Buy the Ticket, Take the Ride

by Sweany, Brian;

  “Thanks for noticing.” She throws her purse in the car, bending over in an obvious way. She stands up and closes the door. She hands me her driver’s license, lipstick, and a wad of cash. “Here you go…Pocket Man.”

  The Vogue has been around since the late thirties, a Golden Age theater turned porn palace in the seventies, turned nightclub in the eighties. Beth and I walk under the original 1938 Vegas-bold marquee through The Vogue’s front doors. Being the one with breasts and a vagina, Beth is, of course, inside the bar and halfway into a drink by the time the testosterone in the doorman subsides enough for him to relinquish my ID.

  Peter Wolf has already taken the stage. The Vogue is a nightclub, so you either sit way beyond the stage in high-backed lounge chairs or else commit to standing all night on the open concert floor. “Come on, Hank. Let’s try to get up front.”

  Wolf is playing a post–J. Geils original, a song I don’t recognize. This tanned older woman next to us, a leather-skinned groupie well past her prime, claims to be Peter Wolf’s biggest fan. She tells us she saw the J. Geils Band in ’81 when they were the headliner and U2 was the opening act. I’m impressed. I counter by telling her I saw Bon Jovi open for Scorpions in ’84. She seems less impressed.

  The song ends. That synthesized opening riff comes, as we all knew it would.

  “‘Freeze Frame’!” Beth screams with an almost childlike joy. She pulls me closer to the stage, closer to her. She pulls my arms around her waist, twisting her pelvis into me to the beat of the music.

  Peter Wolf is going into the vault tonight, pulling out J. Geils classics like “Homework,” “First I Look at the Purse,” “One Last Kiss,” and “Night Time.” And by classics, I mean songs I’ve never fucking heard of. I almost give up on him until “Musta Got Lost,” at which point Beth tugs on my sleeve.

  “Got to take a break.” My date holds out her hand. “Lipstick?”

  “Hurry up.” I hand over her paraphernalia. “I’m sensing a major encore.”

  Beth kisses me on the cheek. “Then save me a spot.”

  Seconds later, the stage lights are doused as Wolf ends his second set. Hundreds of cigarette lighters take their place. The Vogue shakes with drunken, nostalgic noise.

  Ten minutes pass. An unmistakable bass line. Where the hell is Beth?

  Wolf grabs the microphone and points to the crowd. He starts into the first verse, building to the chorus.

  “I’ve had the blues, the reds, and the pinks. One thing’s for sure…”

  “Love stinks!” the crowd shouts back at Wolf.

  Seriously, where is…

  She taps me on my shoulder. I turn my head, right into Beth’s lips.

  She times her kiss with the chorus. I didn’t even see it coming, our date hovering all night between a good time and me wondering if a follow-up date was even in the cards. The kiss is unexpected and cathartic all at once. Like Beth.

  Her kiss tastes confident, premeditated. Freshly applied lipstick. An obvious trace of a breath mint. We dance, still kissing. There’s a comfort level with Beth, as if we’re starting right where we left off. Our lips press and purse when they’re supposed to. Our tongues attack and retreat in concert with one another.

  We kiss for the whole song. The louder people scream, the more frantic, sloppy, and wet our kisses become. Our kiss is like an open act of defiance against the mob, the irony of the chorus pushing us deeper into one another’s mouths.

  “Love stinks…yeah, yeah!”

  Chapter fifty-three

  Against my better judgment, I drive us to Sanford & Son. We get there just before daybreak. I can hear Hatch and Mack both snoring in their rooms.

  I grab us two Natty Lights. Beth bends down and peers into the illuminated fifty-gallon aquarium on the back wall. Her calves are muscular, tight.

  “His name’s Bobo. Mack has had him since the beginning of college.”

  “He’s huge.” Beth taps on the glass. “What kind of fish is he?”

  I hand Beth her beer. “A snakehead, I think.”

  “Natural Light, huh?” Beth raises her blue and white aluminum can for a toast. “Cheers.”

  “Six bucks a case at Costco,” I say, raising my can in response. “Spare no expense.”

  “That was a great show,” Beth says.

  “It was?”

  Beth smiles at my sarcasm, her cheeks a little flush. We had kissed for the rest of the concert. The fact people mocked us made no difference whatsoever. The fact Peter Wolf closed with “Centerfold” made no difference whatsoever.

  Who am I kidding? We stopped kissing for that song!

  After the show, we walked, aimless and smitten, down the streets of Broad Ripple. By the time we found our way to the car, everything had closed, even the late-night burrito shack that never dims its lights until at least four in the morning.

  On every date I’ve ever been on, there’s an endpoint, a precise moment at which I say, “I’m done with this girl,” or, “I’m doing this girl.” This date doesn’t have that moment. It comes as a comfort to me.

  “What are you thinking about, Hank?”

  “Nothing,” I say, when of course what I mean to say is “everything.”

  “You’re lying.” Beth takes a drink of beer. She wipes her lips, pointing to my mouth with her free hand. “You stick your tongue out and bite down on it whenever you’re thinking about something. You do it when you’re dancing, too.”

  “I do?” I pull my tongue back in my mouth. I remember Dad. I grin, shaking my head.

  “I say something funny?”

  “Sorry, I just had a flashback of my father marching around the house to Chuck Mangione.”

  Beth doesn’t respond, allowing the moment to carry its own weight. She grabs my hand. It’s getting to the point where I’m almost too caught up in the date. I’ve barreled past smitten to just full-on wanting this girl more than anything else in my life.

  I look around the room. “You know, Beth, my friends think I’m crazy for going out with you.”

  At best, it’s a last-ditch, halfhearted, but all-the-way lame attempt at reestablishing control. We take our beers and our flirting out onto the front porch.

  “Your friends think you’re crazy.” Beth kisses me. “Or just Hatch?”

  I close the front door behind us and lean in and kiss her back. “He bet me his truck we wouldn’t last the rest of the summer.”

  “Like I told you, that dude has just got to let it go.” Beth kisses me again. “But if it makes you feel any better, my friends say you’re a bastard.”

  “I am a bastard.”

  “You are?”

  “Okay, maybe in the literal sense I’m only half-bastard.”

  “How so?”

  “Fatherless but not quite rudderless.”

  “That’s not what I’d call a bastard, Hank.”

  “It’s not? If being a bastard means being a product of my pain as much as my joy, my vices as much as my virtues, a raised up, broken down, and raised up again mishmash of sin and sincerity, how can I not be a bastard? And not just a bastard, a lucky bastard.”

  “Lucky?” Beth’s eyes perk up.

  “The luckiest,” I say.

  “How do you figure?”

  “Look at me, Beth. I’m sitting on a porch, on the eve of morning, when the world isn’t yet full of itself, and after all my fuck-ups, I’m still getting to taste the lips of the hottest girl in school.”

  Beth grabs my face with her hands and kisses me hard. Her tongue lingers inside my mouth awhile, licking my lips on the way out. “Anybody ever tell you that you have the softest and cushiest lips?”

  I lie of course. “No, never.”

  She sees right through me. “How many?”

  “Counting you, four.”

  Beth smiles and grabs my lips in
her fingers, squeezing. “You are the most adorable thing I’ve ever laid eyes on, but you know this date has to end at some point.”

  “What time is it?”

  “Your clock inside said almost six a.m. Let’s go get some breakfast. I bet if we jump in the car right now, we can find an even better view of the sunrise.”

  “I don’t need a better view. I’m waiting right here.”

  “Waiting?”

  “Yeah, waiting.”

  “For what?”

  “For nothing, for everything. I’m just tired of chasing the dawn. My postcard is right here, and the only thing that can lessen the beauty of this sunrise is you not being in it. Wait with me, Beth.”

  She stands, fronting a vintage Coppolla pink-gray dawn that consumes the whole scene. I can’t stop staring at her calves. She reaches down to take my hand. “Eyes up here, pervert.”

  I rise up, easing into her kiss. Her arms are around my neck, her lips pressed against my own. She pretends to rub her lipstick off my lips but leaves it there. She likes to mark her territory.

  “I’m a sure thing,” Beth says. “You know that, right?”

  I smile. “Now I do.”

  She smiles back. “So what are you waiting for, really?”

  “I told you what I’m waiting for…” I glance out over the pre-dawn horizon. I think about Dad, about Uncle Mitch, about Jack. I think about Mohammad El-Bakkar. I speak with a voice not quite my own but close enough to fool Beth, if not myself. “I’m waiting for the sun…to come to me.”

  “Then I’ll wait, too, Hank.”

  Her response comes as reflex. For as long as I’ve known Beth she’s exhibited an unconditional loyalty to me I’ve never earned and would never deserve. But hell, life has kicked me in the nutsack enough times that I’m taking this gift and running with it.

  “Hey, Beth.”

  “Yeah?”

  “You ever think about taking up belly dancing?”

  PART II

  1994–1995

  Chapter fifty-four

  Hatch chatters his teeth from beneath an old blanket. He points at the coffee table. “What the hell is that?”

  A white-gold 1.85-carat princess-cut diamond ring sits on the table. I must have taken it out last night when I was drunk. Like an idiot, I passed out and left the case open.

  “Family heirloom,” I say. “My mom’s wedding ring.”

  “And what the fuck are you doing with it?”

  “Debbie gave it to me.”

  “Why?”

  “Why not? Just shut up and drink this.” I hand Hatch a plastic bottle of orange Pedialyte that I procured from Dr. Burke’s pediatric office. Short of running an actual saline IV, it’s the best cure for dehydration or a hangover.

  Hatch unscrews the cap, sips the bottle reluctantly. He gasps, licking his teeth. “That shit tastes awful.”

  “Serves you right.”

  Hatch and I both took our own sweet time at IU, graduating in five-and-half-years. We continued to be roommates even after moving up to Indianapolis from Bloomington. Our house is an American Foursquare tucked into a row of American Foursquares in Indy’s SoBro neighborhood—as in “Southern Broad Ripple,” not “South Bronx,” although our house sits in the middle of a weird Gotham nexus. I can throw a rock from my front porch and hit the neon marquee of Red Key Tavern, Kurt Vonnegut’s old watering hole. Wander a few blocks north, and I’m standing in the parking lot of Atlas Supermarket, where David Letterman bagged groceries as a teenager.

  “M-moving a little fast, aren’t we, F-Fitzy?”

  Hatch is sick. He’s feverish and severely dehydrated but refuses to go to the doctor. He’s shivering even though he’s running a one-hundred-and-three–degree temperature. He’s running a temperature because he has food poisoning. Yesterday during a Patrick Swayze marathon—Red Dawn, Next of Kin, Point Break, and of course the one hundred fourteen minutes of cinematic perfection that is Road House—we each drank five forties of Crazy Horse malt liquor. I passed out and pissed myself. Hatch got the munchies, mistook a half-pound of raw bacon in the fridge for lunchmeat, and made himself a sandwich. He’s been shitting blood for the past hour, insisting he’s turned the corner, but the truth is his dad kicked him off his health insurance last week.

  “Fast?” I cover my mouth with a closed fist, swallow down a burp. I raise my thumb and then the rest of my fingers in sequence, counting to myself. Beth and I hit a year last July, five months to December, and then four more after that. By my count, we’ve been together for—”

  “Two years,” Hatch says. “Has it been that long?”

  “Twenty-one months actually.”

  I’m still drunk. About half of Road House sits unwatched on the laser disc player I appropriated from Dad’s office right before Mom sold the dealership. Hatch has managed to appropriate my dead father as his own excuse to blow off life and drink himself into oblivion. After he downed his third forty of Crazy Horse last night, Hatch confessed he couldn’t recall the last day he hadn’t been drunk. Over the last year, he’s held multiple jobs. Just out of school, he worked the early morning shift at an indoor playground on Indy’s northeast side called Leaps & Bounds. His responsibilities included dusting the entire four-story jungle gym, washing the balls in the ball pit, waxing the floors, and smoking blunts with a gangbanger who was there on a work-release program. When a Pizzeria Uno opened next door the same week his Leaps & Bounds co-worker got thrown back in jail for failing a drug test, Hatch quit Leaps & Bounds to become a waiter, sobered up for almost three months before they offered him a management position, then proceeded to get fired after every bottle of Chianti in the Uno’s bar somehow ended up at a Delta Gamma sorority party at Butler University. Hatch tried the waiter thing again at the Beef & Boards dinner theater on the north side of Indy, worked there just long enough to meet B.B. King, then quit the day after he touched Lucille.

  I just convinced Dr. Burke to hire Hatch to paint the interior of his house, which should keep him busy through the spring and part of the summer. At present, Hatch’s monthly contribution to our rent check is somewhere between ten dollars and a half-dozen late-night burritos. He disputes this number by claiming he makes up the difference by paying for most of our booze, a dubious claim seeing as (a) he drinks most of our booze, and (b) nearly all the liquor we still have in our house is the remaining contraband from Uno.

  Fortunately, about a month after we moved in here, I answered an open advertisement to IU grads for “Eager and Earnest Hoosiers with English Degrees.” I got on the ground floor of a start-up independent publisher all of five blocks from my house called College Avenue Press. My title is assistant editorial director. My gross income is twenty-two thousand dollars.

  Hatch’s affinity for the sauce has nothing to do with me or my dad. The apple doesn’t fall far from the tree, and Hatch is a drunk hanging from a fucking sequoia of alcoholics—his father, his mom, his grandfather. Since I started dating Beth, I feel like I’ve turned a corner. Hatch still seems stuck in the straightaway.

  “Beth is the best thing that’s happened to me, probably ever,” I say. “But who says I’m ever going to give this ring to her?”

  “Keep telling yourself that.” Hatch sits up, rewraps himself in the old blanket. “You know what your problem is, Fitzy?”

  “Enlighten me.”

  “For as much as you’ve fucked around, you’ll always be in love with being in love. You’re a man whore who deep down wants the fairy tale.”

  “Says the King of the Narrated Mix Tape.”

  “Oh, fuck the fuck off, Fitzy.”

  “Can’t you just be happy for me, Hatch?”

  “I don’t know. You gonna hold that mix tape thing over me forever?”

  I nod. “You bet your ass. What are friends for?”

  Hatch smiles, but I think it’s pro
bably the food poisoning doing the talking. He grabs a cup off the coffee table that has a swallow of malt liquor left in it. And the bastard fucking drinks it! He reaches in between the couch cushions and pulls out an unopened forty of Crazy Horse. “Qualms, motherfucker,” he says.

  Qualms is another one of Hatch’s stupid drinking games, Qualms being the code word for “finish your entire fucking drink.” Even sick, Hatch can find time for a drinking game. Originally intended as a power-drinking variant of the more universal “Social!” toast that allows for the occasional harmless chug with a friend, Hatch has turned Qualms into a weapon, a way to pummel people into inebriated comas. See, the loophole in Qualms is that you simply must finish your current drink in hand. So Hatch drinks down his drink—in this example, a solitary swallow of cheap malt liquor. Meanwhile, he hands you a fresh drink—in this example, an unopened forty-ounce bottle of cheap malt liquor—and proceeds to immediately yell, “Qualms!” Then, while casually burping up a mere drop of backwash, he sits back and waits to see if the foam first comes shooting out your mouth or your nose.

  This time, it’s my nose. My stomach is okay, though. Money being as tight as it is, the only thing I’ve had in the last twenty-four hours is a bag of Cool Ranch Doritos and a large Diet Coke, both purchased with my mom’s Unocal 76 gas card. Forty ounces is surprisingly easy to keep down on an empty stomach.

  I wipe traces of malt liquor off my mouth. “You really are a fucking dickhead.”

  Hatch is laughing. “Just trying to lighten the mood, Fitzy.”

  “Consider it lightened,” I say. The ring is still sitting in its open case on the coffee table. I grab the case and take one last look at the ring.

  “You sure you know what you’re doing?”

  I close the case, stuff the ring in my pocket. “This feels like the one, Hatch. It’s the first relationship I can see me being in for the long term.”

  “The long term? When I said you’d been together two years, you immediately corrected me and said twenty-one months.”

  “So?”