“Virility,”
I “Gosh, Eddie. I’m impressed.” The chains melted away. Merry was retreating in the dim room, backpedaling out into the bright hall. Light silhouetted her curves through the gossamer nightie. Before gently pulling the door closed, she whispered, “Listen, if your little ritual is successful and you can’t get to sleep, come down the hall and let Mommy take care of you, ’kay?”
I listened for her footsteps to go quiet at the end of the hall and began mutely working my way free from the cocoon of wet sheets, a task that took almost ten minutes of strenuous exertion. Exhausted, I tiptoed into the bathroom, locked the door, stripped off the wet bedclothes and toweled myself dry. I did not dare shower. I wouldn’t have been surprised if Merry had returned and offered to scrub my back. I put on jeans, a sweatshirt, and the shoes of deceit. I need to get out of here, I thought, and shut off these sinister thoughts. I knew what I had to do in lieu. I picked up the wallet and a handful of change from the bedside table, depositing these burdens in my pockets, then slipped down the stairs, out the back door, and into the street, the buzzing still echoing in my ears.
It took two hours pretending to watch the cybernauts play VR to sidle up to the door. I stood with my back to the sign, taking in the sum effect of the whole room, and for an instant out of time the world seemed intangible. Everyone else was intent, each absorbed in his or her own synthetic environment, a still-life of dumb-struck, brain-dead satisfaction.
THIS MEANS YOU, MOTHERFUCKER.
I just touched the knob, already promising myself, in a futile attempt to calm my wildly beating heart, that I would not actually enter, that I was only curious to make physical contact with the mythic portal. Suddenly everything went pitch dark. Even in my state of extraordinary adrenal alertness, I could not ascertain whether I had blacked out. An untenable stretch of time passed during which I might have sojourned to the curving edge of the expanding universe, but then I realized I had somehow been spirited into the forbidden back room of Adelle’s Penny Arcade. In a cruel accession of destiny, a snippet of deliberation had been lost to me. How had I been robbed of the chance to chicken out? What if I had been detected? I pressed an ear to the crack of the doorway and listened for a commotion, but there were just the muffled, mollifying booms and pings of pilgrims absorbed religiously at their rituals. My heart was up in my throat and I was too terrified to back out. I tried to calm myself with deep breaths while my eyes adjusted—given the usual acuity of my night vision, an absurdly long interval. A peculiar, viscous quality to the air left the center of the room saturated with darkness. I focused on the far edge of the ceiling, where an anemic glow seeping in through soot-smudged window panes made a grimy garland along the top of the wall. Finally, I saw her. She was crouched right in front of me, the spookiest old gypsy staring with glazed eyes from behind plate glass. I froze. At her belt, a little ledge was covered with cards only slightly less dingy than the tablecloth of rotting felt. They were face down, and nothing about the backs advertised the likelihood of anything being printed on the fronts. After ten seconds of ear-thumping paralysis I thought to wonder about Adelle’s unblinking lids. She seemed hypnotized. However terrified, I had to try to get a closer look. For better stealth, I took off the clunky Adidases and left them by the door.
Adelle turned out to be a mechanized mannequin, a metallic mermaid whose torso, instead of turning fishy, was fused into a blocky box at the base of her transparent tank. There was a coin slot where her navel might have been, maybe a little lower. Static stars and flaccid ribbons had been pasted patternlessly around the inside of the booth. I strained to read the writing, ornate faux hieroglyphs that time had partly rubbed away from the casing: YOUR FORTUNE A PENNY.
There was no swiper for my penny card, and Adelle’s slot rejected all the usual denominations: I tried ten-, twenty, and fifty-dollar coins. None of them fit the sliding steel slot that presumably would catapult the proper piece inside. Adelle would have been a bitch to trip: A diminutive eyelet would not admit any of the common slugs, the mechanism prohibited insertion of a skeleton key, and her case—of an antique cast that, for its heft, could have been iron—was impossible to crack. Even if I had managed to figure out the trick, I doubted whether she would still operate. I had decided it was not too late to try finding a window or vent through which to escape and vow to never look back on, much less speak of, this dangerous game, when I was struck by a strange feeling, a jiggle in my pants like a Mexican jumping bean. I fished in the denim pocket and what did I pull out but One Cent. Funny, I had never thought of it as money, this chump’s charm. Are you lucky?
I tried the coin in the notch—it fit!—thrust the protuberance into the heart of the machine, and held it there for a second. Heart skipped a beat as the bodkin stuck. The trough burst back out—empty! A second second: Nothing happened. Adelle seemed not to like it. My brass had been too brash, unpalatable to the venerable seer. I had plunged in a poisonous plug and jammed her contraption, at once executing antique medium and forsaking trusty One Cent. A cosmic sense of loss came pouring in through a coin-sized quark in my chest. I was ready to crawl into a corner and curl up with the rest of the dilapidated has-beens when I heard a faint whirring coming from far away. Then all the world crashed into being.
Adelle accepted my suppository, swallowed, and sprang to life. Hands of crumbling plaster stiffly lifted little cards, unjointed arms crossed and recrossed her airtight atmosphere in hypnotic gymnastics impossible not merely for the human form, but, it would seem, for matter at all. Pinwheels spun and streamers streaked about the dusty interior of Adelle’s transparent chamber, causing dust bunnies inside the vestibule to awaken from hibernation and explode with ghostly smokes. I agonized to make sense of Adelle’s alabaster expression, which remained unchanged. The whole cabinet creaked and croaked with the winding down of robotic clockwork, and Adelle herself—as if animated by some other, unseen, unearthly engine—whined and groaned. What are you trying to say? Creep? Kraut? Rhine? Rome? The mummy shuffle sufficiently entranced me so that by the time Adelle’s revolutions were done and the room fell abruptly silent, more silent, for the ebbing of the cacophony, than before, it took a second to register that the works below had spit something out. I scooped the cardboard fortune from the repository at Adelle’s abstract lap. What was that cold chill emanating from the alcove behind me?
A growl of sour stomach boomed from the resonant darkness. “Curse my goddamn indigestion.” Spinning 180, I almost jumped out of my socks. “Boy, you got a fuckin’ question?” Before the door loomed a figure somehow darker than shadow, a black hole of form and spirit in whose presence I felt more alone than when it had just been me and the machine. I stole a glance at Adelle. She was silent, stationary, altogether unmoved by my plight. After the intensity of our intimacy, when she had by her wooden gaze penetrated my dilated eyes and fixed on the ineluctable essay of my dormant fortune, she now displayed only mute complicity with the awful drama playing out before her. I felt betrayed, but how could I blame her? After all, the animating impulse was over; the magic had been spent with the penny, One Cent. “Don’t make me fart— it’ll tear you apart.”
In timorous tones, with the upcurled articulation of supplication, I said, “I’m a friend of Apple Jack.”
“You smokin’ crack? Your answer’s wack—a shit full of sack. I’m Apple Jack.” Out of the abyss emerged the greatest mass of spirit I have ever seen, except that, in the ill-lit back room, it was precisely everything but him I could see. Fluorescent tattoos implied great crushing biceps. A broad rim of lustrous platinum rings delineated flaring nostrils. Green-glowing aquatic goggles reflected fire from no visible source, perhaps the smoldering ignition of my own terror. “I know your daddy,” Apple Jack proclaimed, “and he’s one dead ducker. You’ll get him iced of you don’t blow, motherfucker.” A great, flashing swatch of gnashing gold caps briefly illuminated the room while Apple Jack uttered the obscenity: at his feet, my orphaned Adidases. So long, snea
ks.
Although a warm but not consoling tingle told me that I was quite thoroughly irrigating my britches, I feigned indignation, quarried my last reserves of nerve, and said in tremulous sotto, “What did you call me?”
“You heard me, sucka,” Apple Jack huffed. Rolling it over his blood-engorged tongue—which even with twenty feet between us I can attest was cankerous, fetid-smelling, coated with gore, as if for breakfast he had consumed a half-dozen pygmies—he indulgently drew out the insult, lasciviously licking each delectable syllable: “Muh… tha… fuh… ka!” In the four seconds of orthodontic light this gave me, I sprinted between his columnar legs and into the cacophonous parlor. I blasted out Adelle’s front door, the full flare of dawn exploding over me, and burned down the street on shoeless feet, Apple Jack ever after casting a terrible golden gleam on my subconscious eye.
I ran through the alleys and abandoned lots of Paramus. I did not know where to go. I only knew I could not go back to Ho-Ho-Kus. Return over the Saddle River would only provoke my own self-destructive strain. Ever since discovering my patrimony, I had entertained escapist ruminations. Now I was a sleepless, guilt-ridden fugitive, and I knew that if I tried crossing the bridge I might not make it to the other side. As with all borderlines, I was of two minds, and I was afraid the spoils might go the way that would have me more intimately familiar with river’s bottom. It would do no good to try calling the hotline—I was already hip to that bullshit. Ringing in my ears, Apple Jack’s insult, threatening prophetic: Blow, motherfucker. On the card Adelle had given me, one line: PS: He lives. The combined message was clear: Not-so-naturally did I love my mother, while for my father I would never be anything but trouble. If I didn’t make tracks, I risked knocking up the one and off the other. At the outskirts of the city, I squeezed through the steel lips of a Goodwill bin and was swallowed in a tangle of second-hand clothes. I changed my pee-soaked pants and found a pair of mismatched clodhoppers. Lacing up one big wingtip and one worn rubber gunboat, this was all I knew: I wanted the feel of the road, movement more rapid than my defeated feet could bring. I wanted a chariot to spirit me away, out of these towns, and I wanted it fast.
All the options were there on the board at the bus terminal. I fixated on the obvious destination. Should I make my way back to the Beast, resume where I had left off, resign myself to the status of rat, and spend the rest of my days a sideshow sidekick to Shep’s petty Svengali? I could almost hear him smugly sensing the return of his prodigal Milquetoast, readying a sharp riposte: “Ha! boy, come back? bad pennies come not sooner.”
All the other place names had, during my days operating in and around South Station, provided enchanting distraction for the hapless travelers I sent their ways holding only their tickets. I had imagined them emptying out at the other ends —Fantastic Falls, Big Apple, Boardwalk, et cetera—and patting pockets for a little reassurance, just to discover the disheartening absence. What a way to get to know a place!
Plotting equilaterally on the route map, I located the vertex of Ho-Ho-Kus and the Beast, just above Albany on the Hudson River. As long as I was deliberating, I figured I might as well triangulate. In that accursed wallet there was more than enough money for the fare. I decided to go on a little odyssey.
“Howdy!” the driver, whose badge read “Homer,” hailed. Taking my ticket and espying behemoth feet, he added, “Long trip to Troy. With big boats like those you better take the first row.”
The suspension was loose and high, the ride like an industrial rock tumbler for the bowels, a centrifuge for the soul. The four-hour trip over awful surfaces turned my insides into ratatouille. In spite of all the discomfort, the bus was a perspective worlds apart from the low, road-hugging lounge chair that had brought me to this part of the world. The limousine had been too terrifying. Every time a truck had passed, I felt certain we were about to get crushed, but here on high I could just let it all go by. In the front seat, I ended up suffering everyone’s mass-transit nightmare: being held captive by an endless talker. I could not ask him to please shut up, as he was the operator. In garrulous good humor, Homer narrated the wonders of the road. “I go places. I have adventures. I meet interesting people. Yup, best job there is. You should try it, kid.” He added, nodding cockeyed at my huge shoes, “You look like you’re cut out for it.”
I was lulled by the the bus driver’s injunction. Who was to say I had not haplessly happened upon my calling? It made sense, in a way. Why get off the bus at all? By staying, I could make all these piddly towns mere pauses on a perpetual run which would itself become the here-and-now. What better way to live up to my name than to be always on the go? At the time it seemed like fate. In retrospect, I suppose I just gauged, in an unconscious, accelerated way, that it was time to resolve on a regimen that might pilot me through the terrible teens. I required a little self-imposed authority in the absence of an actual role model, something, in short, to keep me and the rest of the Correntes out of trouble.
After he discharged all the passengers, I had Homer make good on his injunction by taking me to an empty parking lot for a little driving lesson. At first press of pedal to the metal, I felt connected with predestiny. My big, ballasted sandbags were just as long as this, the largest of all accelerators. It took me twenty minutes to get the hang of bus-driving. Chalk it up to VR practice at the arcade.
I had my driver’s permit, which said I was seventeen, but for a chauffeur’s license I’d have to be twenty-one, and I could not use the name Corrente—what if Pauly and Merry tried to track me? So in Troy I ditched the EC ID, inquired at a head shop, got the phone number of a fellow who manufactured fakes, and decided to shut down the teen in me.
“What name do you want on it?”
“Eddie.”
“Eddie what?”
“Make it Eddie … Swift.”
“Hey Frankie!” said the artist to his laminating assistant, “we got a porn star here!”
Aiding my alias back in the early days of my escape was the fact that puberty had hit like a ton of bricks over the summer, filling out my gangly frame, slackening my vocal cords, and sprouting fuzz in all the right places, especially my face. I sported that shadow with all the dolefulness that befits a bandit. It was as if some dark condensation had brought a brown cloud to my countenance, occluding my mouth and effectively eclipsing all distinguishing characteristics.
I marched into the bus-line offices armed with my new identity and asked for an application. “You sure this is you?” the supervisor said, examining the license.
“Sure I’m sure.” He looked down at my big, dissimilar shoes. He must have reasoned that anyone with feet that large had to be older than he looked.
“What days you want?”
“What do you mean?”
“Monday to Friday? Wednesday to Sunday? It has to be a minimum of five, and they have to be consecutive. Company rules.”
“Sunday to Saturday would be fine.”
“Are you making fun of me, floppy feet?”
“No, sir. I would like to work the whole week. I’m used to it.”
“Oh, I see, trying to save up vacation days?”
“I won’t take them. Give them to someone else.”
“They’re non-transferable. And just in case you’re thinking of a mad dash to early retirement, they don’t roll over at the end of the calendar year.”
“That’s all right. I just want to drive.”
My only stipulation was no stops in Ho-Ho-Kus or Paramus. This did not prove too prohibitive in the eyes of the supervisor, who always had to stretch to cover the casino runs. I was hired.
The job came with a company-issued uniform, complete with sturdy, styleless shoes, which in my size had to be special-ordered. The line started me on major routes like Atlantic City and Foxwoods. My stomping grounds were the monotonous stretch of 95 through Connecticut and the Mobius run up and down Jersey’s twin toll roads. I accepted almost any schedule, carried a cell, and made myself unconditionally availab
le for substitutions. At the wheel, my hardy hands were happily without distractions, and the company kept me on the road every hour I wasn’t sleeping.
I rented an apartment near one of the upstate terminals and it didn’t make a difference whether it was Utica or Rome; it was just the dark intermission between successive trips: a futon, a shower, a microwave, a term, and a caveman named Merle crooning on the MP: “I’m on the run, the highway is my home.”
It was wholesome work, as sincere as you could get, it appeared to me. Motor-coach operators were not superior men and women; we were diligent stewards of the people. For the first time I had the simple satisfaction, which to my sensibilities seemed perversely exotic, of earning an honest wage. I looked my passengers square in the face, whereas I had never locked gazes with any of my pocket patrons—this would have been against one of the cardinal rules of picking. I took their tickets, ripped, returned half, and riders and I imparted that instant of existential recognition that transcends all exertions of discourse, either oral, scriptural, or electronic. Any open seat. It was the moment that told them I knew where they were going and let me know they were satisfied I would take them there, one of the deep, ingenuous transactions that has not been bested by advances in global communication and virtual visitation, namely: the empirical drudgery of translating a body through space. Trafficking meat will never become obsolete. The numbing discomfort of the seats, the rubber fingertips of no-slip flooring grabbing shoe bottoms, the sickening smell of overheated cesspool seeping up the aisle from the john: These elements conspired to give us all—myself and my passengers, the mechanics and dispatchers, the fat-assed management who themselves flew first class—an abiding satisfaction that, however unpleasant, the safety of our passage was assured by the most rugged and rigorous mode of conveyance: the passenger bus, leviathan of the road.
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