Fast Eddie, King of the Bees: 1

by Robert Arellano

  I submerged memories of my former lives beneath devotion to my job. Movement occupied me, distance defined me. I measured the stretches, but not the time. If each mile corresponded more or less to a minute, it was only on some other, abstract plane that did not concern me. My heart beat in synch with the thunk of the highway joints. In my new vocation, I caught the eye of a maximum-capacity sixty-five persons four or five times a day. By and large, the sojourners who chose my coach hailed from a special milieu—more amorphous than stratum, somewhere not so much between as adjacent to the class divisions of those who went by automobile, rail, sea, and air. My passengers were prone to motion discomfort or afraid to fly; they had seen too many derailment picts or had never learned how to drive. The bus is a great leveler. The people who take it just want to go big red, leave their lovers, leave the driving to us. I could tell by the volume of baggage and the length of time they lingered on the platform bidding good-byes whether it would be a long absence. On night runs, I observed their overheadilluminated faces, twice reflected between black windows and my mirror, looking out at a dark departure town for what might be the last time. Over extended flights of frivolity, I waxed sanguine and imagined that I was ferrying, among the anonymous bodies who had stepped up from the platform, my actual parents. Anything was possible, I tried telling myself, even that the detestable mayor and his sexy wife were not Dad and Mom. But I wasn’t kidding anybody. Deep inside, I knew such delusions had to do with an addiction to running, a dependency which heightened my capacity for fantasy.

  I was still Fast Eddie, although on a different scale from that of the early days. Turnpike, Parkway, Thruway, Connector, Expressway, and Interstate were my sprinting grounds. I could do Newark to Atlantic City in an hour, New York City to Stonington in just under two. Troopers across three states had heard of Fast Eddie but had never seen him in action. My method? It was partly that I did not strive. It didn’t require any highfalutin system, radar scanning, or channelling nineteen for smokies. Rather, there was a Zen to it like that of wallet-lifting: slipping by like you belong, bolting through like lightning, and for the love of Pete, never—especially when encountering a surprise speed trap—slowing up or otherwise exhibiting signs of culpability. By no means did I exceed the limit all the time. In fact, a lot of days I was just on time. Some foolhardy scofflaws made it a point of pride: “I can’t drive” fifty, seventy-, or ninety-five. My credo: “Excess in moderation.” I had a sort of sixth sense for correct conditions. Although dispatchers, drivers, mechanics, luggage-handlers, and ticket-sellers built up the hype around my every arrival, my own satisfaction was purely personal. If by extension I could steal a little extra time off the trip table, all the better. This was my sublimated subversion, the vicarious vent for all the criminal energies of my upbringing. In the treacherous trousers of the Northeast known as the tri-state area, the great highways were as pockets, and my shuttle snaked through folds and furrows like a slick, steely finger, every day’s record time better than a fat billfold packed with cabbage.

  I tried to convince the regular passengers that my good fortune was limited purely to the fact that I never got stopped, but they never believed me. They were ball-spinners, crapshooters, slot-feeders, and card-counters caught up in blackjack, pai gow, jacks-or-better, and all the video variations. Occasionally, one would cajole me into sitting on his lucky side during a poker hand, calling red or black while the wheel reeled in its hypnotic roulette, touching dice before a loaded throw, or pulling the bandit’s solitary arm. It never lasted long. Invariably, I broke out in a drenching sweat and the gamblers discovered there was no such luck in these big bones.

  I never once approached Ho-Ho-Kus, charting its position only by the stars, but on my constant runs I obtained occasional news of the one-time hometown from papers, passengers, and Net, as well as from that anarchic and, when it comes to deregulated democracy of discourse, as-yet-unbested medium known as citizens’ band. Pauly, after conducting searches, offering rewards, and, with a glimmer of intuition that impressed me despite my contempt, having the Hackensack and Saddle Rivers dredged, gave up searching and admitted to the press that I had been “a little wild.” Shots of the first lady crying in the tabloids were more than I could bear to look at. Merry kept herself busy as den mother of a local boy scout troop. While it broke my heart to have left her in the lurch, I never dared drop the Correntes a line, lest I alert Apple Jack’s intelligence to an opportunity at following through on his shadowy threats. The PR from the whole melodrama of finding their prodigal son only to lose him again just served to boost the mayor’s approval rating among his sympathetic citizens, and Pauly’s re-election meant he must have managed to remain in the Jersey crime boss’s favor. There had been no reprisals from the despot, so I figured I had done the right thing by staying away from Ho-Ho-Kus. The only times I ever ventured near the town where my parents laid their heads was when I blew by on the Turnpike at ninety miles per hour.

  While I was making my monotonous runs up and down the Parkway and I-95, Apple Jack went semi-legit. The penny arcade proprietor, by his ruthless influence, had shored up city after city like so many big-boy toys until he called the shots throughout the entire northeast corridor. He rode his golden chariot up to Mass and ran for mayor of the Beast. Throughout the campaign, Apple Jack expertly affected the whole baby-kissing routine. Most people thought of him as an enormous teddy bear with a smile of genuine gold, and so the city council shrugged when Apple Jack stole the election. He kept up the gentle giant charade during his first months in office, but those of us familiar with Bean Town politics weren’t fooled. Apple Jack was affecting the patina of public figure because he knew how the city’s strong-mayor system worked: The initial term is going steady, the second is the wedding, and from there on out it’s pure honeymoon. Fossilized leaders like White, Flynn, Menino, and so on had each gone a decade or more in this town-without-term-limits, invincible demagogues running unopposed or against token challengers, flexing their muscles all the way. If Apple Jack managed to get re-elected twice, his awful gravity would become the biggest new force the Beast had seen since the turn of century 21. Someday, he would cause more trouble than both the Bolger brothers put together. In the meantime, Mayor Apple Jack remained the wicked witch rolled up inside the wizard.

  It was an eventful age, but I managed to stay above it all—six feet above, to be precise. That’s how high my ass was perched above macadam. Riding a few heads over automobile roofs was like jumping to a transcendental place with perspective beyond the realm of regular mortals. I knew all those cars were down there, and I was careful not to squash them. Meanwhile, my army of sundry defeated passengers and I shot back and forth between marble palaces on purposeful missions, even if my purpose was only the back-and-forth. It was not a little unnerving, piloting a chrome shuttle over worse-than-lunar surfaces, but it beat offing your father, effing your mother. I was in a good place, where I belonged. There was sanctuary in kinesis. The moving kept me safe. Above the mad, rattling gyre of sidewalks, streets, and doorways, a sober judiciousness reigned. Without slowing down, there was no way that lust and murderous musing could catch up with me.

  The months ticked away like numbers on a doctored odometer. On those long, ludicrous runs, I had a lot of time to think under the mantric influence of passing lamps and the Om-like drone of down-shifting. I was a mariner on a sea of the fragrant hydrocarbons in ebb and flow with carbon-monoxide, which has no odor. In no small measure intoxicating, albeit highly toxic, on a cold winter day the bouquet of engine exhaust fills the lungs with the artificial afterburn of pious, if poisonous, warmth, and in the heat of summer offers an almost mentholated chill to nostrils, sinuses, and cerebellum. I hear synapses shut down like circuits extinguished by a dry spike of frost: snik! Yes, I allowed myself to become a bit fritzed by this noxious routine, and I did not fail to recognize an element of self-cancellation in all the headlong-rushing toward the next (or, as the Buddhists would have it, my chance at escaping
the wheel of this same) world. I entertained reincarnation as an opportunity to clear the slate, reboot the system. Next time, I would hang onto that umbilical real tight and not let the culprits out of my sight. I never did get rid of my morose fascination with death, although it lay dormant, certainly, all the time I had other lives in my hands; this was perhaps my surest insurance, although every morning I was horrified by the prospect of being left to return an empty bus at the end of the day: What enticing voices might attend such a starcrossed mission?

  Every so often, a schedule would take me into the Beast. I might have tried to look up Shep, except I never touched the ground. For a driver involved in the swift evacuation and replenishment of passengers, the Hub hardly ever felt like a real destination. Ramps removed coaches right up to the fourth-story terminal and deposited them back on the highway without ever allowing a wheel to tread the surface of the city.

  In the South Station waiting area, I bumped into all sorts of hard-luck weirdos. On one shuttle run to East Beast, I was talking current events with an old-timer, a one-hundred-year-old flower child, health nut, conspiracy theorist, and compulsive gamble, who had been riding right up front for as long as I had been driving. He was always holding forth on one or another social subject, and this time he filled me in on the underground siege. The subterranean revolution had been blockaded by a traitor, one of their own who had bugged out. Miss Spinks, the transvestite hacker and chief of underworld security, had scrambled the passwords for the seven entrances to the submerged colony and holed herself up in the sewers, leaving Dig City inhabitants trapped inside, stuck without any means of procuring provisions from above. The psychotic Spinks had reprogrammed the security codes in the central artery’s old command bunker: the Pan-Harbor Operations Command and Infrastructure Service. While she played VR and smoked too much loco weed, Dig City waited out starvation or suffocation.

  “Sounds like just a stoner bent on sabotaging the co-op from his little hacker hole,” I said.

  “She’s an anarchist and a Leo,” annotated the centenarian bettor. “Wants to be unattached and in charge at the same time.”

  As I was pulling up to the casino in East Beast on the next-to-last leg of my run, the old-timer needled me for my zodiacal sign. I did not know, so I had to tell him the date. That very day turned out to be my twenty-first birthday, my real twenty-first birthday. “You mean to tell me you haven’t taken a day off in almost five years, you’ve never gotten a ticket, never had an accident, and you just turned twenty-one?”

  “I guess.”

  “Then you have got to let me buy you a drink—in the blackjack room.”

  I had an hour break so I went along, but we never got to the beverage. Poor guy, he busted every time. Even beginning with can’t-lose combinations like ace-seven he managed to misplace his nerve and go over while the dealer held at seventeen. When he started holding low, the dealer trumped with blackjack. “I’ve never had such a bad streak!” he said. I was cold-sweating in that cavernous hall of clockless walls and perpetual fluorescence. It was not so much for any phobia of gambling, but of gamblers. Along with all the funny money, chips, and cheap buckets of slot feed, they frequently carried great wads of actual American cash. When I saw such bundles, my hands instinctively itched.

  “I told you I wasn’t lucky that way.”

  “Hey, you don’t look so good, Eddie. Maybe you should get some fresh air.”

  “I better get back to the bus.”

  A half-hour remained until departure and I decided to buy myself a birthday beer at the Crossroads Tavern, a worried way station beneath the casino for the losers, the non-players, and the weary coach operators. I found the place agreeable at first dreary, inky light. The karaoke machine in the corner was dusty with disuse. Someone had finger-traced desolate letters in the coating of crud: “Long live the King.” I liked my first beer after just one sip from the greasy mug. I was beginning to think this might be the beginning of a beautiful dependency when a madman burst into the bar with all the ceremony of a psychopathic slug. “Arise! Beastonites!” he howled in maniacal half-laughter.

  With rings on all his fingers, the leather-suited stranger couldn’t be a complete hound. One thing I noticed right away: He was wearing a really nice watch. A pimp? A nightclub singer? A high-class huckster? A furloughed schizophrenic? The retinue at his coat tails seemed to belie this last guess. They were not the clinical type: five guys, mirrorshaded goons in dark suits with conspicuous ear pieces, the signal features of those security automatons typically managed by an unseen genius. Two shadowed the mac daddy’s every move while three others hovered at the door.

  I pushed the glass back towards the well and was swallowing my last mouthful of sour brew when a meaty clap on my back caused me to sputter. What little beer did not get sucked into my lungs sprayed across the bar top. “Another round for the birthday boy,” the buffoon bellowed into my ear for all the bar to hear. A grievous glance broke the bad news: to my right, the only empty seat.

  The blue, boozy equilibrium of the heretofore maudlin tavern had been upset and everyone peered uneasily over their beers, glaring sideways not at him but at me, as if I had betrayed them by involuntarily invoking this insufferable extrovert. I was using my tie to mop the suds from my chin when I had a strange feeling and mouthed, almost unconsciously, and, I believed, inaudibly, “How did you know—?”

  “Relax!” the bumptious intruder growled, climbing up on the stool beside mine. I had barely fed him his cue and he was already stepping on my lines. “It’s everyone’s birthday when the King sits down beside them!”

  This so-called King was swarthy and the gray had just begun to streak his temples. He was not stoned, per se, but his eyes—great, broad oculars with dilated pupils—suggested he was soused on something, probably a lot of things: a stiff cocktail of cybertropics blended with a volatile mix of delusions and topped with a twist of overripe ego. My eye on his timepiece, I was idly contemplating a snatch and dash, but a surreptitious look toward the exit told me that was not an option. One of the not-so-secret servicemen posted at the door shook his head in definitive defiance. Sure enough, I was going to have to ride this one out to some kind of climax. This was what happened when a person with my luck entered a bar.

  The bartender placed a yard-long stein before me. I thought for a moment that it was just for show. There could be no way to lift such a thing to one’s lips—the fluted stem stretched almost all the way to the ceiling of that dank, airless saloon—but upon lowering my gaze along the entire amber length, eyes settled on the little apparatus at the base, a sort of nozzle made out of surgical tubing. I had heard of this: beer bong.

  “Look,” I said, “I don’t drink.”

  “Oh yeah,” he said, motioning to the measly glass I had just drained, verily dwarfed by the brimming monolith beside it, “what do you call that?”

  I thought I might appease him by drawing a little draught, but before I could try a bejeweled hand had covered the mouth of my pudgy mug. “Oh no you don’t. This little piggy,” he said, fondling the thing’s spigot, “goes between your lips.”

  The goon at our star’s right shoulder cracked a sadistic grin, but Barrymore himself beheld my dilemma with perfect, ingenuous earnest: The kook really believed it was in the interest of fun, and failed to detect any signal whatsoever of my own disenchantment. Patrons who moments before had brooded agreeably over their stale distillations became inebriated by the air of imminent punishment. They shuffled over and crowded around with glasses raised to watch how their former fellow in erstwhile self-absorption would be served up. As a newcomer, I had trespassed, however innocently, by raising this evil spirit. A pink pique of bloodlust came to a hundred-some eyes marbled with over-indulgence and undersleep. Recognizing at that instant the presence of all the elements for a precipitate of dark crowd pathology, I resigned myself to the instigator’s unctuous injunction.

  “Show ‘em, son!” he cried, pounding the top of the bar. I sucked do
wn the sparkling gall in great, convulsive gulps.

  “Bring it home, son!”

  Finished, I roared a great, curdling burp.

  My captor swaggered over to the karaoke corner and picked up the microphone. “Ever have a woman treat your heart cruel?” he announced to the roomful of brutes, eliciting an approbatory murmur.

  “Did you ever come home from working hard, traveling far, and your baby’s wearing that loved-on look?” A grumble went up indicating general empathy.

  “When that kind of thing happened to the King, I’d say, ‘That’s all right mama.’”

  He shook a hip. There were cheers, whistles.

  “I’d say, ‘You’re just a natural-born beehive, filled with honey to the top.’”

  Hoots and hollers.

  “You know what I’d say? ‘Hey mama, don’t you treat me wrong. Come and love your daddy all night long.’ That’s what I’d say.”

  Howls, snorts.

  “But she’s a stingy little mama, ‘bout to starve me half to death. So you know what I told her? ‘I’m leaving town, baby. I’m leaving town for sure.’”

  Foot stomping, bar banging.

  “That big eight-wheeler runnin’ down the track means your true lovin’ daddy ain’t a-comin’ back.” A general yeehaw.

  “Move on ol’ son, move on!” The self-proclaimed King lowered his sunglasses a touch and peered over the frames with icy blue eyes. “Only thing is, friends, what could I say to my boy?”

  People piped down.

  “I stood over his crib. ‘You’re sleeping son, I know, but, really, this can’t wait. I wanted to explain—before it gets too late…” He tilted the glasses back and flicked a switch on the karaoke machine. Sentimental strings swelled shrilly from the speakers. Words scrolled across the screen and the man sang:

  For your mother and me, love has finally died.