Now Is the Hour

by Tom Spanbauer

  Who was this girl?

  Billie gave me a big smile. A smile like I was the only boy in the whole world.

  Just reach in and pull one out when I tell you to, Billie said.

  Relax, Billie said.

  This is different, Billie said.

  Happy birthday, Billie said.

  It wasn’t long, and the two girls from the ’57 root-beer brown Pontiac got out of their car. One of them, the one with bleached-blond hair with a flip, knocked on Billie’s window. Billie rolled down the window.

  Come in and sit, Billie said.

  Billie scooched over, and the two girls slid into the pickup. The girls and Billie were talking a mile a minute. I didn’t get what they were talking about, so I just watched the shiny cars pass by. After a while, Billie looked over at me. That same smile, like I was the only boy in the whole world.

  Cheryl, Karen, Billie said. This is Rigby John.

  Both the girls were real cute. Probably really popular. The way they smiled was nice but you could tell they were checking me out. Cheryl and Karen both said, Hi, Rigby John, together, and the way they said my name, they sounded like they were singing, so they started laughing.

  Then they were off again, the way girls do, talking, talking. So comfortable with each other. Their long hair and their perfume smells and sitting close, touching each other.

  Sometimes, I think I could watch girls all day. Not in a bad way, like looking to screw them or something. Just looking. How their hair is, how they smell. Jewelry on them, how bracelets fall down their arm, or an earring catches the light. The way they start moving when they get around you because you’re not like them.

  Then Cheryl said something about the Senior Summer All Night Party. They all talked and talked some more, but it wasn’t long, and Billie and Cheryl and Karen were all looking at me again.

  Billie laughed that laugh of hers that started in her chest, then moved her whole body.

  So, Rig, Billie said. You want to go to the Senior Summer All Night Party with me?

  A flash of heat in my cheeks. It took me awhile to speak. You know, the breathing thing. Which was weird because I think it made me look cool, the way I was silent. But underneath I wasn’t cool. My mother. I knew my mother wouldn’t let me go to an all-night party.

  Sure, I said.

  More talking and laughing. Cheryl flipped her hair. Karen touched the peace symbol that hung from a piece of leather around her throat. Billie got out the cigarettes, passed the cigarettes around, and we all took a cigarette. I lit a match, and there was the joke about three on a match and there we were four, all of us crammed in the pickup. On the radio, the Box Tops were singing “The Letter.” Outside the windshield, headlights and exhaust fumes, an endless parade of kids in their cars.

  So, do you have the stuff? Karen asked.

  How much is it? Cheryl said.

  Billie patted her hand on my shirt pocket.

  Two dollars, Billie said.

  Two dollars for one joint? Cheryl said. Or two dollars for two joints?

  Two dollars for one joint, Billie said.

  That’s cool, Karen said. We each want a joint.

  Here’s four dollars, Cheryl said.

  Billie looked at me, her eyelids down halfway. I reached into my shirt pocket, pulled out the plastic sack, unrolled the plastic sack. My fingers weren’t shaking. I pulled out two joints and handed one joint to Cheryl, one joint to Karen.

  That moment, handing out the joints like that, the way Cheryl and Karen were looking at me, something stirred in my balls.

  Billie saw it too. In my face, Billie saw what was happening in my balls.

  There were three more girls that night. Two together at once, then another one alone fifteen minutes later. I don’t remember their names, and they didn’t come in and sit with us and smoke like Cheryl and Karen. Billie knew all three of them. Seemed like Billie had a lot of close friends. They all stood outside Billie’s window, and Billie talked to them for a while and then Billie patted my shirt pocket and her eyelids went down halfway, and I reached in my pocket and pulled out the joint and handed the joint to Billie and then Billie handed the joint to the girl.

  The three girls were all real differnt. One was tall with short black hair. One was heavyset with braces with a stick-on red star on her forehead, and one was a black girl with an afro who Billie kissed on the cheek. Three differnt girls, but each girl, it was the same way. When they saw me go into my pocket for the joint, they looked at me like I was the coolest guy they’d ever seen.

  Billie opened her pink satin purse with the gold clasp. In her purse was the man’s watch, her lipstick, and ten one-dollar bills. Billie took the bills out, fanned the ten dollars out in her hands.

  Yummy! Billie said.

  Then: Here, Billie said. Put this money in your wallet.

  The ten one-dollar bills in my wallet with the couple I had looked like a million.

  There’s one joint left, I said.

  And with that I started the pickup, put the clutch in, put it into first. As Billie and I were driving out of the Snatch Out, two cars honked their horns and waved. Just as we pulled up to Ashby, out of the ’57 root-beer Pontiac, Cheryl and Karen yelled: Wooo! Right on! Billie and Rigby John!

  Instead of turning right, Billie and I turned left.

  On the radio, the Buffalo Springfield was singing “For What It’s Worth.”

  Billie had that smile on. I was the only boy in the world.

  I shifted real smooth from first into second.

  Happy birthday, Rig, Billie said.

  Let’s paint the town red! I said.

  Let’s paint it pink, Billie said.

  The rest of that night was something like a circus ride, something like a dream. Billie and I smoked our joint parked in Buddy’s Pizza’s parking lot. I was scared at first smoking out in the open like that, but Billie wasn’t, so I figured if Billie wasn’t scared, I wasn’t going to be scared. Plus, I kept thinking of how all those girls had looked at me that night. The guy with a pocketful of joints.

  The grass hit us fast, and my head was spinning, but I felt clear and strong.

  Out of Billie’s pink satin purse came another surprise. My birthday present. Billie had made me and her plastic laminated fake IDs.

  My kiss to Billie was two lips against two lips soft with a kind of suck, tobacco, and the taste of pink. Billie fit in just right under my arm.

  I’d never felt so close to her as I did that night. Something in me was differnt, I don’t know what, but I felt I was all brand-new. I’d completely forgot all about George Serano, and the truth I needed to tell Billie. At that point I couldn’t even remember what it was I was going to say.

  We put our cigarettes out, and then the loud metal-to-metal pop of the driver’s door, and Billie and I were out in the warm night and high, right in the middle of Saturday night. The wind blew from the west, and the wind was warm, and the way the wind hit our faces, we were invincible.

  Hand in hand down East Fifth Street, Billie and I walked to the corner of Fifth and East Center. The other side of the tracks. The other side of Pocatello. Where the old Pocatello House used to be. Black people. Indian people. Mexican people. Neon lights and all kinds of people on the streets everywhere. The world so strange and new, especially while we stood waiting for the light to change. I wondered if we might see Flaco and Acho. It was like Billie and I were in a big town like San Francisco or something.

  There was a line to get in the Blind Lemon.

  Billie and I held on tight to each other’s hands. Just before we got to the bouncer, Billie pulled out her pink satin purse with the gold clasp and pulled out a cigarette. I lit the cigarette. Billie took a couple puffs, handed the cigarette to me. Our fingers touched.

  Praying, Billie said.

  Smoking is praying, she said.

  The bouncer was a college guy in khaki pants and a white oxford button-down. His glasses were horn-rimmed and he had a crewcut. He looked like one
of the Kingston Trio or one of the Brothers Four. He was sitting on a high stool behind a podium. There was a lamp on the podium. Bugs in the light of the lamp. A frat ring with a blue stone on his finger.

  The door to the Blind Lemon was open, and the music was loud, and the place was packed, everybody drunk and yelling. Communists, the lot of them. Smoke pouring out of the open door out into the night.

  Something about the light inside the bar was something I’d never seen before. Everything was glowing with a purple glow.

  When it was my turn, I stepped up to the podium. I handed the bouncer my fake ID. Usually, I would’ve been scared shitless, trying to find my breath, but the grass had kicked in. When you’re stoned, you don’t have to wait until it’s all over for things to make sense. As they happen, things make sense. Ordinary things, like looking, make so much sense.

  The sleeve of my chambray shirt turned into some kind of day-glo purple brightness. It made so much sense, this brightness.

  The bouncer saw me staring at my shirtsleeve.

  It’s a black light, the bouncer said. We just put them in, he said. Makes everything look weird.

  The bouncer hardly looked at me, handed me my ID back. When I opened my wallet up to put my ID back in, the black light coming out of the Blind Lemon made the dollar bills, my hands, look like we were on another planet.

  Planet Blind Lemon.

  So much sense.

  Then it was Billie’s turn. Billie wasn’t a lot taller than the podium. Her little hand, her tiny Midnight in Helsinki fingernails. She handed her ID to the bouncer. With her other hand, Billie grabbed my hand and squeezed. Billie’s hippie earrings, the Indian beaded birds, flying, flying.

  The bouncer looked hard at Billie’s ID. He checked the corners. He turned Billie’s ID over, looked on the back side. Pulled his glasses down his nose.

  I couldn’t figure out why he was spending so much time on Billie’s ID. I was the one who looked like he was seventeen years old. Billie could pass for twenty-one any day. And Billie’s ID was the same as mine.

  Then it hit me. Another, even deeper sense of meaning. A true marijuana moment.

  The bouncer looked differnt with Billie. A way he didn’t look with me. He was making himself look tough, like he was a real hard-ass.

  When I looked over at Billie, I could see. Billie wasn’t worried a bit.

  The guy was flirting with her.

  It blew my mind, it made so much sense.

  Then something else. Billie’s boobs.

  The bouncer was really looking at Billie’s boobs. Billie said she was used to it, and I was used to it too, in a way, the way people, I mean, men, looked at her breasts. But that night with the bouncer, that moment, just before Billie stepped into the black light, he was really looking at her boobs. I mean, he was gawking.

  It made so much sense.

  Billie’s boobs under her loose-knit pink sweater, in the black light, that bra of hers was going to pop out like the Star-Spangled Banner.

  The bouncer gave Billie’s ID back to her, and Billie was putting her ID back into her pink satin purse. Just before Billie took the step, out of darkness and into the light, so to speak, I put my hand on Billie’s arm.

  You know, Billie, I said.

  Right at that moment, Billie’s head was still outside, but her boobs were inside. Inside, that is, in the black light. The bouncer’s eyes bugged right out his head. I thought he was going to have a conniption fit.

  Billie looked down. There they were. Each one as big as my head. The two enormous day-glo white D cups that were her breasts.

  Billie squeezed my hand so hard it damn near broke the bones.

  Oh shit, Billie said.

  What happened next went smooth and made sense.

  I pulled my shirttails out, unbuttoned my shirt, took my shirt off, and handed my shirt to Billie.

  If ever I was sure there was a time that Billie really loved me, it was right then.

  In her blue eyes. So much sense.

  Billie took my chambray shirt and pressed her face into my shirt.

  Billie’s big smile, like I was the only boy in the world.

  My God, you smell good, Billie said.

  Inside in the crowded smoky loud Blind Lemon, my T-shirt glowed. Billie’s teeth glowed. We kept pointing and laughing at each other because of our teeth. All over on the both of us, tiny little specks of things that glowed. My chambray shirt on Billie was glowing. Billie’s hippie earrings, those birds were glowing too. Glowing and flying.

  All around us, people with glowing teeth, everything that was white, glowing purple-white. Everything dark, especially dark. Everything dark covered in glowing specks. A weird purple light in people’s eyes. Come on, baby, light my fire.

  Couldn’t hear yourself think.

  Everybody yelling and laughing.

  Planet Blind Lemon.

  Billie and I in the middle of it all. Billie in my shirt, and for some reason I was holding her pink satin purse. Smoking the same cigarette. My arm was around Billie’s shoulder. Billie so close. Like we were one being, attached at the hip.

  After a pitcher of beer and about an hour in the Blind Lemon, Billie and I felt like we were tripping on acid. There was this one woman who had put Murine in her eyes, and the Murine in the black light made it look like her eyes were leaking green shit.

  We moved on to the next bar. It had regular lighting and a good jukebox, called Juck’s. Then after Juck’s, there was the Emerald Club, then the Office, then a basement bar close to the railroad tracks called Satan’s Cellar. Each bar, each time, the bouncer checked our IDs, looked us over, let us in as slick as snot.

  Satan’s Cellar had a cover charge because there was dancing. One dollar a person. After all the beer we drank — I should say I drank — there were still five one-dollar bills in my wallet.

  Mostly hippies in Satan’s Cellar. I didn’t know Pocatello had so many hippies. The dance floor was no bigger than ten feet square, so it was real crowded.

  “Monday Monday,” “To Love Somebody,” “Baby I Need Your Lovin’.”

  The top of Billie’s head right under my chin. Her breath through my T-shirt onto my chest. Her French smell. Both my arms around her. Billie had her hands in the back pockets of my Levi’s. Warm and close and slow, Billie and I were smooth dancing.

  If you’re going to San Francisco. Be sure to wear some flowers in your hair.

  Right there that night on the Satan’s Cellar dance floor. The first time I heard that song.

  You might say that song changed my life.

  Back out on East Center Street, we were feeling no pain.

  Billie and I stood ourselves on the sidewalk under a lamppost. Just Billie and I in a bright spot on the sidewalk. We had our hands on each other’s shoulders. We were looking at each other in the eyes. We were laughing and talking and laughing. I can’t tell you what all we were talking about or what made us laugh so hard, but whatever it was, it was making so much sense, and the way it was making sense made Billie and I laugh our asses off.

  Eleven-forty-five by Billie’s watch. The night sky was a mess of stars. A big gust of warm wind blew our hair back. Even Billie’s hair with all her hairspray. Her earring birds flying, flying.

  Billie and I started walking, just walking along, her shoulders under my arm. Billie was trying to take steps as big as my steps.

  Another big gust of warm wind. Out in the dark night, the wind blew through the leaves of a tree, the high sigh on top, and Billie and I turned to look. In the branches, a large bird. A crow maybe, or a raven. All we could see was the bright in its eyes.

  The tree was a scrub elm growing by the side of the underpass where the cement sloped down.

  That part of town my dad called Niggertown.

  Billie’s eyes lit up as if the high sigh of the wind and the bright eyes of the bird had made her remember something.

  I’ve got a great idea! Billie said. Let’s go to the WORKING MAN’S CLUB!

&nb
sp; Something big and sharp in my heart then. Breath. There was no breath. My hand on my throat, then my hand on my chest, I laid my palm flat.

  Billie’s elbow, locked in my elbow, pulled me forward.

  Come on! she said. Let’s do something really different!

  Walking was a dream of walking.

  So long ago that Sunday after nine o’clock Mass, the first time I heard the word nigger, and the word nigger landed on the dark side of my heart. How old was I then, five or six? One of the very few times my family did anything differnt. A detour on the way home from church, my father behind the wheel. He had turned his face and smiled his black eyes across the front seat of the ’48 Buick Special into Mom’s almond-shaped hazel eyes, the net of her Sunday hat a shadow onto her forehead and her glasses.

  Slumming, Dad had said. Just thought we’d see how the other half lives.

  The other half, the dark half, that part of Pocatello, especially the two bars Dad pointed out that Sunday to us, his loving Catholic family locked safe inside their big green Buick, Sis squeezing my hand so hard. The two “dives,” as Dad called them, the Working Man’s Club and Porters and Waiters, the bars’ long, sad windows with the paint peeling off, the rusted, broken-down cast-iron fence, the garbage overflowing in the two garbage cans, a skinny yellow dog peeing on a dead bush, the two sets of front stairs up to the first floors, a woman with dark skin in a yellow dress and red high heels sitting on the front steps, the little neon blue moon in the cracked window, WORKING MAN’S CLUB. Next door above the door, the painted red sign with fancy gold letters, a sign like you see in the train station, PORTERS AND WAITERS. The slow, sinful saxophone jazz playing out from somewhere inside in there, enormous and dark.

  Those two dives and the basement door in the alley behind the two dives and what I was still yet to find behind that basement door.

  Even back then, five years old, to me the world on the other side of my rolled-up window, beyond the stuffy locked-up Buick, was Scrooge and the Ghost of Christmas Past, something shocking, differnt, a pain down low in my pants I wanted more of.

  The part of Pocatello that exists only in a Judy Garland song.

  Niggertown.

  Looked like the Princess Theater to me.