Home Free

by Dan Wakefield

  “What does that mean, ‘farting around’?” said Lou, putting her knife and fork down.

  “Hey,” Barnes said, “I like it this way. No shit. This is great.”

  “It means whatever you think it means,” Gene said.

  “Can’t stand rare myself,” said Barnes. “The more done the better. Well is well with me.”

  “I don’t call having a drink with a friend ‘farting around,’” said Lou.

  “Oh, I didn’t realize you and he were old friends.”

  “I didn’t say ‘old’ I said ‘friends.’”

  “Well,” said Barnes, wolfing down a last hunk of burned beef and jumping up from the table, “I really gotta be going now. Hope you’ll both come over sometime. I’m on the Hill. Name’s in the book. I’ll open a can of beans or something. Anyway, drinks. Really. Anytime.”

  He made his escape, leaving Gene and Lou at battle stations.

  “That was some hospitality,” she said.

  “I’m supposed to feed every pickup you drag home?”

  “I didn’t drag him anywhere and he wasn’t a pickup.”

  “What was he then?”

  “A friend, goddam it. Or might have been. Don’t you understand about that? Just because we locked ourselves up and didn’t see anyone in Urbana doesn’t mean I’m going to do that here. We need friends. People. Otherwise we’ll smother each other.”

  She persuaded him she wasn’t out to make the guy nor did she have any such ideas or why the hell would she have brought him home anyway?

  He took a deep breath and said he was sorry he’d thought such things.

  She apologized about being late and not calling.

  He said he guessed she was right about having friends.

  She said then why not start with Barnes?

  Gene thought that sort of brought things right back to his feeling she picked the guy up or let him pick her up because she had some kind of thing for him.

  He didn’t say that, though.

  He said “Why not?”

  Gene had to admit that in one way Barnes was the perfect choice for a friend.

  If anyone needed one more than they did, he did.

  Living all alone in this dramatic duplex pad, high long windows looking on rooftops, spires and chimneys clustered around like a lump of London, the Charles River glinting down in the distance.

  The sleek low Scandinavian furniture looked out of place.

  So did Barnes.

  He seemed to be sort of lurking there.

  On both sides of the fireplace boxes were stacked used grocery and liquor boxes full of books.

  “Why don’t you unpack them?” Lou asked, looking at titles.

  “Sure, man,” Gene said, “I’ll build you some shelves.”

  What were friends for?

  Barnes looked embarrassed, scratched his head.

  “I like it this way,” he said. “When you put up your books on the shelf it seems permanent. This way I feel I’m free to pick up and go.”

  “Maybe sometime you’ll feel free to stay,” Lou said.

  “Maybe. Sometime.”

  Lou said they liked his book, which was true. It was funny. Not the murder, the people and what they said.

  Barnes brightened, brought out a better bottle of brandy.

  It was somewhere toward the end of that one he told them how he went a year to something called The Iowa Writers Workshop to learn how to write The Great American Novel but had to drop out and make some bread doing newspaper work. When he finally got to the novel he didn’t care anymore if it was great or even American he just wanted out of the newspaper business, he had OD’d on asking people questions all the time. A “real writer” he knew in Denver sent Barnes’s book to his literary agent who sold it as a paperback original mystery with a big enough advance so Barnes could split and have enough time to live while he wrote another one. When he got the check he went straight to the airport, looked at the list of departing flights on the first TV monitor he came to, and picked one.

  “Why Boston?” Lou asked.

  “It sounded old. That’s how I felt.”

  He said he was thirty-four then but that was six months ago so he must be thirty-four and a half, and felt he was going on forty.

  “Don’t sweat it,” Lou said. “Two years I’ll be thirty.”

  Gene couldn’t tell if that was consolation or kind of a come-on.

  Barnes didn’t even seem to hear. He was lying on the floor propped against his couch, belting the brandy, when suddenly he sat up straight, stuck his arm in the air, and said, “I will never again ask anyone what he has for breakfast or thinks of the President or does in his spare time.”

  Then he slumped, as if shot, inert on the floor.

  Snore.

  They arranged him on the coach, brought blankets from the bedroom, tucked him in, turned off lights, tiptoed out.

  Gene figured they had a friend. He was glad, since Lou wanted some.

  It was cool with Gene that Lou didn’t take him to faculty affairs or bring home academic colleagues. She decided and he agreed it was best to keep her two lives separate, home and work, since her living with a guy who was not only four years younger but naked of any degree would not do much for her own image. Besides, she said after teaching and going to committee meetings all day she was tired of talking academic.

  Students and their parties were a different ball game. Lou was the kind of teacher they liked to invite and she liked to go. These were not finicky faculty cocktail sherries but casual sprawls, everything comfortable. She didn’t mind taking Gene, either, all she had to do was say “This is my friend, Gene” and that was the introduction, no need for name-rank-social-serial number, where are you from or going.

  They took along Barnes to a student party over on Phillips Street, the back side of Beacon Hill where students and dropouts and rundowns lived alongside Chinese laundries, secondhand TV sales-repair stores. Mellow old Mamas and Papas music was asking you to “Look Out Any Window,” the crowded living room fragrant with grass and sweet wine. Barnes was disappointed he didn’t bring booze but found a nice bubble-gum-popping girl named Nell who dredged him up some old Mr. Boston Lemon Flavored gin from out of the depths of the kitchen.

  A scruffy-looking wild kid staring at Lou all night got fortified enough on wine and grass to float up to her and declare his undying love and she smiled and introduced Gene and said they could all be friends. He ended up on their couch the next morning, pledging his loyalty to both, saying his regard for Lou was unsullied by vile thoughts of sex.

  Gene appreciated the purity.

  The party was good for everyone. The bubble-gum girl who got Barnes his booze was a social work student and evidently his case appealed to her. Barnes not only had friends, now he had a lover.

  The kid on the couch, known only as Thomas, like Fabian was just Fabian, arrived outside the window Monday morning blowing a horn that sounded like a sick moose. He was driving a converted milk truck painted red white and blue that said “Amalgamated Enterprises,” and below that, “Let’s Make a Deal.” Thomas said it was his “company truck,” his business being buying, selling, and trading such a wide variety of goods as furniture, record albums, dope, kitchenware, TVs, stereo components, and pills, mostly uppers and downers with a scattering of antibiotics and antihistamines thrown in. In his spare time he went to college, or rather colleges, sitting in on lecture courses at Northeastern, Harvard, BU, and MIT.

  “You mean you’re not registered anywhere?” Lou said.

  Thomas looked shocked.

  “Then you have to pay!”

  He expressed his pure devotion to Lou by tooting outside their window every M-W-F and driving her to Northeastern.

  If Thomas wasn’t such an all-around scruffy-looking general fuckup, Gene might have been a little jealous.

  What the hell, you couldn’t knock free transportation.

  Gene didn’t feel left out or anything because Lou had the world of
her work at Northeastern completely separate from him, shit, he had his own little world tending bar at The Crossroads.

  Afternoons there were cool and dim, restful. Gene dug it most when the old guys got it on arguing about the baseball players of the past, it wasn’t really arguing it was just to say the names: Rizzuto and Marion, Musial and Bauer, Lemon and Ford. The names were like a litany and when they got it going Gene loved to listen, the litany lulled him, too, helped turn down his own mind.

  The peace of the place was always shattered when Flash came in, topping everyone else’s stories, especially about sports or sex, telling again how he might have made it in the pros but at 6’2” he was too short for forward in the NBA. Telling again how in college he ran the 100 in 10.4, which was lightning in ’61 and had earned him the name Flash.

  He usually came in around the happy hour but one day he showed a little after three, wearing instead of his usual splashy threads a grungy old sweatshirt and jeans. Instead of one of the frothy blended drinks he usually had he ordered a double dry martini straight up with an extra olive.

  “This is a good time to drink,” Flash said. “Between lunch and the cocktail hour you have a kind of dip in there, that’s when you need a little something to pick you up.”

  Like all good bartenders Gene agreed with the customer, and by the second drink Flash was pouring out his troubles to him. Or trouble. There was one biggie, which was that Flash owned—had owned—a travel agency, and the business had just gone bankrupt.

  “That’s rough, man,” Gene said.

  “Hell, ya can’t let that stuff get ya down,” Flash said. “When ya get off here? I’ll take you over to Dorchester, we’ll hit a couple spots I know, scare up some action.”

  “Sorry, man,” Gene said, “I’m cookin tonight for me and my woman,” but when he saw Flash’s face fall he added, “You come, too. There’s plenty. Stew.”

  “Oh, thanks, ole buddy, but no thanks, I’m on a diet. Strictly vitamins.”

  “Pills?”

  “Nah. In the booze. Plenty of vitamins in booze. You know, it’s made out of potatoes and grain and shit like that. They boil it down, so you’re actually gettin the essence.”

  “That’s all? The vitamins in the booze?”

  “And the olives. Fuckin olives can keep you goin for weeks. Shit. You take those wops up in those hills over there, they raise whole families on olives. Maybe a little spaghetti thrown in, but that’s no vitamins.”

  “Tonight, you’re gettin some stew in you.”

  “Well, hell—”

  Flash was revived, not by the stew but the sight of Lou, which inspired him to “spruce up a bit” in their bathroom, taking a shower and applying every talcum, lotion, and ointment he could find to drown the stench of his moldy clothes.

  Over stew he regaled them with tales of bankruptcy, making it seem the most glamorous trip in the world.

  Flash had put all his hopes as well as capital in buying up a block of three thousand tickets to the Rolling Stones concert at Shea Stadium, and putting together a package tour that would hopefully lure every hip kid in New England.

  “Sounds good,” Lou said. “How’d you blow it?”

  “Details. I got bogged down in details. Like the box lunches for the bus ride. Christ, but I had that organized. Made a deal with a guy runs a super mar-kette in Revere for three-day-old Wonder bread. A pal in the North End promised sixty salamis in return for using my passport for a quick little business trip he had to make to Panama. Pickles? Beautiful. Chick I knew was doing PR for a local pickle company—but shit, there I go getting bogged down in details again.”

  The detail Flash failed to notice until it was too late was that the Stones were also booked in Boston and Providence on the same concert tour where they played Shea Stadium. So not too many fans fought to pay extra to see them in New York when they could see them at home.

  “Did any—uh—go on your tour?” Lou asked.

  “Ninety-four,” Flash said, shaking his head. “Shit, they must have been some kind of misfits. I didn’t have the heart to go to the station and see em. Jesus. Ninety-four losers in one place.”

  “What about you?” asked Lou.

  “Me? Hell, I’m the comeback kid. I got friends. You got friends you can always bounce back. Look at Gene here takin his bankrupt buddy home for a hearty stew. Bankrolls you can always get. What counts in the long fuckin haul is friends.”

  Gene guessed they had another one.

  When he thought about it Gene was kind of proud about bringing Flash home, he figured it showed he wasn’t uptight anymore about Lou liking men who were just their friends. He saw she was just more comfortable with men, there wasn’t any sex angle to it, that’s just the way she was. The concept of “meeting with the Sisters” was catching on big in Boston, but to Lou the idea was as foreign as the old-fashioned custom of “getting together with the girls.” She wasn’t against it or anything, it just didn’t happen to be her scene. She tended to clam up around women, unless they were in the company of their own man.

  A few days later Flash fell by The Crossroads, dressed to kill. He had just got some kind of temporary loan and was going out to find himself a date and celebrate.

  “You hit the dating bars?” Gene asked.

  Flash drew back, offended.

  “Those meat racks?” he said. “Wouldn’t go near em.”

  “Where then?”

  “The source, man, the airport.”

  “Bar?”

  “Incoming flights. You wait till the passengers are off, go up to a stewardess coming out and say you expected a certain girl on this flight, you had a whole evening planned around her coming, and she didn’t show—well, hell, take it from there.”

  “You just go up to any airline?”

  “I personally prefer Delta and Allegheny. You get a more outgoing, positive type. But to each his own. Who knows? You might dig Eastern. Go out to Logan, give it a try.”

  “Nah, I’m all tied up, man.”

  “Well, sure, that Lou is somethin else, but you ought to share the wealth.”

  “Huh?”

  “What I mean is, socialize a little. Like I was thinkin, I got this girl flies in from Atlanta every week or so, a real peach. Thought we could make it a foursome.”

  “The four of us go out, you mean? Have dinner?”

  “Uh, well, sure, that might be good, sort of as an icebreaker. But what I had in mind was then when we all get to know each other we could trade off. Me with Lou and you with this delectable, exquisite peach. Then back again. You dig? Sort of a round-robinish sort of thing.”

  Gene thanked Flash but said he and Lou weren’t into that kind of scene. He tried to make it sound casual, just something they didn’t enjoy, like watching “The Brady Bunch” or eating Armenian food.

  Back of the counter, his legs were trembling.

  Finally Flash believed there was no way to get the round robin on.

  He shook his head.

  “You and your middle-class hang-ups,” he said.

  When Gene got home that night he discovered he didn’t quite have it together enough to laugh and tell Lou about Flash’s proposition for getting on a round-robinish sort of thing.

  On the other hand, he didn’t get bugged at her because he knew Flash wanted to ball her.

  He figured all together it was some kind of progress.

  Lou was right that you shouldn’t just shut yourself off from people. Hell, it felt good to know they’d brought Barnes and Nell together, and besides that it was a trip to figure out how it happened, how it worked.

  Lou said the differences did it—not just the fifteen years difference in age, but their personalities. Nell was the kind who wanted to Help people, for Barnes the word Help was a personal plea. See? They fit. She as his personal social worker, him as her one-man emotional slum.

  Besides, it was good to have another couple like that to boogie with. Like Gene and Lou would have just sat back and missed the best
two ticket-bought nights of their lives if it hadn’t been for Barnes and Nell.

  And the coke.

  Barnes went down to New York to see the literary agent who sold his mystery and told him about a new one he had in mind, setting the story at Harvard, he would hang around there awhile and take notes. The agent was so turned on by it that Barnes before coming back saw a friend of a friend and bought $100 worth of coke to celebrate the triumph of the book he had just thought of trying to write.

  It came in a tinfoil package, astonishingly small.

  “Don’t anyone sneeze for Chrissake,” Barnes said as Nell tamped a little mound of it out on her tortoiseshell hand mirror. On Barnes’s instructions she separated the mound out into slim lines with a razor blade, while he rolled tight a ten-dollar bill for sniffing it up.

  “Bill should be a hundred,” he apologized, “if you do it right.”

  “We’re just folks,” said Gene.

  They sniffed, in turn, sitting back awhile and waiting for it to happen, coming on suddenly giggly, funny, everything anyone else said was funny to the rest, and Nell asked who was best, Joni or Janis. Gene said each was best of who she was. Lou asked why. Nell said both were coming to Boston to give a concert and who should they hear? Everyone yelled and argued, happy high confusion till Barnes said the solution: “Both.” Clapping, cheers, cheer, till down again, a drag, the trouble with coke was being over so soon and then you wanted more to get back up; product with built-in sales pitch.

  But even after being down from the coke Barnes said they all had agreed, all had to see both Joni and Janis, he’d get tickets if Gene made stew.

  Dinner and the theater!

  None of the four of them ever forgot. The stew maybe, the concerts not.

  Joni all light, on a bright stage, nice light airy fluffy feeling, the feeling you got from hearing her “Clouds.” The audience buoyed, buoyant, bouncy, behind her, with her, all the way, wanting to show, make her know, how they loved her—once she forgot the words to a song and everywhere were smiles, sighs of sympathy, a feeling through the hall that everyone wanted to run to the stage and feed her some special warm homemade chicken soup. Sad songs she sang them, yes, too, but sweet, sincere, soulful, soft as a breeze. Yes, yes, yes, Joni! This was the bright warm milk of the world.