by D. Foy
BASIL WASN’T GOING TO ASK LUCILLE ANYTHING worth her breath. He already thought he knew everything she had to say, a presumption which, so far as I could tell, was nowhere near the facts. And whereas it was true that before she’d become his woman he wouldn’t have thought twice about crushing her at every meal, now that she was his, he’d save his curiosity for the pillow talk to come.
I was absolutely positive, for instance, he didn’t know a thing about the times my ex-wife and I found the cupboards full of empty cereal boxes those three months Lucille had crashed our sofa. And if not cereal boxes, it was milk cartons at the back of the fridge, dry, or garbage cans stuffed with candy bar wrappers and foils from TV dinners. An entire roast would’ve vanished in the night, or a pot of spaghetti we’d just made, or a half-gallon of ice cream, all manner of food all of the time. Basil didn’t know, either, how those very mornings, I’d enter the bathroom to the odor of Lysol and vomit.
And neither would Basil ask why Lucille had slept with each of the three Gladden brothers that crazy summer of ’87, when after munching three grams of shrooms and a hit of blotter our friend Moo-Moo stumbled through a skylight and broke his legs; when our dealer Tony the Tongue invited four girls to the House of Men for a session of free love only to fake an epilepsy fit after two of the vixens tried to pork him with their strap-ons; when in front of the Grand Lake Theater a herd of cops arrested me and Dinky and Basil for having bombed a woman with a fire extinguisher just because she looked, as Basil claimed, like Barney Rubble with tits: while she went ape shit and chased us howling, we burned rubber through a KFC lot full of cops gathered for an ad lib feast. They caught us with three fat blunts, a bottle of wine, and a BB gun, fully loaded.
But Lucille. First she’d taken Bobby, then Benjamin, then Brad. Not one of these brothers knew the rest were boofing her, too. Because with the mornings, with the rising of suns and fungus-eyed friends—whichever friends happened to’ve been in whatever house she and the brother-at-hand had done their boofing in—Lucille would appear all by her lonesome in the crumpled state she’d adopted as style. Back then, the girl wore nothing but Birkenstock sandals and macramé anklets, cutoff Levi’s or OshKosh overalls smeared with the paint of her artistic dabblings—an imitative blend of Arthur Dove and Marsden Hartley with a hint of Homer’s seascapes—them and her Grateful Dead tees, tie-dyed, of course. When the weather was bad, she’d wear some Tijuana poncho and often even a blanket round her neck, like some queen-of-People’s-Park swaddled in mangy ermine. And this was on top of her feeble attempt at sprouting a noggin full of dreads. The day would begin like habit, bong hits all around, the morning’s wine in homemade mugs. Whichever Gladden brother she’d been with had already slipped through the woodwork like the creeping ferret he was, so that when all was said and done, that, as they say, was that.
Later, after these affairs had caved, we began to crush Lucille with gossip. And though for the next few years shadows kept the details grey, the matter cohered vaguely nonetheless. That’s how these things work: one morning, said Misha, who’d got the scoop from Lisa, who’d pinched it from her boy Sam, whom Bobby himself had told, Bobby bragged about the compliments his lovers all gave his beautiful cock, which, according to Lisa-by-way-of-Karen-by-way-of-Lucille, was hardly the case; as for Brad—Lucille’s last of the brothers—he had caught the clap (someone else had slipped between him and Ben); and Ben had a girl in the east who’d found out about his slick business, then told another friend, who, of course—because, again, that’s the way these things go down—was a friend of mine.
And where I was concerned, what could Basil ask he didn’t already know? How many diseases I’d got by the time I hit twenty, or had I shoplifted as a kid or tinkered with sex? The closest it came to that was kissing my cousin when I was five, beneath a blanket on Christmas Eve. Though my dear old toad had no doubt caught us, he was kind enough to wait till morning, dressed like a Hare Krishna elf, to beat me with his paddle.
Nor would Basil ask why I’d called last year at four a.m. to say something was amiss with his granny. She’d just suffered a lapse in health he and his mom went nutty for, some sort of brain hemorrhage I knew nothing of. At the time I considered my little call a motiveless joke spawned by a five-day binge during which I’d consumed three eight balls, seven quarts of bourbon, five cases of sucky beer, and nineteen or twenty packs of smokes—and that’s forgetting my jaunt through Berkeley’s midnight streets in nothing but a beanie with a propeller on top, ranting about Ezekiel’s wheels gleaming of beryl and the predictions of Nostradamus.
But later, in the clarity of my regret, I saw the canker in the bloom. Basil had “fired” me (that was the expression he used once he started talking smack) from what he obviously had considered “his” band. In a dull autumn noon veined with dull autumn smog, we sat over a mound of pad thai and confessed our interests had suffered a rift. He felt, or so he said, I could do better elsewhere. Get out on my own maybe, he’d been stifling my creativity and such, he said. But even in the midst of these shams we both knew he was wonking through his bullshit tulips, making a farce of protecting my ego while disguising the rage of his own.
That he knew I knew he knew I knew all this made it the more obscene. His head had grown bigger even than Dinky’s, which wasn’t to say my own had shrunk. I’d risen from the glop of my tyro swamp, having begun my apprenticeship in music just five years back. Now a producer chose my song from a group of twenty-plus that Basil and I’d mostly co-written, claiming it the stuff of hits. But that didn’t justify anyone calling me greedy, not like they could Basil. The cat couldn’t share a stinking thing—not money, not women, not smokes, not booze, not cars, not drugs, not nada. Why the hell would he share the title Creative Genius—whatever that meant: more groupie sex? a solo name-drop in the Chronicle’s Pink Section or BAM magazine?—even though he’d already taken all but the glamor-light itself with his singing and playing both? People by then were comparing him to stars like Paul Westerberg and Chris Cornell and Sting. Did that matter? Not a stewed red penny. A shadow’s shadow threatened the kid. The shadow itself nigh on crushed him. And the thing that made the shadow, when it came too near, it might as well have been King Kong. We sat there stabbing at our shrimps, hoping the waiter would bring us the check so we could go get drunker than we were.
And the more I thought, the more seeds of deviance I scraped up. In our high school days, Basil’s grandparents left each year for a three-month tour to Europe or wherever, leaving us to our bashes at their mansion in the hills. It was during their last trip, before his grandpa died, that I got plastered on Rainier Ale. I was sixteen years old, shorter and skinnier than I am today, a gawky, graceless runt, for sure, in size five-and-a-half waffle stompers and a Gor-Tex parka stuffed with paraphernalia and drugs, and long, greasy hair, and zits the size of gumballs. Between my having left the party and gained the john, I’d become so drunk that when finally I began to hurl I lost control and shit my pants. And this was no ordinary shitting, either, nothing like a few solid logs you could scrape into the bowl and have done. We were talking about a sloppy, repulsive mess, full of chilidogs and Funyuns and Hostess Apple Pie, to say nothing of all that brew, an honest-to-god shitting if ever a shitting was. Really, I should’ve been proud of that dump, but I was a twerp. It made the Montezuma’s Revenge in some tripper’s shorts look like a painting by Renoir, green and yellow and slimy as it was, running down my legs and the pants at my ankles and even in my boots. To make matters worse—if that were possible—a very special girl had come that night, a little vixen with whom I fancied myself in love. For months I’d been chasing her eye, going so far as to write her a poem she wasted no time laughing at with her friends on the quad. Had I merely barfed, I’d’ve been okay. But I had to go and crap my pants, and that no one could pardon. So there I stood moaning and crying and retching in the shower, and when I called Basil to ask for a pair of trunks, what did he do but burst out cackling. Because that was the kind of guy Basil wa
s. He made buffoonery of your heroics and heroics of your buffoonery. If you told a joke, he made it your inexcusable flaw. You had a flaw, he turned it to a nasty joke. After laughing till he cried, my dear buddy rushed out to the PA for his band. “Hey, everybody!” he yelled at the mike. “Guess what? AJ just crapped his pants!”
Another time, high on mesc, Basil lit some kid’s hair on fire just because it looked, as Basil said, like it would burn real good. Another time yet he turned me in to the dean after the dean had caught us smoking dope in the bushes behind the portables. I’d run down the hill and got away clean while Basil and the other tard with us stayed put like the dean had said. Basil never knew I was the one who’d slashed his tires the night he fell asleep in his van after banging some girl he’d dragged from The Ivy Room. Basil never found out, either, how I’d filled the lock to his apartment with glue. He was living in a rat hole near West Oakland, whose landlord hated to answer his phone. Wearing his clothes for the days it took Basil to get inside pounded him with jock itch.
The one person Basil could demand a real Truth or Dare from was Hickory, the only one he hadn’t known for more than half his life. I listened to the howling rain while Jelly Roll Morton bopped on the ivories and Lucille tore open some Mexican candy bar I’d never seen, with a load of marshmallow and other shit that looked like blood. I thought how when it rained my old toad would tell me the undertaker’s wife was coming to take me away. He and moms had so many ways of expressing their love. Every time you sigh, moms used to say, you lose a drop of blood, and that just keeps bringing you closer to death. Then she’d sigh, and I would scream, O Mama, Mama, Mama! while she and my toad fell back laughing. I thought about all the creatures in this wintry world, out where the rocks lay cold and the mud ran thick and the trees and wind and clouds sputtered and racked and rolled, and Basil sat there before me with his impudence and his flaws and his knowledge of and persistence in them. He took great pleasure in these traits. They somehow gave him the sense he’d become indispensable to the people on whom he committed his tiny crimes, the way delusions become vital to the hypochondriac. His face was always glistening with that petty smirk of self-awareness. Even in his antagonism he’d become precious to those he knew—big, goofy, confident, fashionable, dear, droll Basil, the helpmeet fright wig, twentieth-century portrait of Juvenalian adage—two things only the people anxiously desire: bread and circuses. God, how I hated that I loved him. And then there was Hickory lounging in the smoke with her ink-black hair and creamy throat while upstairs Dinky wheezed among his dreams.
“I should ask her,” Basil said, as I had guessed, sneering Hickory’s way. The booger was still lodged in his hat. “But I won’t. You, doofus,” he said to me, “Truth or Dare. And don’t give us another one of your boring-ass stories we’ve all heard a jillion times.”
Across the room our bottles sang their nitwit song. I’d talked to them in the past, my bottles, and held them close. “Sweet, sweet booze,” I’d say, “please don’t ever leave me.” I crawled to the table and stuck one in my mouth.
“Truth,” I said.
“We want to hear more about your fucked up family.”
“Yeah,” Lucille said. “Tell us more about your Hare Krishna dad.”
I smiled my smile of the hero, the general at his table of defeat, surrendering up his troops.
“I ever tell you my old toad was a paperboy?”
“Every kid was a paperboy,” Lucille said.
“I mean when he was forty-two.”
I told them how after he’d quit the Hare Krishna’s, no place would hire him, no place real. He still had that bald head with the queue down his back. Who was going to hire a guy that looked like soap-on-a-rope? He delivered those worthless inserts with the advertisements in them, I explained, the ones with the Round Table Pizza coupons and Thrifty’s discount ads and such.
But what I did not tell them was how my whole life it seemed I had to watch my ass, waiting for that fuck to sneak up and holler: Andrew Jackson!
What I did not tell them was how he would jump, and I’d run, and bit by bit the time would pass until he caught me with his paddle.
What I did not tell them was how from the shadows my mother would always laugh. Yes, she’d say, yes…
And for absolutely positively certain what I did not tell them was every time he saw me my grandfather said how he and dear ma had spoiled my mother past sense. They may’ve had to scratch it out, but that never kept them from giving her love. He gave her love sure, he’d say, especially him, more than she could use. Their lives, he said, were each other. On their wedding day, when they and theirs and all theirs too came dusting through the gates to the fields trying to swallow up the house for the last hundred years, the place was a vision or mirage. They spat from barrels and slapped on legs and pebbled the hens and drank from a bottomless jug. And the goods, he said, did they ever have them: black-eyed peas, corn bread and greens, pickled peaches, and okra, and ham. Greasy fingers ran through tri-tip and pone, gravy and spuds and coleslaw, too, and laughing mouths scarfed cookies and apple pie. If the men weren’t eating or drinking in tens, and the women weren’t doing the same, it’s because they were together. They hooted into that Texas night, he said, and no one cried unless for good. In the morning, for their honeymoon, they chugged on down to Austin. He spoke about those times like they’d just passed, my grandfather did, their five wild nights in the honkytonks and jukes and once a hall with its giant band, the champagne swilling and they screwing like bugs wherever they could—on the hay-riddled planks of the ’29 Ford, in the alleys with the tramps and garbage and toms, but mostly in their eight-bit bed—all this before returning to the dust of the fields and the everyday sun. Lucky for grandy she couldn’t make more after whelping out moms, my grandfather said. She all but dried up, like a row of set alfalfa. Of course the coot presumed he’d done what he could to make sure moms knew he loved her. He never could see how once she’d grown to bleed she didn’t want him anymore, he said, why she went away. And the day he himself went away, I drove off with my old toad and moms to gather what he’d left of grandy in Lamesa. Not so, however, the day my own toad croaked. The first thing I did was strip an ambulance clean and smash it all to bits. It was only later someone told me I’d done every crumb of dope I stole before they’d fed my toad to the grave, how everything stunk of ether and mints. Red rover, red rover, send happiness over—that’s what the voices said. And then it was them on the street, plotting my destruction, bearded women, first, then barkers and trolls, then geeks and elves and clowns would come to lay me siege. Robitussin low balls and speed-jacked marys made my fare. Sometimes I drank water, sometimes I even slept. We buddies went to jerks with names we didn’t know and watched films whose stories were an endless blur. And sometimes, like now, we journeyed on trips whose ends we’d never guess…
For a long while no one said a word. That stood to sense. The only thing we knew was how to keep on boozing. And my dear friends, I trusted, wouldn’t—couldn’t—ever feel the emptiness of that, leastwise not how I did. We couldn’t go forever. Sooner or later we’d have to lie down in darkness. Without the speed that had kept us hopping, I saw no other way. Any time now we’d collapse around the secrets of ourselves, the ones we knew and the ones we didn’t.
I was tired of believing a shroud could mute the sense that some dimly feared disaster might beset me in the night. Let it come. It couldn’t be more terrifying than sleep, with its dreams realer than our lives. The party was ending, that was sure. We’d torn our gifts open to find boxes inside boxes inside boxes, and nothing in the last. Good riddance, holidays—sayonara.
“I forgot Dinky’s tea,” Hickory said at last, and glided toward the kitchen. “I’ll just make him a cup of tea.”
“What’re you going to make it with, pine cones?”
Basil was right. Everything we had was on the table.
“Think I’ll go see what’s up with army boy myself,” I said.
“Che
ck the phone while you’re at it,” Basil said. “Maybe it’s working now.”
But when still nothing but fuzz dribbled from the thing, Basil flung his hatchet at the stack of wood and cracked his knuckles like he did when he was tight, a tic I’d grown to hate across the years, not for its sound but what it foretold: my bosom pal was about to become a bigger asshole yet.
“Next thing you know,” he said, “we’ll be eating each other for breakfast like the losers in the Donner Party.” He dug his fingers into Lucille’s ass and lurched at her with fangs. “My oh my how these buttocks are sweet,” he said. “Fingergoddamnedlickinggood they are, oh my, oh my.”
“That’s not funny,” Hickory said.
“This isn’t funny?”
“What you said. It wasn’t funny.”
“But her ass does taste good.” Basil held a hand over Lucille’s butt. “See for yourself.”
“It’s just not funny, talking about our predicament that way. Even as a joke.”
I was surprised at Basil’s little fun. He had his man-bag with its hatchet and knife and rope for good reason, or for reason good for him. Territory past any town’s limit was territory rife with Deliverance-type freaks and fools gone native, full of conspiracy theories and tales of a world destroyed—with fruitcakes, essentially, like Super. Every time we hit Baja, much less the Berkeley Hills, Basil would forage through the mess in his truck to make sure he had his kit. It didn’t matter the fun we made. He’d just tell us to thank him when we’re old, for our necks from the noose that day back when. And the Donner Party especially. I don’t know how many times he’d spun yarns about it, like tales from the crypt, bemoaning, at bottom, their fates as fodder for themselves. The notion he’d end his days in someone else’s stomach was for him the doomsday to beat all doom ever. The man couldn’t see three frames of a zombie flick without breaking into hives. Watching him blow his top was always a gas. Every now and then, just to flip his wig the way I knew it would, I’d break out the drumstick from a turkey or chicken and cackle like hell while the fantods rocked him. If he was joking about the Donner Party now, it meant one thing: he was scared.