The Mentor

by Pat Connid

  It wasn’t really a lake after all. Nor was it the ocean.

  I had seen this place years ago-- the North Fulton County quarry in Atlanta. That explained why I'd gone so deep.

  Already exhausted, the swim to shore, while short, was difficult and by the end of it, half of the quarry’s small lake must have been in my stomach or mouth.

  The rocks that dappled the water’s edge were oily and slick, so climbing out I fell twice. The second time, I banged up my knee pretty good.

  Rolling out of the darkness and through dying patches of heather, a small laugh startled me. It was cigarette-harsh and phlegmy, but rather than mean, it seemed pleasant. Like someone who hadn’t laughed in a while and all it took was to see some half-naked fatso fall down a couple times on a pile of wet rocks to make his day.

  It was not quite dawn yet, and the moon had busied itself trying to calm the water I'd stirred up. Not much light.

  He stood a couple yards away from me. I could only make out the more angular features of the man's face.

  “No place for swimmin’, that there,” he called over to me, then laughed again and spit something out. “All sortsa stuff down there you don’t wanna get cut up on.”

  Falling onto a patch of long, matted grass, I was breathing heavily and couldn’t stop gulping in the air. Hyperventilating, maybe. They always say you should breathe into a paper bag. Supposed to help. Dunno why. I did, coincidentally, see a small paper bag, but it was wrapped around a bottle of beer in the hand of my one-man audience.

  He took a few steps closer.

  “You all right, then?” Poking his head into a beam of moonlight, his face looked scarred from years in the sun, but it wasn't unfriendly. One eye still on me, he took a long pull from his beer.

  I leaned up on my elbows, still breathing heavy. “How’d I get into that van?”

  He frowned, looked to his left and right sluggishly. The man seemed to drift off for a moment. He finally said, “What van?”

  Then he took a small step back, cautiously, as if he were suddenly aware the wet, angry guy in front of him may try to take whatever he’d collected in his coat pockets over the years.

  “Lost your shirt boy,” He took another pull of his beer. “I think I saw a shirt balled up back in the woods over there. Some other dirty clothes… maybe somebody bunked over there for a while, stuff got left behind. Might be buggy. Buggy’s better than cold, though.”

  With a wave of his long, dirty fingers, he slowly began to walk away.

  “Is there a phone around here somewhere? Gas station?”

  The homeless man kept walking, disappearing into the dark, either not hearing or just not bothering to answer me. I wobbled up to my feet and considered for a moment looking for that shirt. My man-boobs were freezing, capped with nipples like sharks’ teeth.

  I was shivering. And it wasn’t just because I was wet. I just about drowned under a hundred of water in a van someone put me in… to teach me some sort of lesson?

  Standing more firmly now and staring out as the moon finally reasserted its will upon the quarry’s water, I didn’t have the first explanation of why I was there.

  Chapter Two

  “Sorry I woke ya up, man,” I said to Pavan and meant it.

  He took another drag of his cigarette and, too tired to actually turn his head to the gap in the window, he blew the smoke over the steering wheel, and it rolled across the dash momentarily enveloping the small, plastic Jesus Christ figurine on his dashboard.

  He wasn't terribly religious, but when he'd bought the car, Dashboard Jesus had come with it-- super-glued smack-dab in the middle of the dash.

  Pavan was too spooked to rip it out ("That's like really bad luck, man!"), so Dashboard Jesus stayed.

  “Yeah, I only had a half hour of sleep when you called.”

  “Rough night.”

  He nodded, pulled something from his lip. The sun was beginning to warm the air, and he started rummaging around, one hand still on the wheel, for shades underneath the fast food bags on the floorboard behind us.

  “Since I had the early night 'cause I drove the new guy home again, I went to my cousin’s house. You know, Ray, right?”

  For the last ten minutes, I’d just told my best friend that some ninja sociopath drugged me, put me in a speeding van and sent me to the bottom of the Fulton quarry with nothing but a Bic pen and a couple lungfuls of air. And he wanted to talk about Cousin Ray?

  'Course, he did get up in the middle of the night to haul my ass out of the quarry, a good forty-five minutes away from where his head had briefly met the pillow.

  I said, “Yeah, I know Ray. The guy that's got the…” I lifted my hand up to my head, drawing an imaginary line near my brow.

  “The nail gun thing? Yeah, he got those out.”

  “Good thing.”

  “Not sure if they got all of them because sometimes if he’s in the room when you flip the microwave on he pees himself like a freaked-out lapdog,” Pavan said and slapped on an old, scratched pair of fake Ray-Bans. The lenses looked like the bottom of an Italian grandmother’s favorite iron skillet. “Well, I go over there to Ray’s, and his power’d been cut because he spent all his dough on pull-tabs last week and they cut it. So we’re just sitting around, you know, smoking and somebody thought it might be a good idea to get the dog stoned.”

  “Well, with no power, right?”

  “Yeah, no TV or nothing,” he said, then scowled, and took another deep drag, and blew it out. “Well, the dog, I guess had this real bad reaction because he starts running around munching all the stuffing out of the couch cushions, just tearing through them like a mad beaver, and there’s that foam everywhere, so Ray and everyone’s trying to stop the dog but, you know, they’re pretty drunk and high, and it’s dark because there’s no power, so they’re just sorta stumbling all over each other and to look at it, even in the dark, it’s like a fucking New York blizzard with the coach foam all over the floor, everywhere, then—“

  “Pavan,” I interrupted. “I think a guy tried to kill me tonight.”

  His mouth still bent around his next word, he flashed his eyes at me from behind the shades. His shoulders fell and he nodded just a little.

  “He put me in a van, sent me to the bottom of a manmade lake and left me for dead.”

  “I know man, it’s just… it's so wild, right? Crazy.”

  My friend Pavan was the kind of guy who always looked like he’d just been rousted from bed: lines under his eyes, wrinkled clothes, and a huge mass of curly hair weighed down by shampoo he'd not been patient enough to properly rinse away.

  The hair used to bother me because I was a head taller than him and with that messy near-fro I usually saw more hair than face when we worked together or hung out.

  He had started at the theater about a year after I did but, impressively, matched my level of disenfranchisement, lock step, within weeks.

  Weeknights, he and I would tear tickets at the usher stand, clean each of the eight movie houses and do it all over again. That cycle would repeat twice more and, often, one of us would be passed out drunk by ten o’clock.

  We had a system which we’d worked out over the years to prevent us from both being lights out at the same time-- a misstep like that would probably mean we'd both be fired.

  I say "system" when really we're just taking turns, every other day.

  Not that we write it down or anything. The moment you start to set meeting-makers for the days of the week you plan to drink and pass out… that's probably a good time to just go ahead and chuck the calendar entirely. Hell, you're not going to need it much longer anyhow.

  Pavan had the world's worst poker face. And, at that moment, it wasn't hard to read him.

  I said, “You think I’m making this shit up?”

  “No, no way—“

  “Yeah, you do,” I said and banged the dash with the heel of my fist. Next to us, some guy wearing a tie and Volvo drifted back and moved one lane over. “God, man
, you’re supposed to be my friend.”

  “I am, Dex!”

  “I just went through a seriously fucked-up, traumatic experience here.”

  “I know,” he said. “It just sounds…”

  “What? Sounds what?”

  Flicking the smoldering cigarette butt out the window, he looked at me for a moment and then looked back to the road again.

  “Well, you remember that dude the other night at the theater? He was screaming in there and all that?”

  “Sure," I said. "Last night."

  “Well, he was on something crazy.”

  “Obviously.”

  Pavan did a shoulder-check, and I watched as he approached a semi-trailer. Gunning the little Honda's engine, he wheeled around and passed it.

  It took me a moment to realize what my friend was saying.

  “Wait a minute… You think I took that guy’s stash and ended up swimming half naked in the Fulton Quarry?”

  Every now and then, people with no place to go, go to the movies. It's cheap rent for a seat in a temperature-controlled room, no one talks too much and, if you're lucky, something halfway decent is up on the screen.

  The previous night, this one guy shows up and an hour into his movie, he stands on the seat backs, straddling two rows and screams, “Be excellent to each other!” and “Party on, dude!” from the movie Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure.

  I have no idea why he was yelling that. He wasn’t even watching that movie. Mainly because it came out in 1989.

  But, some movies… they touch people, move people, change their lives. We hold them dear and even retreat into them, a safe place, when we're at our lowest.

  However, no one has ever found solace within a Keanu Reeves movie. Not even Keanu Reeves.

  This guy was obviously just really fucking high.

  “Well, I mean, no way, man. No, I don’t think you took his stuff, whatever he was on,” Pavan said. “Did you?”

  “NO!”

  “Okay, I was—“

  “I’m not one of your drug-addled buddies, man. I’m a beer drinker, you know that.” I turned slightly and put my back against the car door to face my friend. The small of my back where the toolbox had nailed me still hurt. “Everything I told you about tonight happened.”

  He shook his head like he was trying to stop a small bug from landing on his face. The Honda wove slightly as he did, but we didn't veer into anyone. Thankfully, northbound traffic was light—all the morning commuters were heading south into Atlanta.

  After a full minute, Pavan finally spoke: “Why? Why’d this guy single you out for all this weird crap?”

  I didn’t have an answer. It was something I’d been thinking about for the last hour or so, sitting and shivering, waiting for Pavan. No idea.

  “You said he gave you riddles and shit?”

  “No, not riddles. Facts, like… notes. He’d planned this night out, and he was giving me a little idea of what I was in for.”

  “Why?”

  “Dunno,” I said and grabbed a bent smoke from his pack. I’m not a regular smoker but watching him, it started to look like a good idea. “Maybe he was trying to spook me.”

  “By giving you water trivia?”

  “I have no idea,” I said and reached for the in-dash car lighter, but Pavan knocked my hand away.

  “Don’t do that. Shorts out the electrical system and the car dies.”

  I’d forgotten. “Why don’t you take that little lighter knob out so nobody tries to use it?”

  “Yeah but then little bits of things end up in there like sunflower seeds and wrappers and, I gotta dig in there and could electocut—“

  “Okay, shut up, enough about that. You're making my head spin.”

  “Hey,” he said, and looked at me like I'd said something awful about Dashboard Jesus (I hadn't. I wanted to, sure, but I hadn't. Bad luck).

  “Sorry man,” I said. “I’m just really freaked out.”

  “So, what’s all this stuff about the baker? Why’d he ask you about the baker? You think that old dude's in on this? He don't look right, you ask me. I'm not eatin' any of his crap anymore.”

  "Yes, you will."

  "Hell, yeah, I will!" Pavan said and smiled for the first time all morning. "That guy's like a muffin magician or something. Still, what was up with the baker stuff?"

  I leaned forward and slipped a small lighter out of the console, then lit the cigarette. “That’s the part that really is throwing me because I don’t tell anyone about that stuff. Not anymore.”

  “What stuff?”

  “Nothing bad, but when I was a kid… I developed, uh, what they call perfect audio-retention.”

  “Yeah? That’s like when you’re a neat-freak and shit, right? All your socks lined up, pointing North in the drawer or something.”

  “Not anal retentive, man, audio-retention. Everything I hear…”

  I looked out the window, trying to swallow the welling sadness a little, but only traded the dull, sour taste for a bubbling lump that had been tumbling around in my stomach all morning.

  Still, I just stared out there. We were getting farther and farther from the city. The trees were starting to thicken, like a cold dog’s coat. We'd be home soon.

  “I sort of can remember everything I hear.”

  “Everything?” He whispered. “You remember being a baby?”

  “No.”

  “You remember what it sounds like being born?”

  “No. It came on just before my teens,” I said. “But I remember conversations, television shows, awful high school musicals... all that stuff."

  “You remember every single moment? No way. That's fucking nuts!"

  The lump in my stomach found something down there, took it in, and grew a little.

  “Mostly. I've got a couple gaps. But otherwise, yeah."

  “What? No way,” Pavan whispered. “You’re like a genius or something then? Like that Rain Man, dude. Why didn't you never say anything about it?”

  “I just don’t really use it much anymore,” I said. “There’s no real need, right. I work at a goddamn movie theater.”

  "Hey."

  He pointed to the dash, and I apologized to Dashboard Jesus for the infraction. Pavan let out a deep breath.

  “So… you remember everything you hear?”

  I shrugged, lifting one shoulder. All I wanted was to crawl under a blanket and succumb to the elixir of sleep. However, even if I did see a blanket in Pavan’s car, I’d never use it. Not even to warm myself during nuclear winter.

  Pulling off the interstate, we sat behind a couple cars and waited for the light to change.

  Pavan’s eyes then closed to slits, and he asked, “Okay, what was the first thing I ever said to you?”

  I sucked in some of the smoke (maybe I could suffocate the stomach lump or, longer term goal, kill it with cancer) and spat the plume out the window. “You said to me, ‘Hey man, you see a fat guy run past here with a wooden rolling pin and a bag full of film canisters?’”

  “Okay, too easy,” he blurted.

  "Right."

  "Even I remember that.” Pavan concentrated, pulling at his lip again. I waited. “Okay, I told you about my trip to Vegas, right?”

  “Yeah, two years ago.”

  “Okay, so what was the name—“

  “Angelina.”

  His mouth opened a little. “Okay, how much—“

  “The handout said three hundred but you found out that was just for starters, like some sort of 'Naked Lady cover-charge,' you called it. Anything else would be extra, ‘tips,’ she told you and they started at five hundred, which you did not have." More smoke tumbled out of my mouth, but I couldn't remember even taking another drag. “So you paid her thirty-seven bucks-- all you had left after the three hundred-- for her to just stand there topless for three minutes while you pulled out your—“

  “OKAY.”

  “And while you were otherwise engaged, she stood there for the thirty-s
even but ordered the new Tron movie with the hotel’s remote and, quote, 'just to screw me but not a for-real screwing,' she chose the All-Day movie pass-- which ended up costing you twenty-four ninety-five more-- and that sucked because you’d seen the film only the week before.”

  Pavan went as quiet as I've ever seen him go.

  He nearly melted into his seat, his arms sagged a little and his chin fell far enough to where the zipper on his hoodie was close to piercing the skin.

  Sometimes, he would zone out like that. All the dope. No joke, except for the minute or so it took him to roll up a joint just after waking up, I'd never seen him not high. I’m convinced that if you scraped an ice cream scoop around the inside of his skull, you'd come up with a blob of resin the size of a bowling ball. Without finger holes.

  “Hey man, cut it out,” I said and pointed to the road through the windshield. Behind us a guy laid on the horn, which did the trick. He looked at me, then turned back to the road and shook his head real slow.

  “Can’t believe you never told me about that,” he said. “That’s just something people, you know, I think you tell other people about. At least your friends.”

  For whatever reason, he actually looked a bit hurt. Like I’d lied to him.

  I stared out the window again and we dropped into silence all the way back to my apartment.

  "You want to have some beers later?"

  "Sure," he said and grinned a bit. One positive about all that dope-- too hard to hold a grudge if you've fried your short-term memory.

  "Okay, cool."

  "Hey," he said as I got out of his car. "You never said where you went yesterday. I covered for you and had Cheryl call the new guy in."

  I looked up to my apartment window. Dark.

  "Huh?"

  "Never mind, you don't want to tell me, so--"

  "No, no. What are you talking about? I was with you yesterday, Pavan."

  "Not yesterday. Yesterday, you did your vanishing thing."

  Stoners.

  "The guy screaming in the theater," I said. "That was last night. Remember."

  My friend shook his head.

  "Two nights ago. Last night, Anthony subbed in for you. You didn't show. I told everyone your Aunt died," he said. "So look real sad and shit when you come in, okay?"