by Lou Cove
I smile to show I appreciate his sympathy, then I slip back under the blanket and wait for all the sounds to subside.
*
The school year proceeds according to a strict formula: blazing intoxication at night and perpetual agitation during the day. The former, a reasonably effective antidote for the latter, keeps me out of school a lot. And it generates a new sense of paranoia that keeps me housebound and cable-tethered. Uli and I drift apart. Veronica remains too beautiful to seriously pursue. Mama calls often but I’m rarely around. Frank dutifully takes messages. I can read the longing behind the words and it keeps me from returning her calls. Papa checks in once a week and seems angry that I haven’t come over to his dark side. He doesn’t try hard to persuade me, he just lets me know, in his silent way, that he’s there when I’m ready to embrace him. I don’t speak to Howie and Carly nearly as often, but they’re so much better at bridging the distance with just a few carefully chosen, blatantly honest words. “This is shit. We love you. Be strong.” I’d rather go to California and live with them than succumb to either of my parents’ new realities. While Howie and Carly aren’t offering that much, they do invite me to spend the summer there if I can find my way out. I promise them I will.
For now, Frank is turning out to be the most stable force in my universe. He knows I’m smoking and tabbing mesc but he doesn’t judge, he just reminds me to be careful and makes me promise to come to him if I take one too many tokes over the line. He wakes me every morning for school with those gentle back rubs which I now realize are more innocent than my baby brother. Frank is, in fact, playing house. He has a little boy to take care of—his ragazzino—and he takes exquisite pleasure in the responsibility. I stop fearing his touch and find a rare comfort when he pulls me softly from my steady bloom of bad dreams. For a few months, Frank is the selfless parent the world will never give him the chance to truly be.
When the school year ends he drives me to Logan Airport. Mama has granted my one birthday wish: a round-trip ticket to Berkeley. In truth, I would have been fine with one-way but I knew to ask would be to break her heart that much more.
Frank hugs me good-bye, pats my cheek, tells me to be good. “I’ll send your stuff to your mom’s,” he says. “It’s going to be lonely on Chestnut Street.”
“I may be back,” I offer, but he shakes his head.
“You’re always welcome, but you’ve got people waiting on you.”
“If they really wanted me, they would have tried harder,” I tell him, shouldering my travel bag.
Frank smiles sadly and pats my cheek again. “Maybe they need to know you really want them?”
*
I have to wait until the lady in the seat next to me falls asleep before I can pull the June issue of Playboy out of my backpack on the plane to San Francisco. It’s Dorothy Stratten’s Playmate of the Year pictorial. She’s on the cover, white dress just this close to falling off. As with Howie, the choice feels inevitable. She must have had some campaign manager.
The ride over the Midwest is bumpy but eventually the seatbelt light goes off and I take Dorothy to the lavatory for a mile-high whack. Back in my seat, I fall asleep in five minutes, head against the window on the other side of the clouds.
Howie picks me up at the airport, arms waving and hugging, lifting me off my feet. We’ve hardly spoken for months, but time has lost its power to separate us.
“Jesus! You’re big now.” I try to lift him to show just how much.
We drive to Berkeley in a gold ’71 Camaro, windows down to vent the smoke from a bit of a joint and a few cigarettes. Howie offers me some of the former, which I decline, and none of the latter.
“What happened to the minibus?”
“Felt the need for speed,” he smiles. “You OK?” he asks before we get to the cottage. I nod. “This thing with your folks, it’s a big piece of shit.”
I nod again.
At the house, Carly wraps me up like a burrito, signature-tight, in her soft arms. She lays out an assortment of food but the only thing that appeals is a bowl of grapes. I flop onto their bed, the only communal space in this tiny two-room cottage, and pick at the fruit. My ears have yet to pop.
Traveling across the country hasn’t erased, as I hoped it might, the feeling that things are irrevocably changed. The levity I expect in their presence is tempered by muffled questions: How’s Mama doing? Does David understand what’s going on?
The window is open and the lively smell of eucalyptus fills the room—so different from the smell of fireplace ash and chestnut mold. Howie’s pot smells different, too—pungent and emerald, not like the crumbly brown ’lumbo back home. I grab a baggie from the night table and pluck out a bud. It’s sticky, crystally, and lush like everything here, but almost too alive. The flourishing world of California brings my internal gray to stark relief.
“My stomach hurts,” I say, though it’s more than that. I just feel bad. Indeterminately bad. Full of bad. Sunday morning bad. And it is Sunday morning, kind of. The early morning flight that took me to San Francisco took me backward in time. Brunch time. But the Sunday paper here isn’t gray, it’s pink. And there’s mango instead of lox.
“Want some tea?” Carly asks somewhere outside my ear muffle. I shake my head, reach for another grape. They’re sweet, wet on my dried-out tongue. I can’t stop eating them.
“Can I turn on the TV?”
“If you want,” Howie says. He looks at Carly with sad eyes I don’t miss and then plops down alongside me.
Star Trek is on. Kirk splits into two: a weak, whiny Kirk and a violent, aggressive Kirk. When it ends, another comes on. Spock goes home to Vulcan for a mating ritual.
“It’s a marathon,” I say happily when a commercial promises twenty-four straight hours of Trek. I down handfuls of grapes like popcorn for the next five hours, disappearing into a world of impassive orange and purple skies and alien papier-mâché landscapes.
My stomach only gets worse, and I start to feel a contact high from the weed Howie’s been smoking beside me.
“You want to go for a walk?” he asks.
I nod. We turn off the TV, run the Camaro to Shorebird Park, and walk out along the fishing pier. Howie limps slightly and I give him a quizzical look. “Knee,” he says. “It’s fucked up.”
California is relentlessly sunny but the wind blowing off the water gives me a chill.
“I’m going to be in a movie,” Howie says. “It starts filming next week.”
“Really?” I perk up. Howie smiles, a movie-star smile. I knew it. He’s going to be a star. Jeff Bridges in King Kong, pulling Jessica Lange out of the ocean and saving her over and over again. “What’s the movie? What’s it called? Can I come watch you film it?”
“It’s called The Candy Stripers,” he says. “And no, you can’t.”
*
I sleep on a pullout couch in the front room, separated from Howie and Carly by a set of flimsy French doors and the sheer curtains that cover their panes. The wall above my head is filled with books. I browse the titles before I fall asleep, settling on a little orange paperback about sex among inmates in prison.
I don’t sleep well.
“Listen,” Howie says as he passes me a breakfast joint. “I just sent a letter to Dorothy.”
“Wizard of Oz Dorothy?”
“Dorothy Stratten, Hutch. I just wrote and said ‘Hey, you’re the Playmate of the Year. I’m Man of the Year. Let’s get together and do some stuff.’ Makes sense. Right?”
“She’s going to be in a roller disco movie with Scott Baio,” I recall, handing the smoking stub back to him.
“See? There you go. Why does it need to be Chachi? He’s a kid. It should be me. Me and Dorothy on the silver screen. Sex symbols. It could be a musical. A disco musical about a band. And our music could be so intoxicating that it frees everyone up. Drops the hangups. And people fall in love every time they hear it. And we can call it Sex Cymbals. With a C. Like that? I like that. I like that! I’
m going to write that. And I’m writing you in, too, hombre. You can be our guitarist. Fuck Scott Baio.”
“Do I get to meet Dorothy?”
“Does Kurt Russell make a shitty Elvis?”
“Yes?”
“Yes.”
“Well, you’re already going to be in a movie.”
“Not that kind of movie,” he says, oddly low. “Robert Blake did In Cold Blood, not Behind the Green Door, you know? You don’t get to be Baretta by playing Doctor Bishop. I know that now. I’m not even using my real name because everyone in LA says it could hurt my chances of doing the straight movie/TV thing.”
“What name are you using?”
“Marc Howard.”
“That’s a good one.”
“Look, last year I made five bucks an hour busting concrete. Tomorrow they’re paying two hundred for a half day to get my dick sucked in a closet by a nurse.”
“And you’re feeling bad? That’s so dumb!”
“Hey, what the fuck do you know? It sounds like a good deal, but so did winning Man of the Year.”
“So, you didn’t get all the money Dorothy did,” I admit. “Or the movie contract. Or the Corvette…”
“Keep it going, chief.”
“What about the complete wardrobe? You still get a complete wardrobe for winning.”
“Yeah, they promised me a complete wardrobe. LA-style? You could be talking anything. I was thinking five to twenty-five thousand dollars easily. But they just make promises. I spent days and days chasing them down. They were going to give me ten cents a copy for every boner poster of me they sold. So, good, I said, let’s sell a million of them! But then eighty percent of their advertisers threatened to quit if they ever showed another man sprouting wood.” He shakes his head. “Somehow my penis has become the line between erotica and pornography. I was their first guy with a hard-on and I’ll probably be the last. And I haven’t seen a dime. I got fifty posters.”
“And the wardrobe?”
“Right. I need to stop smoking this shit for a little while.” He taps out the joint, runs his hands through his hair, and presses on. “Yes. The wardrobe I finally got, after me nagging and nagging them, refusing to go away, writing nasty letters and being an asshole, as much as I could be without alienating them completely. Then, finally, I get a call from Linda Desiante, the publisher’s secretary. I call her The Tongue ’cause she tells me the secrets of how to maneuver the shit, you know? I keep running into LA people who are just soooo fucking savvy. They’re players in The Game. And they just look at me like a Berkeley rube. They just laugh. I come down in my flea market clothes and Carly’s handmade pants. LA never got the revolution. Ever. They hate everything about it. Rags and torn jeans—that’s high fashion in this world.” He points out the window, his frustration painful for me to watch. “In LA … they don’t even let you in the room. I can’t get a table at a restaurant. They just hate it, ’cause they can’t make any money off it. LA doesn’t understand the revolution because the revolution is about sharing. We have enough here. Here. But LA is all about greed. The two never fit together and it’s why I’m never going to make a home there. But I respect this woman, Linda. The Tongue is the queen of that empire. She laughs, too. She knows the story. But she likes me, so she tells me how to behave.”
I’m having a hard time following. Partly because I still don’t know what happened to the wardrobe, partly because I am way too high way too early in the morning, but mostly because this isn’t Howie. Since when does he care about how people view him or how they think he should behave?
“So what happened to your fucking wardrobe?!” I yell, shocking him out of that place I don’t want to see him go.
“OK, Jesus. I’m just telling you. There’s a backstory here.”
“The backstory is starting to sound like a sob story,” I mumble, not intending to be mean.
His look confirms I’ve gone too far. But this is not what I came to California to find.
“I just need to know what happened to the wardrobe,” I say. “OK? Please.”
“Sure. When it came time to finally give me the wardrobe they were going to write me a check. The Tongue says ‘How much do you want.’ So I say five hundred. And she shakes her head and points her thumb higher. And I say, a thousand? She points higher again and I say fifteen hundred? And she says OK. She’s the one who quietly let me know that I was an idiot and I had no idea what I was doing. I got fifteen hundred bucks, skipped the clothes, and bought a top-of-the-line Betamax camcorder. And I didn’t do Merv.”
“Good.”
“I also went out and bought a tongue,” he adds, and I choke on my milk. “A cow’s tongue. Not sliced—a whole cow’s tongue. It must have weighed, like, five pounds? Ten pounds? I had the butcher wrap it and I gave it to her. She was unwrapping it in her office and she screamed. Screamed! It was the only time I was able to leave her speechless. It was a great moment in my life. And maybe in her life, too. I know one thing: she’ll never forget it. She knew all about LA, but she didn’t know everything.”
I howl and he laughs with me—not just high and merry, but that smile that takes joy in the other. That smile that is love.
Bobbling at the Joints
The naked beach past Pacifica, finally.
Howie and I smoke mind-bending weed in the Camaro, all the way to Shangri-la, stumble down the treacherous dune of Devil’s Slide, and strip. I haven’t been naked on a beach since I was four, but it doesn’t feel free the way it did back then. I’m beyond high, relatively pubeless, and there’s not a Playmate in sight. The only naked women here look like copper raisins carrying prunes.
What’s more, the water is just as cold as Maine. No one told me that!
I turn onto my stomach and scan the mass of old flesh but it’s hard to see past the group of naked Mexican men who form a circle on the beach between us and the water. They drink beer and bray, clearing the area.
One of the men catches me staring, sees my bloodshot eyes dart away, and calls out to me. I look back and he begins to pour beer, in a slow and frothing yellow stream, all over his dick, shrieking with laughter and calling to me in Spanish. He points to his wet joint, then to me, then squeals and rolls on his back. I don’t know what he means but it totally freaks me out.
“Ignore the peanut gallery,” Howie advises me. “Everyone has their own way of dealing with nudity. Some do it better than others.”
Here’s my way: I don’t get up for the rest of the day and by bedtime my ass is so charred I want to cry. Carly rubs a thick layer of Noxzema on my butt cheeks—an experience that almost makes the burn worth it, but I can’t help feeling like she’s going to put a diaper on me next.
I spent the day on my stomach and now I have to sleep that way. Every time I roll over the sting wakes me, and the greasy slide turning back over in my jammies feels like I pooped.
I’m never going to a naked beach again.
*
“Aren’t you going to be late?” Carly, drowsy with sleep, luscious.
“Fuck!” says Howie, rushing to the mirror one more time. He’s smiling but he looks queasy.
“Break a leg,” I say.
“This is what you want,” Carly says. “Go get it.” He nods and flies out the door, leaving dark feathers of exhaust and engine grumble behind.
“Well, this is just us. Let’s make something of it, bambino.”
We spend the day wandering together through the Exploratorium, the Palace of Fine Arts, and the lagoon, weaving between tiny field trippers and their teachers. As amazing as it is, I’m more excited for the tacos Carly has promised to make. I’ve never eaten Mexican food outside of Mexico.
“How’s your tush?” Carly smiles. She hands me a hard corn shell and we sit on the edge of her bed and eat dinner.
“Fine,” I frown, recalling her humiliating application of cold cream on my ass and the greasy sleep that followed last night. “How do you think Howie’s doing?”
“I’m sur
e he’s doing … great? I don’t know. It’s a little hard to talk about.”
I imagine being on a movie set with Howie, watching him have sex with a real actress. How do they pick who has sex with whom? Does he get to do it with more than one woman? Carly hasn’t said much, but she seems at peace. I don’t know how. My mother cries every time we talk, and that’s because her husband had sex with another woman last year. (Well, and ever since.) But I know this can’t add up in the end. How can she not go back to being all puffy eyed? Howie’s sleeping with an actor, I rationalize. They’re getting paid. He’ll be a bigger star because of it. Not just a magazine, Phil Donahue one-afternoon-stand star, but a movie star. Who cares what kind of movie it is? It’s a movie. The comfort Carly exudes gives me the courage to ask.
“Do you care? About the kind of movie he’s making, I mean.”
“I care that he’s happy,” she says, as clear and as quick as a thunderclap, and I believe her. I don’t think she wants anything more in this world than to be with him and see him happy. It’s a major miracle: Howie found the perfect woman—the one who lets him be himself. And all the signs suggest that, despite the pain he may cause her, he is the perfect man for her.
“Did you know that Howie came this close to becoming a rabbi instead of being in this movie?”
I gag on a tortilla chip.
“He applied to the Hebrew Union College to become a rabbi. He likes history, you know. But they told him that in order to get into the rabbinic program you have to spend two years in Jerusalem studying Aramaic. So he chose Candy Stripers.”
“Oh, well, that makes sense. Rabbi Gordon. Dr. Bishop. So similar.”
“Either way, a Jewish mother should be proud!” We giggle, scoop salsa, recline. Without meaning to, Carly breaks the mood. “Speaking of Jewish mothers, how’s yours doing?”
I straighten, wrap the remainder of my tacos for later. “Bad. I don’t know. I haven’t seen her much. I don’t like Brookline. When I go she’s always crying. She gets mad even more than she used to.”