Barnes wasn’t in a big hurry and Gene was in less, so they didn’t mind getting lost, swerving off the super-lane highways to bump down onto slim ribbons of blacktop or even long gashes of gravel in search of “real” places to eat, that is, no famous-name franchise food. They sought the sort of place Barnes categorized as “Your Quintessential Old-Fashioned Fly-Specked Diner,” places with straightforward names like EAT, Jack and Fran’s, LUNCH, Joe’s Place, STEAKS, Main Street Restaurant, and FOOD. They hit the places with the old stained menus with a fresh sheet put in with a paper clip that said “Today” and had typed or more often written or printed words in ballpoint or pencil, the bill of fare, and anything described as “Special of the Day” they ordered, and any available pie guaranteed to be homemade on the premises they had for dessert.
After eating they’d make their way back to the superhighway, set the car in one of the slots headed west and as soon as it was dark Barnes started to look for potential motels, his taste there running to modern and efficient with TV in the room and preferably a nice dark bar on the premises though sometimes they’d just buy a fifth at a package store and drink in the room from the water glasses, watching TV or talking. When Gene joined the trip he had twenty-some-odd bucks in his pocket and wanted to put the little bit in the kitty for all the expenses and pay off what he owed Barnes later, he could keep a record, but Barnes said that would spoil the trip, take their minds off enjoying things, and since for Chrissake he was going out to L.A. to get paid $12,500 for rewriting a script of his mystery that the first guy they hired gave up on halfway through he could sure as hell foot the bill for Gene coming along. He couldn’t have gone alone anyway, couldn’t drive all that way by himself and if it weren’t for Gene he’d have picked up some fuckin hitchhiker and with his luck it would have been some hippie slayer on the way to the Coast. The thought of Barnes driving by himself to L.A. and what might happen to him in fact made Gene feel not so guilty about the free ride, he accepted Barnes’s assurance the small additional expense of having his companionship would be part of the “Business Expense” of his venture into Hollywood.
“Stick with me, kid,” Barnes told him. “Once I get set up out there, I’ll make you a star. Or anyway, maybe if they ever do the damn movie I could get you in as an extra.”
Gene laughed.
“An extra. Shit, I’d be playing myself.”
“Cheer up now, buddy. You’re on your way to lotus land.”
“That’s one thing I haven’t tried. Lotus.”
“I got you out of there just in time, I think. Maine. That whole setup.”
Gene had told him about it, all about the thing with Stella the Divorcée. Somehow it was easier to talk about personal shit in a moving car. You didn’t feel called upon to look the other guy straight in the eye. In fact you shouldn’t. If you’re the one driving you’re supposed to keep your eyes on the road, and if you’re the one sitting next to him you’re not supposed to distract him from taking his eyes off the road. So, sitting there with both people looking straight ahead, it was easier to say a lot. For both of them. Once when they were tooling through Illinois on some superjob of a highway Gene had the nerve to ask Barnes about something nagging at him for a long time. Not that it made much difference anymore, he just wanted to know.
“Can I ask you something, Barnes?”
“Sure.”
“Did you ever fuck her?”
“Who?”
“Lou.”
Barnes sort of shifted his body a little more forward over the steering wheel.
“No,” he said.
“Ever try?”
“Yes.”
“Didn’t make it?”
“No.”
“She wouldn’t?” Gene asked, surprised at how hopeful he sounded, felt.
“No. I’m sorry. On all counts. She would, but I couldn’t.”
“Why not, you suppose?”
Barnes took his right hand off the wheel for a moment and scratched his ear.
“Cause you’re my friend, I guess.”
“But that didn’t stop you from trying.”
“I know. The only thing I can figure is, my prick has more of a conscience than my goddam brain.”
“Wow. The prick with a conscience.”
“That’s me, I guess.”
“Don’t sweat it, man.”
“All the same, I’m sorry.”
“Forget it. All that’s gone.”
Neither one said anything for the next few miles and Gene turned the radio on. Got a kind of staticky call-in show from Chicago.
At a small-town diner Gene bought a postcard to send to Stella. On the part for the message he put, “Sorry had to go. You were the greatest.” He signed it “Love, Gene.” She never called him Gene but he didn’t want to put anything she did call him on a postcard. The other side was a color photograph of the Mississippi River. It was green. Gene put a stamp on and slipped it in a mailbox, squeezing his eyes shut, thinking to her in his head, Be well. Don’t hurt too bad. The metal flap of the box clanged back. Shut.
Barnes said he’d like to stop off in Iowa City and see some old friends from his time at The Writers Workshop thing he had gone to there.
“Will they still be there?” Gene asked.
“Oh, yeh. Some will. Some always stay.”
“How come?”
“It’s that kind of place. You know how there’s jocks who hang around their old colleges after they’re through, just get some kind of job and stay on? Well, it’s that way in Iowa City except instead of jocks it’s poets. I can see it, too. It’s an easy place to live. And there’s always a party.”
“Maybe we’ll find one,” Gene said.
Barnes laughed. He said the only way they would not find a party in Iowa City would be to lie on the floor of the car, roll up the windows, and lock the doors.
“No use to go to that trouble,” Gene said.
They found a party all right, but the trouble was they got there late. Not in the day—it was just around five in the afternoon—but in the week. The party had started Thursday night and now it was Sunday. That’s why things were kind of a mess and the spirit had sort of gone out of it all. Parties often lasted three or four days, during which time a lot of people went back home to sack out or shower with someone they’d met at the party to do it in company with and then came back, bringing new supplies of booze and beer to replenish the stock but now the hard-core returnees were thinning out. One girl mentioned that tomorrow was Monday and she wanted to try to get back into going to classes.
“Monday, my ragged ass,” said Gordo. “Classes. Shit. Not like in the old days, huh, Barnes? Youth is gettin soft now. Don’t drink as much either. Too much sittin around puffin the goddam weed. Lowers capacity, stomachs can’t hold it. We’re breedin a race in which the human stomach will someday be able to hold no more than a cocktail. Alcohol will pass from the scene, markin the fuckin downfall of civilization.”
Gordo then took a slug from the half-gallon jug of gin that he held cocked on his right shoulder, drinking from it like you do from a cider bottle. With his free hand he rubbed his huge belly, approvingly, as if its size were proof of its admirable capacity for alcohol. Gordo had a thick black wiry beard and beady little eyes that seemed to have no white part to them. Just little brown beads. When he got his M.A. in writing he stopped writing, opened a combination greeting card and joke shop with dirty magazines in the back, and settled down in Iowa City. If you could call it that. At the age of thirty-four he was on his fifth wife.
This one was Melba, a roly-poly girl who Gene figured couldn’t be much past twenty. She had red hair, pink cheeks, and big green eyes which she focused on Gordo with obvious adoration, awaiting his commands. She never had long to wait.
“Scare up some booze for these gennelmen,” he told her, and she scurried around among the bottles that were everywhere, trying to find some that hadn’t been emptied. Evidently the jug of gin was Gordo’s private stock. Mel
ba came up with an assortment of bottles from about a quarter to a half full and placed them before Barnes and Gene. They were supposed to pick one. Barnes selected a Seagrams VO, Gene took a Southern Comfort, just for the hell of it. He’d never had the stuff, but if Janis Joplin dug it, it must be somethin else.
It was. Somethin else.
Everyone swigged from the bottle, like Gordo did. All the glasses were broken or dirty and there wasn’t any need to wash any yet since Gordo didn’t use one.
Barnes had brought Gordo a copy of his paperback mystery, and Gordo held it awhile, like he was judging its weight, then tossed it onto some magazine-and-bottle debris on the floor.
“Well, it don’t look like the new Ulysses,” he said.
“Gene,” Barnes said, “I just want to explain something you might otherwise fail to understand. I told you Gordo’s an old friend. There’s some friends you’ve had so long you don’t even have to like them anymore.”
“I can dig it,” Gene said.
“Goddam right,” said Gordo. “What are friends for?”
He waved for his wife to come sit beside him so he could feel her up with his free hand.
“I can see you’re really settled down this time, huh, Gordo?” Barnes said.
“Well if you mean by that am I restricted, like a goddam dog on a leash, hell no. I just got me a nice little warm home base. This place has got too much young new slit comin in all the time for a man to sit back and restrict himself. But Melba here keeps me real busy, she got the hottest pants I come across yet. Hey, you guys had any dinner?”
“No,” Barnes said. “I thought we’d fall by The Airliner and grab a tenderloin or something.”
“Hell no, you won’t, you’re in my house you’re gonna get fed. Melba honey, what you got good you can go whip up for us?”
Melba pondered, then meekly asked, “Macaroni?”
“Bare macaroni? Just plain?” he asked. “For the love of Christ stir a little somethin in with it, girl.”
“Oh, sure!”
He gave her a whack on the fanny and she was off.
“Nude macaroni,” Gordo said, shaking his head. “Well I guess you can damn well have your pussy and eat it, too, but you can’t expect it to cook.”
Gene had a hit off the Southern Comfort, wondering how long it would be till the day sure to come when Melba walked calmly into the living room holding a shiny new .38 revolver purchased after months of careful pilfering from the grocery fund and put a hole right between Gordo’s beady little eyes. Gene would have liked to be there to see it, but he wouldn’t want to stick around to wait.
They all ate warm macaroni with peas out of cereal bowls, washing it down with their respective brands of booze.
Melba was allowed to turn on the TV. She liked to watch reruns of “The Brady Bunch.” It was in color but the wrong kind. The people had bright orange faces and purple bodies. Everything else was green.
What with the vivid orange, purple, and green from the TV screen, the macaroni and peas washed down with Southern Comfort, and Gordo’s conversation, Gene was getting decidedly nauseous. He was going to suggest to Barnes they find a motel, when the door opened and a girl came in.
She lived in the rooming house next door and sometimes she came over to watch TV with Melba. She could look out her window and see if the set was on in Gordo’s living room.
She had on a long plain green bathrobe, and a pair of big black galoshes with a lot of buckles that she took off when she got inside, and was barefoot then. Her chestnut hair was clean and thick, the bottom cut off straight across just below her shoulders. Her name was Lizzie.
Gene got out of his chair so she could have it but she thanked him and took a spot on the floor. Instead of going back to the chair, Gene sat down on the floor beside Lizzie. Not right next to her, just beside her.
He held the bottle toward her and smiled.
“I guess I can’t offer you any of the niceties but here’s the straight stuff if you’d like some.”
She smiled, thanked him no.
Her upper teeth protruded very slightly, giving a lift to the lip, not like pouting but as if she were thinking of something and just about to speak.
But she didn’t so he did.
“We just got in,” he said, not knowing why.
“You missed the party.”
“Yeh. I’m beginning to think it was just as well.”
“It wasn’t Iowa City’s finest.”
“Did you come? For long?”
“I dropped in every so often and had a beer or smoked a little. Just to be neighborly.”
“Hey, Lizzie,” yelled Gordo, “when ya gonna let your pants down for me? You’re the only one of them girls next door I haven’t had. You and that prissy one, what’s her name?”
“Marge, I guess you mean.”
“Yeh, she’s a real priss. But what about you? You’re no priss. I see you with other guys, what about ole Gordo?”
Gene felt his cheeks getting hot. He looked to see how Lizzie was taking it. Evidently she was used to it. Her skin was still pure as milk.
“You get enough,” she said to Gordo. “You’ll be all right.”
“Goddam Lizzie,” Gordo grumbled.
Lizzie took a pack of Camels out of the pocket of her robe, offered one to Gene, lit the one he took and then one for herself.
“Where were you,” she asked, “before you got in?”
“Oh. Maine. I mean that’s where we started from.”
“You live there?”
“I worked there, sort of, this summer.”
“I always liked it. I mean the sound of it. It sounds clean and cold.”
Her voice was kind of high and tended to go up at the end of a sentence.
“It can be,” he said. “Clean and cold.”
Gordo told Melba they were running low on booze, she should get off her fanny and try to scare up some bottles from the neighbors. Lizzie volunteered to help, so Gene did, too. He realized it was kind of screwy, him going up to doors of strangers with two young women he’d just met, begging for booze. But he wanted to be sure Lizzie came back. He wanted to talk to her more. He didn’t know what about.
The raiding party scared up a half bottle of brandy, some cooking sherry, and two quarts of Ballantine ale.
Everyone wanted brandy so the bottle was passed around. Lizzie reached in the pocket of her bathrobe, got out some grass and papers and rolled a joint.
She asked Gene more about Maine, sounding like she gave a damn what he thought.
He told her about it, leaving out the part about Stella the Divorcée.
She listened to what he said, not just in an offhand way, but like it mattered.
Gene was dog-tired but he didn’t want to leave, he didn’t want to move away from where Lizzie was. There was something about her, some quality that drew him, nothing that was said or seen on the surface, but something that seemed to infuse what she said and did, her look, her manner. It was a quality he hadn’t encountered for a long time, it was something even Lou didn’t have though he loved her anyway. As he watched Lizzie, listened to her, he realized what it was about her that drew him to her so powerfully, and how rare it was to find in someone. It was kindness. She was kind.
He had a terrific desire just to lay his head on her lap and close his eyes. Of course that wasn’t the thing to do, but he did it anyway. It was not a calculated move, it was natural and felt, as simple and deep a kind of urge as being cold and wanting warm.
He put his head on her lap and she stroked it, gently. There was TV noise and people noise, Gordo and Barnes repeating tales of the old days, Melba giggling and making appropriate remarks of awe and wonder at the exploits of drinking and fucking and dope long gone, more glorious than now, all of it huge and heroic. Gene didn’t listen. Lizzie’s hand rubbed across his forehead. Soothing.
He woke with people saying g’night, see ya, yawns, yeh, man …
Lizzie leaned her mouth to his ear, whispe
red, “Come.”
She took his hand and he followed. He didn’t look at anyone else or say thanks or good night or see ya later, Barnes or anything at all, he just followed Lizzie out the door and over the cold yard to the rickety white frame rooming house next door and up the stairs. Maybe she did this all the time. Whatever, Gene didn’t care.
In her room, she closed the door, drew a small bolt, lit a candle.
The room was old-fashioned. It had a big high brass bed with blankets and a quilt on it; old, tinted photographs in gilded frames, a faded print of a country landscape. Gene was glad it was that way. He was glad there weren’t any posters of Jefferson Airplane or Jimi Hendrix, no signs with peace slogans or Viet Cong flags. This was another, quieter time and place, with candlelight. With Lizzie. She took off her robe with no drama nor shame. Simply. She was milky white all over as she went to him, her face calm and thoughtful.
What she and Gene did in the high bed was something he realized he hadn’t done for a long time. He had fucked and sucked and humped and screwed, been blown and frenched and nibbled and bit, in old and new and unknown positions. But that night he and Lizzie did something different together than all those things.
What they did was, they made love.
Lizzie thought truck stops were the best places to eat, and she took Gene to one of her favorites for breakfast. Over her meal of waffles, sausage, milk, a piece of apple pie with ice cream, and a cup of coffee, Lizzie swore her passion for trucks was not just because of the wonderful food you got at the truck stops. She drove a beat-up old blue Ford pickup that was her proudest possession, and she said quite seriously after she got her B.A. she planned to go to truck-driving school.
“Do they have them?” Gene asked.
“Of course. It’s something you have to learn, like a science. Well maybe it’s not exactly a science, but a skill anyway.”
Her major was American Lit and she loved to read it but she didn’t want to write it or teach it so she couldn’t make a living with it and therefore needed a trade. So why not something you love? Which in her case was trucks. She had always loved trucks, ever since as a kid she preferred toy trucks to dolls. Also, she felt she had the right personality for a long-distance truck driver.
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