“I see.” Ralph lightly touches Clyde’s arm. “Look, why don’t you stay at my place until—”
Clyde arches an eyebrow. “Is there room?”
“Sure, plenty of room. You can have your own bed and everything. I promise, no funny stuff. Strictly friends. And no pressures about the film.”
“Well, yeah… it’s not like I have a lot of choice in the matter. I mean, after all, who ever heard of Marilyn Monroe sleeping rough?”
“Exactly, good. Then, it’s done.” Ralph takes Clyde by the hand. “Come on, let’s go.” He leads him to a black Nissan 300ZX parked at the kerb next to an expired metre halfway up Wilcox. A parking citation pinned under one of the wipers flutters in the wind. Ralph snatches it off the windscreen, turns it into confetti, and tosses the pieces into the wind.
Clyde lets out a hoarse little scream. “What are you doing? Are you crazy? What if the owner sees you?”
Ralph pulls a set of keys out of his pocket and jangles them in front of Clyde’s nose. “I am the owner.”
* * *
Clyde follows Ralph into a dimly lit, spacious, cluttered loft apartment with cathedral ceilings, brick walls, unpolished wood floors, and a mismatched collection of oriental rugs.
“Be right back.” Ralph drops his backpack on a red velour ottoman and heads straight to a doorway at the far end of the room. “Make yourself at home,” he says over his shoulder.
Clyde finds the dimmer switch on the wall and increases the lighting, then wanders around the apartment examining Ralph’s collection of expensive gadgets, cameras and film equipment, musical instruments, state-of-the-art computers, and movie posters. A massive mirror mounted on a far wall catches Clyde’s attention. He strolls toward it, passing what looks like a table shrine on top of which sits a single burning votive candle next to a silver-framed photograph of a sallow-skinned boy. Hanging on the wall above the shrine are two black-framed photographs, one of a swarthy young man in a dark green military uniform and one of a sombre-faced woman wearing a dark blue blouse, her black, kinky hair pinned into a bun.
Ralph walks back into the room carrying a couple of bottles of San Pellegrino.
“My God,” Clyde says, disengaging from the table shrine, “this place is fantastic.”
“Thanks.” Ralphs sets the bottles on the coffee table. “Welcome to my sanctuary.”
“Where did you get all this stuff?”
“As you can see, I’m no Robin Hood.” He takes the beer mugs from the biker bar out of his backpack and finds a place for them on a shelf. Clyde lets out a gasp and stares at him in disbelief.
“You didn’t steal this stuff, did you?”
“Not all of it; just most of it.”
Clyde holds his purse tight against his chest.
“What?” Ralph says.
“Stealing’s disgusting.” Clyde looks around the room and shakes his head.
“Is it?”
“Don’t tell me,” Clyde says, “you grew up penniless and had to steal to survive. Boo hoo hoo. Poor little victim.”
“Nope, that’s not it at all.” He takes a sip from one of the bottles and sets it down noisily on the table.
“So… you’re what?” Clyde says. “Full-time student; part-time thief?”
“No, actually, I’m both a full-time student and a full-time thief. They’re two of my lifelong obsessions, and I’m excellent at both.”
Clyde snorts. “Are you really?”
“Yep.”
“And all this time nobody’s ever caught you?”
“Only once when I was a kid.”
Clyde kicks Ralph’s shin. “Only once, my ass. If you got caught, how excellent can you be?”
“The only reason I got caught that time was because I broke the cardinal rule of theft.”
“You turned yourself in?”
“Ha ha. No; but just about. I stole something from people I knew.”
“What kind of something?”
“Antique silver. Priceless stuff. By the time they figured out it was me, I’d already pawned it at some hole-in-the-wall shop downtown.”
Clyde rolls his eyes. “Why are you even telling me all this? I’m a total stranger.”
“Because you’re my friend, and friends trust each other.”
Clyde leans in and says in the breathy voice, “Jimmy?” He traces an infinity sign on Ralph’s hairy arm. “I hope you won’t be offended if I say I think you’re full of ca-ca. You might trust me, but I sure as shit don’t trust you. Even less now than before.”
Ralph pulls back his arm. “You will one day, I hope.”
“It’s not likely.” Clyde gazes into the electric blue of Ralph’s eyes, which are still shining from the alcohol. “I haven’t found anyone I could trust in twenty years. But you’re welcome to try.”
Clyde moves away from Ralph and drops into the sofa, exhausted from the day. Ralph sits next to him and kicks off his trainers.
“So you’re a fucking thief…” Clyde echoes after a moment. “Just my luck.”
“Yep.” Ralph stretches deliciously and drapes his legs across Clyde’s lap. “I also practice a bit of credit card fraud, some forgery, and occasionally I pass bad checks.”
“Uh, huh…” Clyde pushes off Ralph’s legs and stands. “Your family must be mighty proud of you.”
“They don’t know about it. Except for that time about the silver.” He stares at the ceiling. “It was a big deal. Court, probation, even counselling.”
“A lot of good that did you…” Clyde sits opposite Ralph in an alligator skin club chair.
“Yeah, tell me about it,” Ralph says.
Clyde pulls out his fan and flips it open. “Why do you do it?”
“What, the stealing? It’s an impulse. You know how some people buy things on impulse, right? They see something they like, and they buy it whether they can afford it or not. Other people eat on impulse. Other peoples are mean or sarcastic to the people they love on impulse.”
Clyde nods.
“I steal on impulse whether I need what I’m taking or not. Simple as that.”
“Don’t you ever feel guilty?”
“At first I did. Each time I swore I’d never steal again. But I’d always end up doing it again anyway.” He sits up. “I used to be religious; I hoped God would help me stop.”
“But he didn’t,” Clyde whispers.
Ralphs spreads his hands at his collection of stolen objects and shrugs. “There is no God.”
Clyde jumps to his feet. “How could you ever possibly know that? Even Einstein believed in God. Are you smarter than him?”
“I don’t know. Maybe. Anyway, I don’t feel guilty anymore. I wouldn’t be able to live that way. I’ve purposely seared my conscience.”
Clyde stares at Ralph and shakes his head. Then, as if heeding some unheard call, he disengages from the conversation and wanders away. Ralph studies him as he strolls aimlessly around the loft.
Circling back when he reaches a wall of books, Clyde cuts his eyes at something over Ralph’s shoulder. Ralph turns to see what Clyde is looking at, and his heart jumps at the blur of Clyde speeding past him.
Clyde pulls up in front of the large mirror and reaches out a hand. Ralph approaches from behind and watches as Clyde giggles and strikes a few random poses, kicking up his leg and checking out his ass in the mirror. He concludes by blowing a kiss at his reflection and turning around, smiling playfully at Ralph.
“I think I like it here.”
Ralph draws a deep breath and nods. “OK… fine. As they say: ‘Mi casa es su casa’. Grab your purse. I’ll show you where you’ll be sleeping.”
Clyde follows him across the main room toward a staircase leading up to the mezzanine.
“What’s this?” Clyde asks as they pass the table with the photographs.
“That’s my memorial shrine.”
Clyde stops and passes his finger along the edge of the table. “Who are these people?”
“They�
��re my victims.” Ralph picks up the photograph of the young boy and stares at it. “People I hurt badly.”
Clyde examines the photos on the wall.
“This is both a memorial to each of them and a reminder,” Ralph says.
Clyde looks at Ralph. “A reminder of what?”
“To be careful with people, I guess.” He shrugs and places the photo of the boy back on the table. “Stealing’s one thing. Hurting people is another.”
Clyde barks a short laugh.
“What’s so funny?”
“I don’t see a difference, sorry. When you steal something, you’re hurting the owner and maybe other people too, especially if you steal something they cherish. That’s the case regardless of whether you’re Robin Hood or Jesse James.”
Ralph blinks at Clyde. “I never made you out to be a moralist.”
“You don’t know me at all, Jimmy.”
“Guess not.”
“What if I were to turn you in?”
Ralph shrugs. “If you do, you do; I guess I’d deserve it. But I don’t think you will.”
Clyde shakes his head. “Anyway…” He inclines his head at the shrine. “Who are they exactly?”
“I’ll tell you some other time when we know each other a little better.” Ralph moves to the staircase. “Come on; it’s getting late.” He races upstairs.
Clyde trudges up the stairs to the mezzanine on which is positioned a king-size waterbed with a black-lacquered headboard, a matching chest of drawers, and a writing table. Ralph flips on the recessed lighting and nods at an illuminated opening in the back wall.
“You can sleep inside there. It’s a kind of guest hutch. It should be comfortable enough.”
Clyde drops to his knees in front of the hutch and peers inside. He sees a clean, dressed twin mattress that extends well into the wall and a couple of puffy pillows. A mixed media mural of shattered mirrors and pornographic images covers the walls and ceiling of the hutch. Clyde glances back at Ralph, who is unbuttoning his jeans.
“Inside here?”
“Yep, crawl in there when you’re ready to hit the sack. Ignore the dirty pictures. They’re courtesy of my last guest.”
Ralph strips to his briefs and Clyde averts his eyes and looks back into the hutch. “Uh… I don’t know. I might never fall asleep.” He crawls inside the hutch, which is barely large enough for him to sit up without banging his head against the ceiling, and tests the mattress. “I’ll try my best.” He pokes his head out of the hutch, his eyes tightly shut. “Goodnight, Jimmy. Thank you.” Then he pulls back inside. A few moments later his blouse flies out of the opening, followed by a brassiere and a pair of jeans.
Ralph dims the lights. He moves to a CD player and plays Siegfried at low volume. Clyde pokes his head out of the hutch again and watches as Ralph slips on a pair of tortoiseshell horn-rimmed glasses and sits at his writing desk. He reaches into the bottom drawer and pulls out a metal strongbox that he places on the desk. Then he extracts a notebook from the box and writes in it.
“What are you doing?” Clyde asks.
Ralph jumps, and the pen clatters out of his hand. “Jesus H Christ, you scared me.” He retrieves the pen and looks over his shoulder at Clyde. “I’m starting work on the treatment for the film project we talked about.”
“You were serious about that?”
Ralph swings around and faces Clyde. “Of course I was. I think it’s a great idea. Don’t you?”
“Maybe your treatment should be about stealing stuff instead. I once heard the best stuff to write about is the stuff you know best. You don’t know anything about what it’s like to be reincarnated. But you obviously know a lot about being a thief. So maybe you should just make it about that and leave me out of it. I can find some other way of getting people to recognise me.”
Ralph stares at Clyde, then lowers his gaze to the floor. After a moment, he looks up at Clyde. “What if I really do believe I’m James Dean reincarnated?”
Clyde narrows his eyes at Ralph. “Do you?”
Ralph shrugs. “It’s possible, isn’t it?”
Clyde sits up. “Everything is recycled; that’s what I believe. Even people. So, yes, it’s possible. But there has to be some evidence. You can’t just wake up one day and say: ‘Hey, I think I’m the reincarnation of James Dean’. That would be crazy.”
Ralph scratches his head with his pen. “What sort of evidence?”
Clyde yawns and rubs his eyes. “I don’t know, Jimmy. You’ll have to work that out yourself.”
Ralph nods and turns back to his writing.
“Jimmy?”
“Yes?”
“I didn’t mean that I think you’re crazy. I just think you’re confused, you know, with the stealing and all that.”
Ralph pulls a tight smile, his back still turned to Clyde. “Thank you.”
“See you tomorrow, Jimmy.”
“Yes. Goodnight.”
Clyde crawls back into the hutch, and Ralph sits for a few moments staring at his notebook. Then he flips it shut and turns off the lights.
* * *
Clyde finds himself in a vast, black formless space. His face is plastered in white pancake and rouge, his hair is perfectly coifed, and he is dressed in a floor-length pink satin evening gown that hangs off his shoulders.
Suddenly, Ralph materialises from out of nowhere and strides up to within inches of his face. He rips off Clyde’s evening gown with a single, violent tug, leaving him standing naked and trembling. Clyde raises his arms defensively, and Ralph vanishes.
A massive full-length mirror appears in the distance, and Clyde glides toward it, propelled by an internal force he is unable to resist. Marilyn’s reflection greets him with a coy smile and a kiss that she blows at him. Clyde reaches out to touch the reflection. As his fingers touch the glass, it explodes, shattering into pieces. One of the shards flies into his eye.
* * *
Ralph hears Clyde scream and sits bolt upright in bed. The scream is swallowed up by the night and is replaced by a deathly silence. Ralph waits expectantly in the darkness.
* * *
An insistent knocking jars Clyde awake. He pries open his lids and finds himself staring at his bleary-eyed reflection in the mirrors that decorate the roof of the hutch. Letting out a groan, he rolls over on his side, pulling the sheet over his head.
“Good morning! Marilyn! Hello!”
Clyde pokes his sheet-shrouded head out of the hutch. “I forgot where I was for a second,” comes his muffled voice.
Ralph lifts the sheet and smiles at him. “Hi.”
“Good morning.”
Clyde sits up and sees that Ralph is smartly dressed in a crisp white button shirt rolled up to his elbows, a pair of Levi 501s cuffed to show his bare ankles and a pair of brown Sperry boat shoes.
“I’m off to class. There’s food in the fridge. Um, what else, what else…? Oh, yeah. Help yourself to the TV or the video player.” He points at his nightstand. “There’s the remote.”
Clyde hugs his legs against his chest and watches Ralph gather his things and place them into his backpack. “What time will you be back?”
“Around three.” Ralph puts his arms through the straps of his backpack. “OK?”
“Jimmy?”
“Yeah?”
“Thank you for everything.”
“Sure thing, Marilyn.” Ralph winks at Clyde and moves to the stairs.
* * *
Clyde approaches Ralph’s writing table balancing a bowl of Fruit Loops and milk in his hand. He sets down the bowl and pulls the strongbox out of the bottom drawer. Finding it locked, he places it back inside. Then he strolls to the telephone on Ralph’s nightstand and dials a number. Hearing his father answer, he listens for a beat and puts it down. He stares at the telephone for a moment and picks it up again, his finger hovering over the dial pad. Then he redials the number.
“It’s me,” Clyde says when his father answers.
After a moment
of silence, his father says, “Stop calling here.” Then the phone goes dead.
Clyde dials the number again.
“I said stop calling, God damn it!”
“Put Momma on the phone.”
“We don’t want to know anything about you. You’re on your own now.”
“You’re not getting away with this; I hope you know that,” Clyde says. “One of these days when you least expect it, I’ll come looking for you, and you and I are going to have it out once and for all.”
“I should feel threatened by a sissy, should I?”
“It’s not a threat, Yoshi. It’s a promise. And when Marilyn makes a promise, you’d better damned well know she keeps it.”
“I’m shaking in my boots.”
“Take care of Momma,” Clyde says after a moment. Then he puts down the phone and curls up on Ralph’s bed to decompress from the pent-up emotion provoked by the telephone call, clearing his mind of everything and focusing on a single point of light in the middle of his head.
Namu Myōhō Renge Kyō
Namu Myōhō Renge Kyō
Namu Myōhō Renge Kyō
Once his heart rate has returned to normal, he sits up and looks around the room. He spots Ralph’s stereo and tunes it to a rock music station, then dances over to Ralph’s dresser and rifles through the drawers.
His fingers make hard contact with a photo album hidden under a stack of white T-shirts in the bottom drawer. He takes it to Ralph’s bed and pages through it, and his breath catches at the sight of a younger Ralph wearing sidelocks and a skull cap. He brings the album closer and goes more slowly through the pages, which portray a life of affluence, including trips abroad, mansions, maids, sports cars.
Toward the back of the album, he finds a large photo of Ralph in a military uniform and peers at it for several seconds. There is something strangely familiar about Ralph’s expression. Devilish smile, soulful eyes, a lock of wavy hair hanging over one eye. He flips to the front of the album and regurgitates his Fruit Loops in a shock of recognition at the sight of young Ralph in a family portrait standing next to a tall man with a smartly trimmed black beard and kind blue eyes. He is instantly transported to that afternoon in Doctor Menner’s clinic in Beverly Hills when the handsome Jewish boy and his father stepped out of Doctor Menner’s office, and the boy snapped a picture of him. Ralph was that boy.
The Death of Baseball Page 31