I had twenty dollars in the bank and a beat up VW. But Richard had ascended and was speaking in tongues.
“This will all work just fine. We’re very pure right now, see? I can feel it. And as you will see, it will work because it will benefit us all. No greed here.”
“Look.” He held out his hand. “No worms crawling through the corpuli. Mortality is nixed. Life prevails. Hence success. For of this is the kingdom of heaven!”
It worked out thus: Richard had all the needed parts to repair the MG. The police would approve his offer of a meagre four hundred dollars because of his karma. I would turn over the VW to Brian (who desperately needed wheels to sustain his identity) for an affordable hundred bucks but keep the car in my name, thus possessing what every man of substance needs — collateral. Then I would go to a Household Finance office in the ghetto, where even my humble holdings of four rusty rims and a cracked windshield would command respect. I would, of course, be loaned the money and buy the car. It would be mine. We’d fix it communally. I would own it, allow Richard to drive it when I was indisposed or sacked out with my girl. Someday I would sell it to him at a substantial profit to myself. And happily ever afters. So who was I to deny vortex, Venn diagrams or vital need?
The truth is that I rather enjoyed Richard’s ebullience, his demeanour, and a chance to forget about my own hang-ups. What else did I have to look forward to? Fall without Melanie. In a couple of months she would be gone, if my worst fears proved true, and that fact hung like a dirty curtain in my face. Did I love her after all, after my doubts, my own inconsistencies? It simply didn’t matter. I needed her. We were magic. Our lovemaking beneath the MG fender and above the rust-seized four cylinders had given birth in some unforeseen way to Richard’s MG. The pieces fit tighter than the spokes in a sports car rim. I was close to believing this mystical balderdash. I knew, too, however, that we were all strapped onto the great Boethian Wheel and that the top spoke one day would find itself humbly on the bottom the next. We had passed the solstice, and I was trying to stare down over the curving rim of the Earth and predict the monsters at the bottom of the precipice.
Melanie was standing outside the theatre when I arrived. Carl had not yet appeared. The lights weren’t turned on yet, and it was nearing time to open the gates and set the wheels in motion for another evening of cinematic horrors. Melanie looked so strange beneath the street lamp in her short skirt and heavy makeup. She stood in a casual, sexy pose that didn’t fit the old Melanie I had first met. I parked across the street and walked toward her. She was talking to three young men in leather jackets and ducktails. James Dean clones with bad acne. She didn’t notice me at first and seemed to be having a good time. More social work?
But something was wrong here. I held back on the sidewalk and tried to pinpoint what it was. Her different way of standing, a looseness around the arms and the way she held her hips. She was chewing gum. When I walked up to her, she suddenly looked confused. It was as if someone had woken her from a dream, and she didn’t know where or who she was. The lads were giving me the dirties. I smiled at them. “Nice evening,” I said to the guy drilling me with his eyes.
“Nice teeth,” he said back to me. It sounded threatening.
Then Melanie turned back into Melanie. She smiled at the leather, said, “Good talking to you,” and took my arm. Carl had arrived in a huff and was unlocking the theatre door. In the stale warmth of the lobby, Melanie squeezed my arm and leaned heavily against me until her softness melted me into the carpet. It almost made me forget what I had just discovered: that I had fallen in love with a chameleon.
The leggy Venusians made their play again for Earth to a somewhat dissatisfied crowd. I was forced to lecture some rowdy thirteen-year-olds who were shooting spitballs through straws at the bald men in raincoats, that ever faithful audience of middle-aged men with horn-rim glasses and tan knee-length raincoats which were worn in all weather. In their almost official pervert uniform, they seemed forever baffled at the ending of our films, having been teased into the theatre by the lurid posters and ultimately disenchanted with the lack of skin. Most likely, they lacked the conviction to attend the real porno films down the street. We called them simply the pervs, but they seemed relatively harmless. One or two of them drank, but they were very quiet. Tonight they made me think of the guy who had died in the MG while futilely trying to navigate beyond his last telephone pole with a pair of undressed girls. But I think he had lived a life of a different calibre from these quiet, confused souls who were perhaps happy to simply cancel out their lives with a brief hour and twenty minutes in a dark theatre looking at someone else’s impossible problems.
“I make it a policy never to loan money to my staff,” Carl answered when I asked him for a loan of three hundred dollars. Carl was eminently approachable on all matters, and even though the time had not fully arrived for finding capital for the MG, I could feel the day was inevitable.
We were up in the projection booth, a ray gun of light dividing the darkness between us as it shot out of the projector lens and raced off, just as Einstein had predicted, to dissolve time and alter reality. “When you talk to me about money, Freddy boy, you have to understand we speak in different languages. I got to where I am today because I hoarded my minuscule savings. Once I was an usher like yourself. We showed bad movies. You think these are bad movies? We had worse. We had movies so bad that whole audiences demanded their money back. That was before the syndicates took over distribution. Then films got better. Only more expensive. In the old days we showed films that were done with spit and string. I loved them. In those days, everything was toy trains falling off cliffs, then close-ups of screaming faces. Hollywood was filled with actors whose only ability was to scream.”
I looked doubtful. I had asked for money and received a short history of the cinema. “You wanna know about screamers, I’ll tell you. They got paid five dollars a scream. Men got eight. Very few men could scream as well as women. All the screamers had to line up outside some schlock studio at eight in the morning, and if the directors were filming a screaming movie that day, some got work, some didn’t. They had to audition each time. You had a bad throat, you could go hungry.”
“How do you know so much about it? You weren’t a screamer yourself?”
Carl laughed. “I didn’t have the tonsils for it. But see, I graduated from usher to projectionist. I didn’t have my papers, but I did it anyway. The films were so bad, nobody cared if the picture was a little out of focus or anything. I sometimes chewed up whole copies of bad movies with a lousy threading job. The world was a better place for it, believe me. And all the while I was saving my capital. That’s what you need, Fred, capital. Anybody can spit shine a thousand dollars into a hundred grand these days. I woulda saved up quite a wad if it hadn’t been for her.” He nodded his head toward the beam of light passing between us. The noisy projector kept grinding frame by frame. Somewhere down below, Ricky Nelson was singing in the shower again. Michael Rennie was in the skies overhead plotting how to gain control of the planet he needed.
“Her?”
“She. I saw her from up here. In the movies. A tiny bit part. I stopped the film right in the middle, with all the stupid audience wondering what was up. I wound it back a bit and saw her again. I was in love. You think I’m a smart man now, but back then I was stupid. Ask me how stupid I was.”
I declined the rhetorical engagement and shrugged.
“I quit my job and went looking for her. Her,” he said, pointing at the beam of light again. “She didn’t even have a name. She wasn’t in the credits, and the syndicate had closed down the studio she worked at.”
“How did you find her?”
“The lineups. I hit every studio in Southern California — six o’clock in the a.m. This is what love does to you. I pretended I was one of them.”
“Them?”
“The screamers. I was no good at it, but
they even hired me once for a stand-in shot. There were very few good men. For eight dollars I stood in front of a camera. The director says, ‘All right, now, cut loose. An airplane is about to crash into your apartment building, a commercial plane, twin props. It’s so close you can see the spaghetti on the chin of the pilot. Now scream!’ So I screamed as if I was about to die, and it put money in my pocket for a few days. It was thanks to a few of the others that I eventually tracked her down. She had lost her ability to do good screams. Young girls coming in from the country who had been brought up yelling at horses and pigs, they were out-screaming her. She didn’t stand a chance. I found her at a little bar where the down-and-out screamers hung out.
“When I told her I had come all the way from up north and the other side of the continent, she looked at me, then smiled and said, ‘Well, it’s about time.’ She had been waiting for someone to fall in love with her from the movies. And there I was. I had to start over again to accumulate my capital, though.”
“Prince Charming awakens Sleeping Beauty.”
“Well, not quite. You know how it goes. She got her voice back after the tonsillectomy. I liked the way she screamed in bed. It was the other times, when she was shattering beer glasses from across the room, that it got rough. But don’t get me wrong. Love is love. I fell in love with a woman who had volume, and that’s what I wanted. No one can say we lived a quiet life, and thank God for that.”
He was really quite proud of this story. I enjoyed hearing it and I couldn’t help thinking how he was the better man of the two of us. I wasn’t sure if I could stop Melanie from slipping away to that other coast of dreams, but Carl had gone out and grabbed what he wanted. He always struck me as a very proud man — odd, but never lonely. Arrogant, but never miserable.
As I was walking back to my neglected duties, he pulled me over and shoved a wadded pair of bills into my palm. “Take your girlfriend out. Show her a nice time. And remember, always buy lubricated rubbers. It saves a lot of problems. If you see what I mean.”
I didn’t, but I thanked him for the money. It would go to a good cause. I hurried down the steps and popped through the door back into the lobby. Melanie was looking out toward the street. Someone was walking away from her, someone just at the very edge of my vision. He moved in a strange way, hobbling — no, hopping — and on crutches. Melanie turned around, wiggled her fingers hello and smiled, her soft, sad eyes drawing me over to her. We kissed through the glass, our lips separated by the tempered bullet-proof window. Our hot breath clouded up both sides. I looked deep into her eyes and knew again that she was everything I needed.
Then it was back into the theatre, where I had to subdue a popcorn fight and calm the irate pervs, who were missing the part where Slim Pickens orders the attack, then takes a swig of Old Granddad from the bottle in the top drawer of his desk. When things had quieted down, I returned to my sentinel stance at the rear of the movie house. A young guy and a girl, maybe only twelve years old, were necking in the last row, oblivious to the fate of the Earth, totally unaware of my presence. I watched them for a full minute, wondering what it must be like to be so young and to be kissing, thinking about myself at that age — always in love with all the wrong, impossible girls, always drifting in a wasteland of unrequited emotion and hopeless despair. I wondered which of the two kids would inevitably (if temporarily) destroy the other, or if it was possible for them to weather the ravages of high school together, remain faithful and end up happily ever after. That seemed as likely as the Venusian spider people invasion.
The movie was ending. The house lights, controlled by Carl up in his projection booth, were coming on in that abrupt “Good night, get out” manner that he had perfected over the years. The kissing kids were unperturbed, still cheating time out of its due as best they could. As I started to look away, I caught the eye of one of the bald-tops in a raincoat. He was halfway across the theatre from me and also looking at the kids. When he spotted me, there was, in his face, an instant recognition of a kindred spirit. He smiled and put on his hat. I could almost hear him say, “Welcome to the club.”
The Plastic Fantastic Lover Meets Mr. Lonely
By the end of July, Brian was still without a car or an identity. He was having a tough time, but recovering. Richard had failed in his attempt to collect compensation for his injury, and I was shouldering his portion of the rent. His almost non-existent savings left him barely enough for peanut butter, his only form of sustenance. Once in a while he would lose control and buy a giant can of baked beans. Then, pretending to be the most generous soul alive, he’d offer to share them with Brian and me. “Dinner for three, my treat.”
Melanie and I saw each other often throughout the month, but things were on the downhill. She seemed quiet and depressed, and I became the same. Nothing could quite snap us out of whatever was wrong. It wasn’t anything I could pin down. Our relationship had become a chore to her, I think, and I should have cut it off. But I wanted her to be around, not just then, but in the fall as well. I couldn’t stand the thought of losing her.
We had made love just once during the month. It was the only night I could persuade her to come back to Apartment X. Brian and Richard were supposed to be gone for the night, but Richard showed up at ten-thirty in a sour mood. He did his damnedest to keep us from being alone, but I finally took Melanie back to my room and shut Richard out.
Even then, it wasn’t the same. We were going through the motions.
On the last day of July, Melanie asked me if I would drive her to visit her parents again, and I agreed. I wasn’t looking forward to the visit but hoped we could sort out our problems in the car. I had a plan to draw us back together.
“Fred, it’s just that I want something more out of a relationship.” She was slouched against the passenger’s door, a recently acquired habit. Since the door had a history of flying open around curves, I had even installed a bathroom-door bolt on the inside, and I locked it each time we drove anywhere.
“I feel trapped,” she said at last. Maybe installing the lock was overdoing it.
“I’m ready to do whatever you want. I love you. You know that.” I had begun to use that line all too often these days. She never returned it, and each time it went unpaired, I felt a little grenade of phosphoric acid go off inside me.
“We’re just not growing in our relationship,” she added. God, I hated that word: relationship.
I had become more aware of the icebergs sidling between us. The harder I tried to fend them off, the further in they drifted. I wanted us to become closer again, and I was starting to use tactics. Tactics always meant the end of something.
“Take a look at this.” I handed her the brochures I had sent for. Government-sponsored student organizations were looking for people to send overseas to work in poverty-stricken villages. They needed teachers, counsellors, hospital assistants. Melanie looked at the brochures and shook her head.
“All we need is one year of university, then we’re eligible. They’ll even place us together. Ethiopia, Botswana, Bolivia, Micronesia. You name it.” Melanie opened the booklet to a picture of a shirtless, razor-ribbed man hoeing a row of pathetic corn in a desolate wasteland. She started to cry.
“You can stay here and go to school with me. I’m sure they’ll let you in late. They need the students.”
She just kept shaking her head.
I was trying too hard. All the wrong moves. The entire Antarctic Ocean stretched between us there in the front seat of the Volkswagen.
“Love is never having to say you have to use the bathroom,” I said to her, trying to lighten things. I pulled into a Gulf station, lifted the hood, and asked the guy for ten bucks’ worth of regular. When I came back out of the can, Melanie was all smiles.
“Fred, you’re the sanest human being I know.” She kissed me and then drove her tongue deep into my ear; the sound of her breathing shot straight down my spine.
“Freddy wants me to go off to Botswana with him,” Melanie teased.
“Botswana,” he repeated, his face trying to find an appropriate expression for something he didn’t understand.
“It’s a small country in Africa,” I assured him.
He couldn’t quite fake the smile.
“What about your scholarship? Your school? Everything’s set.” He followed her into the kitchen, where she had gone to raid the refrigerator. I kept up my end of the procession.
“Don’t worry,” she told him as she hauled yesterday’s roast chicken out of the fridge, “I wouldn’t miss that for the world.” He looked satisfied and turned to smile at me again.
Aside from the Botswana issue, I could tell that he still wanted to like me. But now I realized that my plans for lashing Melanie down to this coast were hopeless. I had never heard that conviction in her voice before. As she slammed the door to the refrigerator, the icebergs caught up to us. I walked out of the kitchen and went to sit down in the overstuffed living room, where I cracked open a copy of Legion magazine and read an article on how the buildup of even more nuclear weapons would indeed stave off World War III. I suddenly seemed to get some pleasure from the thought of all those deadly weapons lying about endangering the whole planet. Misery loves company.
I couldn’t hear anything from the kitchen, but Melanie was having a long talk with her father, and I wanted to leave her alone. I turned on the tube and watched a half hour of Fred Flintstone and Barney Rubble. I was lying there on the sofa when Melanie’s mother came home.
The Summer of Apartment X Page 8