and American in this case, and Pickens had not taken into account the “lateral magnaforce polarity reversal effect on Terran digi-gyrosystems.”
The Summer of Apartment X Page 5