by T. C. Boyle
Death, defeat, futility, that’s what the greenhouse said to me. I turned my back on it. Like a magic lantern—magnetic, irresistible—the flashlight pulled me across the junk-strewn morass of the lot and on up to the door of the Toyota. I dropped the flashlight in the high grass, dug for my keys and fired up the car with a roar. A moment later I was yawing through the undergrowth and heaving down the gutted road to the highway. The headlights grabbed at the darkness like pincers, trees rocked over me, a deer sprang up and vanished like an illusion. I thought of my apartment. Of movie theaters and Thai food and color TV. Of my stereo, my drip coffee maker, of daily newspapers, books, magazines, of the society of men—and women. Branches swiped at the windshield, a rock exploded against the under-surface of the car, ruts and gullies grabbed the wheel from me and flung it back again. Carefully, carefully, I told myself. I was on my way home.
By the time I reached the blacktop, I was thinking of baseball. I don’t know how or why—free association, I suppose. It began with a vision of the players emerging from the dugout against a green that ached, and the feel of the cold salt air of Candlestick Park. I could smell the sour scent of beer in wax cups, flat before it’s been tapped, and then I panned across the crowd: men in T-shirts, women in print dresses, the legions of kids in the bleachers waving their outsized gloves. I thought of balls wrapped in black electrician’s tape and bats that shudder in your hands, and then finally of Little League and my own eleven-year-old self. The memory was like a splinter under the nail.
Small for my age and late to develop, I’d devoted my life to baseball with the passion of an apostle: baseball was the be-all and end-all, the highest expression and fundamental raison for life in the cosmos. Regrettably, my skills were incommensurate with my enthusiasm, and I’d been shunted to right field the previous season—right field, the least dynamic, least significant position on the team, the venue of hacks and losers—and through the winter I burned to prove myself capable of playing closer to the action. That summer I tried out for third base. The hot corner. Where Brooks Robinson and the Boyer brothers routinely dove for scorching liners, leapt to rob batters of extra base hits, scooped up bunts as if they were gathering flowers, and in general demonstrated more skill, guts and panache than anyone on the field. All winter I’d shoveled snow and scrubbed dishes, hoarding nickels, dimes, quarters, the big flat shining half dollars I got for clearing the neighbors’ sidewalks, saving for the ne plus ultra—a new Wilson’s pro-style Big League infielder’s mitt endorsed by and stamped with the signature of Brooks Robinson himself. Eventually, a twenty-five-pound sack of change in hand, I trundled into the sporting-goods store and bought the glove. I worked it and oiled it, and when the snow was gone I was out till dark every day, fielding grounders. I practiced continually, obsessively, practiced till I could handle anything—bad hops, skimmers, liners, dribblers and worm-burners. I was ready.
We tried out on a sweet sunny day in June. The field was new, freshly bulldozed and totally barren. There were stones and pebbles everywhere. Five of us competed for third base while the coach, a laconic veteran of the Korean War whose son was the star pitcher, hammered grounders at us. The first kid handled every ball with fluid ease; the next two flubbed them miserably. Then it was my turn. Thirty-thousand ground balls had been hit to me over the course of the past three months; I was practiced and assured, ready for anything. The first ball came slamming at me over the rocky hardpan of the infield, I bent for it and it took a bad bounce, careening over my shoulder and into the outfield. All right, I thought, the field is like a gravel pit, don’t let it get to you. The same thing happened with the two succeeding chances. Humiliated, raging, I charged the next ball as soon as it came off the bat, pounced on it as if I were killing something for the pot, and heaved it six feet over the first baseman’s head. The coach looked disgusted. He spat in the dirt. Two more, he said. And then, before I’d even set up, the next ball came rocketing at me. I moved back, adjusting as it skipped over the stones in its path, and at the last instant I lifted my glove for the inevitable hop. No hop. The ball went right through my legs and on out to the left-field fence, where a bored-looking kid with an underslung jaw shagged it back.
Object, movement, the elusive patterns of fate: I had never in my life been so stung with despair and self-hatred. Even before the coach could bring the bat to his shoulder for my final chance, I came out of my crouch and flung my new Wilson’s pro-style Big League infielder’s glove into the parking lot. Then I ran. Ran through a gale of shouts and laughter, mounted my bike and pedaled up the street as if the Furies were shrieking in my ears. My breath came in sobs. At home, I found my mother sitting at the kitchen table with a crossword puzzle. It wasn’t fair, I told her, choking on the bitterness of it. I tried, I did. She pushed back her chair, got up from the table and looked down at me from her five feet and eight inches, sleeves rolled up, earrings dangling. Quitter, she said.
The memory arrested me. A moment before I’d been doing seventy, outracing the headlights, intent on San Francisco, and now I found myself slowing. Degree by degree, almost unconsciously, my foot eased up on the gas pedal. Signs, trees, fenceposts drifted up and trickled by, forty, thirty, twenty-five: I nearly pulled over. I was thinking of Phil and Gesh back in the cabin, sitting down to their fatty, starchy, tasteless meal, cracking jokes and dreaming the dream. Then the car rounded a bend and two dim spots of neon emerged from the darkness, soft and alluring, beacons in the night. I swung the wheel, and for the second time in my life pulled into the pitted parking lot of Shirelle’s Bum Steer.
Chapter 8
I sat in the car debating with myself. The threat of Jerpbak and the desolation of the greenhouse tugged me in one direction, undifferentiated needs and personal loyalty in the other. Was I walking out, or was I going to see this thing through? A pithy question. I sat there chewing on it as the night settled in around me and the jukebox thumped seductively from behind the yellowed windows of the tavern. At first, I had no intention whatever of going in—I’d stopped in the parking lot solely to think things out—but then I began to feel that what I needed was a drink. Just a single drink, something comforting and calming—a warm cognac, for instance. But no, it was too risky. I’d been burned once—the thought of the previous debacle at Shirelle’s made me wince—and it would be foolish to tempt the Fates yet again. No: a drink was out. Absolutely and positively.
After a while, though, I found myself casually examining the other cars in the lot, as if they could somehow give me a clue to their owners’ personalities, mores and penchants for unprovoked violence. There were three of them, all American-made, all beat. I recognized the sagging Duster with the I’M MORAL bumper sticker, but the others made no impression on me. The Duster, I realized, must have belonged either to Shirelle herself, one of the Indians or the wasted old character who’d restrained George Pete Turner on the unfortunate and only occasion I’d encountered him. But George Pete, as I vividly recalled (and here I unconsciously reached down to rub my calf in the vicinity of his dog’s initial assault), drove a pickup, as did Sapers. The chances, then, were that neither was present. Of course, all this was purely speculative in any case, as I had no intention whatever of passing through that redwood door.
It was then that I had an inspiration. I’d been sitting there for nearly half an, hour, getting nowhere, when it suddenly occurred to me to call Vogelsang. He was, after all, the manager of this operation, wasn’t he? Its guiding light and chief executive? I pictured him cozily ensconced with Aorta in his Bolinas museum, calmly chewing fish flakes while he rearranged his femur collection or sorted through his box of glass dog eyes. Yes. I’d call the son of a bitch and lay the whole thing in his lap, force him to make the decision for me. Hello? he’d say. Vogelsang, I’d say, this is Felix. I’m quitting. Yes, of course—why hadn’t I thought of it before?
The hinges of the big redwood door grated like marrowless bones, cigarette smoke and rockabilly yelping enveloped me, one foot followed t
he other, and once again I found myself standing before the bar in Shirelle’s Bum Steer. The place was precisely as I’d remembered it, no detail altered: the gallon jars of pickled eggs and bloated sausage, the souvenir pennant, the dusty bottles of liqueur. Shirelle, in mauve eyeshadow and a pink see-through blouse that looked like the top part of a nightie, was hunched over the telephone at the far end of the bar. In back, the customary Indians leaned over the pool table as if they were part of the déeAcor, while at the bar, two old men were engaged in a raucous debate. “I say it was the best thing I ever tasted in my life,” hooted the first, who seemed to be the randy old coffee drinker from the diner—or his morose counterpart. “Aaah, you’re a iggorant shitsack,” said the other, whom I recognized as George Pete Turner’s emaciated crony. “Any fool knows you can’t cook a decent piece of salmon without a slab of fatback pork to season the pan.”
I took a seat at the end of the bar and glanced significantly at Shirelle, who ignored me. She was exchanging passionate tidbits over the line with some up-country Lothario—Delbert Skaggs’s most recent successor, no doubt—and had neither time nor inclination to see to the needs of her customers. I was annoyed. But even more so when I saw that she was using the public telephone—obviously the only one in the place—which hung from the wall in a disused nook at the nether end of the bar. I dug out a ten-dollar bill, creased it, and laid it on the counter. “Shit,” snorted the old boy from the diner, “and I suppose them beans you fed me and Gerard last Saint Pat’s day was supposed to be something fancy, huh? Chili con carney, Texas style, is what you called it, didn’t you?” Pool balls clicked behind me, one maudlin jukebox tune dissolved in a jangle of trebly guitars and another started up without pause. I slapped the bar and jerked my finger at Shirelle.
I watched as she poured a final dollop of lewdness into the receiver, set it on the bar and came toward me, bosoms heaving beneath the flimsy blouse. She gave me a toothy smile that didn’t show the least hint of recognition—just as well, I thought—and said, “What’ll it be, honey?”
I ordered a Remy with a soda back. She poured herself three fingers of vodka and served me the cognac in a smudged water glass.
“You call them beans? I’d as soon have eat my own socks as that hog swill.”
“Godammit now, McCarey,” George Pete’s crony snarled, “you’re going to get me steamed you keep up like that. Thirty-seven years I put in in that kitchen at Tootses’ in San Jose and I’ll be a bare-assed monkey if I can’t out-chop, out-fry and out-charbroil a sorry scumbag like you any day of the week.”
“Thanks,” I said, as Shirelle set my drink down. “Are you going to be using the phone much longer?”
“Oh, no, no, no,” she said, already leaning back toward the recumbent receiver like a dancer doing a stretching exercise, “just a minute or two more, that’s all.”
I lingered over my drink. Not simply because cognac is meant to be lingered over, but because I had neither the money nor the intent to overindulge: I was there to make a phone call. Period. I thought about nothing, the music droned on without pause, George Pete Turner’s crony waxed passionate on the subject of batter-dipped okra. When my glass had been empty for some minutes, I motioned once again for Shirelle, but she didn’t seem to notice. She was bent over the phone, both hands cradling the mouthpiece, her rear projecting at an angle and twitching idly. I began to develop an intense dislike for her.
I slapped the bar again, more violently than before. This time not only did Shirelle look up, but the two epicures as well. They’d been arguing a fine point of ham-hock preparation—whether to add flat or fresh beer to the stock—and both now desisted to turn and give me a wondering, distracted look. Shirelle again set the receiver down and joggled toward me. “Another?”
I pushed the glass forward. My voice was strung tight. “The phone?” I said.
Her laugh was like a bird of prey, shooting from its perch to swoop down and stun its object with a single explosive thrust. “My God!” she shrieked, “I’m so embarrassed! You know, I just forgot all about you, honey.” She puckered her lips and blew me a sympathetic kiss. “I’ll just be a sec,” and then the phone was stuck to the side of her face again, for all the world like some kind of malignant growth.
I was on my third drink before I finally got to the telephone. I couldn’t seem to find Vogelsang’s number in my wallet, so I had to go through information, losing a fistful of dimes in the process and systematically alienating three or four operators. He wasn’t listed, of course—except under one of his many aliases. The aliases were a joke, like the ads he ran in The Berkeley Barb. Dr. Bang was one of them. I tried it. No listing. With the aid of a fourth cognac, I began to recall others: O. O. Ehrenfurt, Malachi Mortis, Teet Creamburg. Nothing. I was frustrated, angry, nervous—each failure seemed to intensify the crisis, drum at my stomach, raise the ugly specter of Jerpbak from the grave of distilled spirits in which Shirelle had helped bury it. Just as I was about to give up, I remembered a company name he’d used two or three years back—Plumtree’s Potted Meats—and I had the exasperated operator try it. To my surprise and everlasting relief, she did show a listing for Plumtree.
My fingers trembled as I dialed, the words etched in acid on my tongue: I’m quitting, getting out, flying the coop, throwing in the towel. There was a click, the line engaged, and I was suddenly assaulted by a mechanical hiss immediately followed by an ineptly recorded version of “Sweet Georgia Brown” done entirely on Moog Synthesizer and what sounded like an off-key triangle. After a full two minutes of this, Vogelsang’s recorded voice came over the wire:
What is home without
Plumtree’s Potted Meat?
Incomplete.
With it an abode of bliss.
This was succeeded by a rasping evil snicker that suggested nothing so much as a Bluebeard or a Dr. Mengele in the midst of one of his experiments, and then the click that disengaged the line.
None of this had given me much satisfaction. Whereas a moment before I’d been anticipating the release of unburdening myself—of arguing, cursing, demanding explanations for the inexplicable and allowing myself to be soothed by Vogelsang’s crisp, confident tones and professorial diction—I was once again adrift, already two sheets to the wind and utterly paralyzed with indecision. What to do? Buzz into San Francisco and stuff loyalty, camaraderie, responsibility and trust, or creep back to the summer camp like a condemned man waiting for the blade to fall? I didn’t have a clue.
Huddled there in the corner and clutching the receiver as if it were a resuscitory device, I sipped at my drink and glanced forlornly round the room. A blue haze of cigarette smoke blurred the atmosphere and dimmed the feeble flicker of the wall fixtures (which were molded, I noticed, in the shape of steer horns). I could just make out the form of the three Indians, all lined up in a row now, gravely chalking their cues and contemplating the configuration of balls on the table before them as if it held the key to the secrets of the universe. Shirelle had joined the two epicures at the bar and was engaged in a hot debate over the length of time a three-minute egg should be cooked.
I finished my cognac. In combination, and on an empty stomach, the drinks were beginning to have a twofold effect—first, of intensifying my feelings of guilt and disloyalty, and second, of exacerbating the panic I felt over the nasty coincidences that had begun to infest my life. I sat there, half-drunk, warring with myself. I probed an ear for wax, toyed with a coaster that showed a red-nosed man crashing a car through his own bedroom wall, tapped my feet on the brass bar-rail. And then, as I couldn’t decide what to do—I found I was unable either to let go of the receiver or to get up from the barstool—I thought I might as well take things a step at a time and put something on my stomach. When Shirelle turned to pour herself another double vodka, I ordered a beer and two pickled eggs.
I don’t know what it was—the taste of the eggs, the odor of the vinegar or the odd amalgam of egg, vinegar, soda cracker, and beer—but I was suddenly ske
wered with nostalgia. These eggs, this beer, this depressing disreputable rundown backwater dive—together they recalled other eggs, other beer, other dives. I thought of a college friend who’d spent every waking moment cloistered in a saloon killing piss-yellow pitchers of draft beer and whose only sustenance derived from beer nuts, beef jerky and pickled eggs. Brain food, he called it. He drank up his book money, his date money, his food, rent, gas and clothes money, he grew pale, his flesh turned to butter. I worried about him—until I quit school. The graduation announcement came the following year, his name prominent at the top of the page, summa cum laude. I thought of a girl named Cynthia, who climbed mountains, wore lederhosen over her rippling calves and once let me creep under a table in a dark bar and stick my head between her thighs. I thought of fights, forged ID’s, vomit-streaked Fords. The eggs tasted as if they’d been unearthed in an Etruscan tomb, the beer was flat. I ate mechanically. Faces drifted into my consciousness, epoch by epoch, counters on an abacus. Then I thought of Dwight Dunn.
Like Phil, Dwight was a touchstone. We’d gone to school together, double-dated, squeezed pimples side by side, we’d struck out, scored, experimented with tobacco, alcohol and drugs together, we’d postured, pronounced, chased the same women, earnestly discussed Nietzsche and Howlin’ Wolf late into the night. Dwight had been best man at my wedding; when his father died I flew in from the West Coast and sat up with him. We were children, adolescents, bewildered adults. Dwight had stayed in New York—he was living on East 59th Street now and working for a public relations firm—but we’d kept in touch. Unlike Phil, he was a straight arrow, steady—I could picture the baggy chinos, madras shirts and Hush Puppies he favored, and the look of pained concentration (as if he’d been forced to decipher Finnegans Wake while undergoing electroshock treatment) the contact lenses gave him. Dwight, I thought, alcohol tugging at my flesh, good old Dwight. At that moment I was visited with my second inspiration of the evening: I would call him, call him and listen to his soft stuttering laugh and the comforting rhythms of his speech.