Whirlaway

by Poe Ballantine

  “I don’t know, man.”

  “It’s a public auction.”

  “Yeah, I read about it.”

  “Lots of dupes and promos, posters, autographed stuff, everything. Like a year’s worth of garage sales in one day.”

  “Donny coming?”

  “Yeah. Last time I left him alone he broke a Shirelles record and ate a whole chocolate cake.”

  “Shirelles aren’t worth much,” I said.

  “He gets kind of lonesome, too,” he said. “He’s used to my mom being around.”

  “Does he know she’s gone?”

  “He was at the funeral. But I don’t believe he remembers.”

  “Does he remember you’re his brother?”

  “Oh yeah.”

  “Why does he call you Chuck?”

  “You tell me, babe.”

  “What does he like to talk about? What does he do?”

  “He likes music. He’s a big Yankees fan. For a while he knew all the planets and the nearby stars and that kind of stuff. His hobby is buying life insurance. These hucksters come around, the door-to-door guys you still see in the South, and sell him wacky policies. He’s bought forty or fifty of them, one of them if he dies of melanoma before he’s forty-five pays out like three million.”

  “Everyone should have a hobby,” I said. “Okay, I’ll go with you. Maybe we can catch half a card at Hollypark.”

  “Del Mar’s opening in a week, believe it?”

  “I haven’t looked at a Form in a month.”

  “Me neither.”

  “What’s happened to us?”

  “Old age, I guess. I’ll pick you up at the Island in an hour.”

  29.Boys Love Their Mothers

  WE DROVE UP TO L. A. THREE ABREAST IN SHELLY’S SCORCHED Nissan. Donny was not wearing his mask. His head was an inflamed quilt of overlapping scars. He was hard to look at, but he looked exactly like what he was, a boy who had jumped thirty feet off a sea cliff face first into a bed of rocks. The disproportion of his features was centered around a lighting-white scar that ran from deep in the scalp all the way down to his chin. The facial halves were so poorly matched that the sightless eye sat a good inch below the good one. Several front teeth were missing and the remaining incisors curled downward giving him a vampirish aspect. His sparse hair was clumped into a peak like a mohawk. His thoughts peeped out, a scramble of mommy, mommy and will you love me tomorrow. Boys love their mothers, I thought. Too bad I never really had one.

  From Del Mar the radio station in Canoga Park was eighty miles or so. We sat in silence, only the radio talking. Donny said finally, “My brain hurts.”

  “Where’s your eye at, Donny?” asked Shelly.

  “In my pocket.”

  “Put it in.”

  “I can’t see through it.”

  “You need to wear it or you’ll lose it again.”

  “It itches.”

  “Put it in.”

  Donny’s hand groped about in his pocket, but he didn’t withdraw the eye. Instead he turned the raw and vacant aperture upon me.

  “How about those Yankees?” I said.

  “Who?” said Donny.

  “The New York Yankees.”

  “Oh, them, yeah.”

  “I think they’re in first place,” I said.

  “Well, I’ll be dipped,” he said.

  “Too bad they didn’t keep Chili Davis,” I said.

  “Good Old Chili,” said Donny.

  The traffic thickened briefly and Shelly downshifted. “That Beatles record is not a counterfeit,” he said.

  “How much is it worth?”

  “Four thousand, maybe more.”

  “I think I’ll keep it.”

  “I would too,” he said.

  “So would I,” said Donny Ray.

  30.Try a Little Tenderness

  ONLY ABOUT FIFTY BIDDERS SHOWED UP FOR THE AUCTION IN a meeting hall at the old KLIK radio station in Canoga Park. The owner of KLIK, an oldies format overrun by time, wanted to liquidate immediately, so except for promotional records and a few autographed items, most of the inventory was being sold off in bulk. The owner had five other radio stations, every one moving to a more profitable pre-recorded format, with America falling asleep between the commercials.

  I was bewildered by the patter of the auctioneer, square dancing had never been my forte, and since this was Shelly’s trip and I was not going to compete with him I sat back and watched. Shelly had his game face on and was picking up box after box for almost nothing. Though most of the bidders seem baffled by his enthusiasm, I knew he was racking up the score. Dinah Shore, even with Sinatra, was worth nothing until you pushed her across the golden threshold into Japan.

  Though most of the participants were as focused as Shelly, there was the occasional alarmed glance in our direction. Donny without his mask was indeed a marvelous spectacle, like a gruesome alien out of Star Trek. After twenty minutes Donny got restless in his metal chair, so I suggested we go out into the lobby for a while and stretch our legs. “Can he drink pop?” I asked Shelly.

  “Yeah, but watch him. He’ll spill it.”

  Donny was fascinated by the 1940s modernist theme of the lobby, brass chip floor, coarse black-pebbled walls, a swooping Bauhaus ceiling with many hexagonal skylights. Along one wall was a row of black and white faces, celebrities mostly who’d stopped in at some time to pitch their wares on KLIK radio. I stopped before a photo of Eddie Cochran, whose voice breaks in “Three Stars,” his posthumously released tribute to Buddy Holly, J. P. Richardson, and Richie Valens, all of whom preceded him in death by one year. Even if his look and pose are all Elvis, Eddie was an original, “proto punk” as they called it now, killed by a negligent taxicab driver named George Martin, coincidentally the same name as the man who “discovered” and produced the Beatles. When the British invaded America four years later, all the great American rockers were dead or gone. Elvis had enlisted, and there was no one but Motown to stop them.

  Donny surveyed the portraits, then leaned in to study a gauzy promo image of Otis Redding. I’d never known much about Otis Redding, the only songs of his I’d been familiar with were the overplayed “The Dock of the Bay,” The Black Crowes cover “Hard to Handle,” and the Three Dog Night version of his “Try a Little Tenderness,” but I’d picked up a number of his singles and LPs in the last few months and gained admiration. He was one of those double-coupon artists whose value rewards both the pocket and the ear. If you really wanted to “invest” in music, as well as ward off the zombies of the corporate age, both Shelly and I agreed, soul was the way to go.

  “Do you know who that is, Donny?” I said, pointing to Otis Redding.

  “Looks like Ernesto,” he said.

  “Who’s Ernesto?”

  “He runs the scrubber.”

  “It’s Otis Redding. Remember that song, ‘Try a Little Tenderness’?”

  “Oh, yeah.”

  He didn’t remember. I wanted him to be a whiz kid, a genius — I wanted him to instantly count spilled toothpicks like Rain Man or calculate Martian orbital eccentricities or pontificate on the golden ratio, but those rocks at the bottom of the Clam had given him little back but the thread of his life.

  We strolled down the curved halls and I looked for a pop machine. “Maybe they’ve auctioned them off already,” I mumbled. “You tired? You want to sit for a minute?”

  Donny Ray sat, out of breath, his mashed head sagging, his thin arms folded over his chest. His breathing was shallow. “We’ll wait for Shelly here,” I said.

  “Where are we, anyway?” he asked.

  “Los Angeles, California.”

  “Hmmm,” he said. “Is Mom here?”

  “You don’t remember the funeral?”

  He raised his head, turning his empty eye socket upon me. “Oh, yeah.”

  He didn’t remember the funeral.

  “Do you remember Renee, Donny?”

  His head flicked to the left, then to the right.
His fingers entwined into his gold chains, his raw sightless eye drifted over me. He grew very still.

  “I saw her the other day,” I said, and thought of my own lost love, Sofia, her picture shimmering up before me. “She says she still thinks of you.”

  His hand had wandered into the pocket where he kept his prosthetic eye. He scratched his ear, hitched a sob, and said, “I remember her.”

  Shelly came striding around the corner, looking peeved. “Hey, I been looking for you guys all over. Come on, they’re loading my truck out back. Let’s get out of here, maybe we can catch the fifth at Hollypark.”

  “I remember,” Donny announced to his brother, getting to his feet. “I loved her.”

  Shelly gave me a look as if I’d been trying to sell his brother drugs.

  “I remember now,” Donny repeated, looking up at the skylights.

  “That’s right, Donny,” said Shelly. “Come on, let’s get out of here.”

  31.Will You Still Love Me Tomorrow?

  I WOKE UP ONE MORNING TO THE SOUND OF SCREAMING, THINKING at first it was Beatriz or a peafowl in a tree. When I went outside the Island grounds were festooned with paper flowers and balloons. Picnic tables and a bandstand had been set up and parillas were stoked and lit. A pig, the screamer, lay yonder, hanging split by its back feet from a tree as a young man addressed it with a long curved knife. Two butter-brown girls with bows in their hair were playing jacks at the foot of my stairs.

  “¿Hola, que tal?” I said to them. “¿Que tenemos?”

  “¡Es una fiesta!” they cried in unison. “¡Mataron un cochino!”

  “¿Para que?” I inquired.

  “¡El hipódromo!” they shouted.

  Every horse track has its pre-opening day celebration. Del Mar’s was usually the best. As a child I recalled them, for all the children and good food and fun, more fondly than Christmas. For the last two weeks track employees, tourists, and gamblers had been pouring into Solana Beach and Del Mar, and rents everywhere had soared. I noted that all the casitas were now occupied and there were several new camp dogs. From below drifted the scent of warm hay and horse dung mingled with the ocean. A bugle sounded and there was the wet flank whack of horse flesh. A woman with an apron tied around her middle came down the stairs from cabin number 3 with a covered basket and two boys about twelve sailed on past toeing a black-and-white checkered soccer ball.

  Past the lone orange tree in the distance blazed a great wood fire upon which sat a bubbling black cauldron. A perspiring man with a red bandana tied round his head wrung long sheets of pig skin, fed them with tongs into the hot fat, and then stacked the crackled lengths of chicharron longwise in a steel rack like so much cordwood.

  Down the way I found Beatriz making carnitas in a large iron skillet over one of the fires, pouring over the frying cubes of pork a sauce made from Coca-Cola, ketchup, and chili vinegar. Her green parrot Paco was perched on the deck nearby, happily cackling the only two phrases it knew: hijole chingao and todos los marinos son putos. There was meat everywhere, the carnage of carnival and purple carcass majesty, ribs in pans, heaps of brains and tripe, snout and feet, head and back meat, side meat already frying and headed for frijoles charros, chops and hams and scraps galore for Sweets and his pals.

  By noon, a full-fledged fiesta was underway. A guitarrista and an accordion player named Poka had started up on the podium. A pickup truck with about nine men in its bed and more hanging off the running boards sputtered up the hill. The whooping passengers leapt off and began to unload cases of Tecate and Pacifico. All the parillas blazed with bright red coals, their mesquite and hickory smoke lifting to the clearing sky, and the best parts of the dressed pork, the chuletas and lomo, laid on the flames with whole chilies and onions and nopales still with their spines. Women kept appearing from the casitas with more food, bolillos, stacks of warm tortillas, cans of chipotles and bowls of chopped cilantro and onions and jars of salsa. Great galvanized tubs full of ice were stuffed with orange and lime Jarritos for the kiddies.

  A guy with a trumpet appeared and for laughs blew the “Call to Post,” then he and the guitarrista and Poka segued into mariachi. Beatriz now finished with the carnitas had soaked corn husks and with the freshly rendered pork fat was kneading a pile of masa for tamales. She waved me in. I did not cook, I told her. Ahora si, she said, and showed me how to spread the masa into the wet hojas and fill them with adobada and roll them. We laid them thirty at a time in a big steamer. As more revelers arrived, the music outside grew louder. A freshly caught shark was thrown onto the grill. Someone handed me a cold can of Tecate and I heard Sweets laughing and then saw his smartass face in the door.

  I thought you didn’t cook, he scoffed. You lazy bastard. Look how happy you are.

  And it was true. I didn’t know why. Memories and Del Mar opening and these sweet familial people, many as illegal as me. I finished another beer, followed by two shots of tequila with a hot walker named Salvador who traveled with the circuit and knew my father well and even remembered me. This Salvador, he insisted I get drunk, and he talked about the days when he cooled the horses in the sea, but I did roll and steam about a hundred tamales, some with mangos and pineapples, before I slipped out of the grasp of Beatriz, and then I briefly played goalie in a soccer game and was scored on umpteen times by children and adults half my size, then I lost all my money in a dice game, followed by a violent discussion about thoroughbreds in which it was denied by several that I could possibly be the inventor of the Plum Variable, giving the credit instead to my father.

  I had never danced and always refused to dance, but now I was dancing in circles with some chiquita with a face like intervention. It was only on Sabado de Gloria, the fiesta before Easter, when an effigy of a U. S. president was burned or blown up on general principles, but someone had an extra George W. Bush hanging around and to rousing cheers up in flames he went.

  Late afternoon the wind shifted and the air grew lazy and warm. A boy like a maypole spun a lasso around himself. Now here came Shelly’s pickup jostling up the trail, Donny on the passenger side waving from the open window. I gestured them up the hill as if I were flagging in an airship. Donny was nearly out of the truck before it stopped and let out a crazy yeehaw through the mouth of his rubber Ronald Reagan mask.

  Shelly, looking a year older each time I saw him, climbed wearily out shaking his head. He looked all around. “Can’t believe it’s opening day at Del Mar tomorrow. First time I’ll miss it in more than twenty years.”

  “Oh, well,” I said, and steered him to the beer.

  Shelly and I stood off to the side, he wearing a wry smile and holding a pulled pork torta in his left hand, a can of Tecate in his right. Donny in the meantime had joined the festivities. Considering that the effigy of a U. S. president had just been burned, and figuring in the Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986, Ronald Reagan, I thought, fared rather well. Donny danced with the same woman I had, a very generous soul, the kind I should’ve married instead of Fang-Hua. Maybe my life would’ve turned out differently if I had, or if Sofia hadn’t jumped from that window, but it was too late for all that.

  Donny limped over to us after a while panting, the collar of his shirt wet from perspiration. “I want a beer, too,” he said.

  Shelly rolled his eyes. “You can’t, babe. You’re not old enough.”

  “How old am I, anyway, Chuck?”

  “You’re forty-one.”

  Donny clapped his hands together and scrubbed them around. The paralyzed hand was as pliant as the handle of a wooden walking cane. “Too young to drink,” he crowed.

  “How about just a paper cup?” I said. “Come on, it’s a party. They’ll be breaking up soon. They all have to get up at four.”

  Shelly gave me a glance.

  “Can he drink?” I pressed. “I mean, are we saving him for some occasion?”

  “He’s got brain damage.”

  “So have I.”

  “All right, all right.”
/>   For Donny to drink he had to take off his mask. With some effort and a little help from Shelly, he peeled it away, a Mission Impossible moment. He blinked in the light. His good eye was rimmed with crud. As usual, he was not wearing his false eye. Shelly patted Donny’s face with a napkin and tried to fluff out his thin and matted hair. Donny resisted his brother’s attentions. There were many nervous glances in our direction. One younger girl stared greedily, the melting ice cream from her cone dripping down her wrist.

  “Put your eye in,” Shelly ordered. “You don’t want your socket to fill up with lint.”

  Donny plugged the eye in as if he were putting a quarter into a vending machine. The good eye fluttered as if it had caught a gnat.

  Except for a massive belch, Donny did all right with two cups of beer. He grooved on the mariachi, gnawed on a sandwich, stared into a blazing parilla, swung and missed a few times at a piñata, kicked a soccer ball, and let the kid with the lasso rope him around the waist. At one point a large silver sombrero was placed on his head. The brim of the hat was wider than his shoulders and Donny was so pleased with it he kept feeling for it to make sure it was still there.

  Evening fell. The sun, merged in clouds, lingered just above the horizon. The passenger train that passed between the ocean and the track every hour or so appeared from around the bend. Bukowski wrote a poem about this train once, “THACK THACK THACKA” it went. He had his pint and needed eight teeth pulled and he was wearing his dead father’s pants and I bet he missed the double and lost fifteen dollars that day. The shore was curtained in mist so the silver-blue train appeared to be emerging from a cloud.

  And then the sun was gone and I was very drunk but content in a lawn chair with Sweets sitting at my feet. I watched Donny frolicking with the two girls at my porch that morning who were letting him fly their metallic green June bug attached to a string. Shelly strolled up wearing that serene expression that always came after five or six beers. He had a plateful of macaroni salad. He took the chair next to mine. “I’m taking Donny back to Alabama,” he said, after a few bites. “I’m going to put him in a home. I can’t take care of him and we have family there and it will be cheaper too.”