Swimming with Bridgeport Girls

by Anthony Tambakis

  The night was sweltering. Neither of us had any idea where we were going. We were just walking. There were run-down houses and abandoned estates everywhere.

  “This town’s a little grim,” I said.

  “Memphis is your colorful uncle who could never quite get his shit together, and now it’s not funny anymore,” he said. “He’ll never turn it around, and everyone knows it. The best you can do is just keep him away from the children. Why the hell are you here, Ray?”

  “No particular reason,” I said. “You?”

  “You know I can’t tell you anything. My marriage is holding on by a thread, or whatever less than a thread is. I mean, we’re not even staying in the same room. She finds out I’m even talking to you, and I’ll get the door.”

  We walked on. Crossed some trolley tracks. Walked past a cluster of bail-bonds joints. Car-rental places. A bread factory. It was all industrial and hot and depressing. But I have to say, it gave me a good feeling to see an old friend. Outside of Dawn, Penny, Maurice, Bing, and the degenerates at the casino, I never saw anybody anymore.

  “Jordy says you’re living with some hairdresser?”

  “I am not living with a hairdresser,” I said. “Jesus.”

  “It’s OK. You’ll get no judgment from me. I fell for a nineteen-year-old who ate two bags of Skittles every class,” he said, wiping his head with his T-shirt. “Jordy puts a bag of them in my lunch every morning just to turn the knife. If it wasn’t for Chloe, we’d be all done, but I gotta be there when she wakes up. I mean, she’s only four, Ray. What does she know about all our adult bullshit?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. And I didn’t. I didn’t know what a four-year-old knew, but I guessed it could be a decent amount. Penny was five, and she knew all kinds of things.

  “On the other hand, how long before she figures out her parents hate each other? It’s not like Jordy hides it or anything.”

  I wondered for a second why it was somehow all right for Benny Fowler to have sex with a student but it wasn’t OK for me to be friends with a hairdresser and sleep on her couch. How was he still part of the gang and I wasn’t? Why did he have options and I had to go to extremes? I liked the guy a great deal, but the group reasoning was bullshit.

  “I went hunting with my old man once,” he said out of nowhere. “For geese. It seemed like the worst possible way a person could spend his time, so I never went back, but I remember him blasting one out of the sky and following the dog to it. I was mortified, seeing it just lying there. The old man looked at me. Said that geese mated for life, and they deserved to be shot for that reason alone. Jesus. I haven’t thought about that in years. Why am I even telling you that?”

  I thought about my old man. His letter was still unopened in my pocket. I wondered if anything was rarer than stories about good fathers. We walked on through the night. Passed a church. Then another. And another. And another. I stopped in front of one. Looked up at a cross spire.

  “What do you think of Peter?” I said. “He strikes me as kind of a scumbag. I mean, for being an apostle. I think he’s a lot closer to Judas than everyone thinks he is. He’s just more of a smooth operator, don’t you think?”

  “I never really thought about it,” Benny said.

  “Somehow L got into the church thing. Father Phil from The Sopranos really did a number on her and Lucille.”

  “I know.”

  “Know what?”

  “That L and Boyd are churchgoers,” he said, stopping to get a breather. “I consider myself more of a lapsed atheist. Every once in a while I slip up and find myself believing in something.”

  “You know Boyd Bollinger, Benny?”

  “Yeah,” he said, sounding ashamed. “He’s OK.”

  “Where’s the wedding? I know it’s tomorrow.”

  “Ray, come on.”

  “Where’s L?”

  “I have no idea. Jordy won’t tell me anything. I think they’ve all identified me as the weak link,” he said.

  “Gaffney said she’s at Graceland.”

  “Where?”

  “Graceland. He said Bollinger knows everyone in Memphis, and he’s getting to stay at Graceland.”

  “I was there yesterday,” Benny said. “They won’t let anyone go upstairs, where the bedrooms are. It’s off-limits. Then again, he is Joe Tennessee, so maybe he has an in. I don’t know. All I do know is that I need a fucking beer. Badly.”

  I agreed. Fowler pulled out his phone. Fiddled with one application or another.

  “There’s a 7-Eleven a few blocks away,” he said, phone glowing.

  We found it, grabbed two six-packs of Bud tallboys, and walked back out into the night.

  “We should call a cab,” I said, just before a major coughing jag hit me.

  “You sound brutal,” he said. “Heat should do you good. Come on, let’s walk a little more. The Lorraine Motel is right around here.”

  We cracked a couple of Buds. Walked on. Every now and then random fireworks went up in the distance. It had to be five A.M.

  “You hear about my neighbor, by any chance?”

  “No one talks to me, Benny. How would I have heard about your neighbor?”

  He killed his beer and popped a fresh one. “The neighbor’s kid is a total wack job, right? Always has been. Acne. Body like Iggy Pop. Shooting squirrels. All of it. Anyway, he catches a bird and dismembers it. Like, clinically dismembers it. Then he goes to the playground and cuts his wrists up with the bones of the bird. Total scene. Blood all over the fucking seesaw. Just disgusting. What did his genius parents do? Put him on medication and bought him a Range Rover. That’s it. I swear, these kids now—they’re all fucked-up, Ray. You don’t even know who might be packing in your own classroom. I was afraid to give an F to any of the guys. I’m not even kidding. It wasn’t worth it. I swear, if I had my way, I’d homeschool Chloe. I’m terrified to send her out there. Hell, you know. You guys were involved in that Sandy Hook thing.”

  You could tell he was truly afraid. He had lost his brother in the most heinous way possible, and now it seemed that schools were getting shot up so often that people stopped paying attention unless there were really young kids involved, like up in Newtown, and even then people forget about it because another one was always right around the corner. It was a legitimate thing for him to worry about, and it seemed like an extension of my fears over swimming pools and deformities. And it wasn’t true that I was afraid to go to Sandy Hook with L. I just didn’t think we belonged there. I mean, she wasn’t always right. She thought I couldn’t deal with our blind neighbor, for example, but the reality was that he bored me by starting every sentence with “The way I see it” and then waiting for you to laugh. I wasn’t spooked by him. He was just dull.

  Benny swilled his beer. His good looks had vanished, and things seemed to be getting away from him. We were the same age, but he’d easily pass for fifteen years older.

  “Never have kids, Ray,” he said. “I’m serious. You’ll never sleep again. When they’re little, they won’t let you get any rest, and once that stops, you end up keeping yourself up all night worrying about all the things that can happen to them in this fucked-up world. And at the end of it, they might not even like you. Hell, they might not even talk to you.”

  He lifted his can and drained the rest of it. His buzz had kicked back in. “The more you love something, the greater capacity it has to ruin you,” he said, and boy, did that hit home.

  We turned a corner. Found ourselves in front of the Lorraine Motel, where Martin Luther King Jr. had been shot. It was another place in Memphis that was frozen in time, though this one was kept that way on purpose. A pair of old Cadillacs were parked out front behind some ropes, tailfins gleaming in the lamplight. A giant white and red wreath adorned the second-floor balcony outside room 306, where it had happened. It seemed like such a great man should have died in better lodgings.

  I looked at the plaque outside the motel:

  They said to one another
, Behold. Here cometh the dreamer. Let us slay him. We shall see what will become of his dreams. Genesis 37:19–20.

  I shook my head. Man, that was heavy. We stared at the balcony for a while and then sat on the curb. Someone had spray-painted “Though Much Is Taken, Much Abides” on the sidewalk. I had no idea what abide actually meant, but it seemed like a very solid word.

  “My brother really liked you, Ray.”

  “I liked him, too,” I said.

  “I’m sorry I haven’t been a better friend to you. That email wasn’t enough. It was chickenshit. You want to talk about all this trouble you’re in? I’d be happy to listen.”

  “Not really.”

  “I get it. When everything happened with Skittles, I didn’t want to talk about it, either.”

  “You actually call her Skittles?”

  “Yeah. I don’t know what I was thinking. Does anybody have any idea what the hell they’re doing? They don’t tell you that about getting older, you know? That you won’t really know anything. The thing that changes you isn’t learning new things but learning old ones over and over until you lose all hope. Hell, anything having to do with the human heart is a fucking mystery to everybody. I mean, Einstein married his first cousin, for Chrissakes. And who the fuck can explain Yoko Ono?”

  I cracked another Bud. They were getting warm already.

  “You want to know why most marriages fall apart, Ray?”

  “Not really.”

  “They fall apart because they’re doomed by an inherent contradiction from the start. We want to maintain the fire of passion while also getting the daily comforts of hearth and home. But they can’t coexist. Not for long. The person holding your hair when you’re puking, the person whose dirty laundry you carry, the person whose face you see every day, that’s not the person who’s going to keep fucking you against the wall. The fire goes out. And it goes out because what does fire need to flourish? Air. Air and space. You get neither of those things in a marriage. Marriage takes place in a goddamn phone booth. There’s nowhere to turn.”

  I didn’t agree with him. I mean, I did agree with him as far as other couples went. No question. But that story? That story was not my and L’s story. Our story was something else.

  “Remember Touch of Evil?” he said.

  It was another thing I had always liked about Benny Fowler: He was a first-rate movie buff.

  “L and I saw it at Film Forum when we lived in the city that summer.”

  “Remember toward the end? Welles goes to see Marlene Dietrich and says, ‘Come on, read my future for me’? And she says, ‘You haven’t got any,’ in that great weary voice of hers. She was in her late fifties then, I think. It was over for both of them. Him worse than her. He was totally ruined. She just got old. Anyway, Welles says, ‘What do you mean?’ and Marlene says, ‘Your future’s all used up.’ That’s how I feel a lot of the time. That my future’s all used up.”

  I nodded. No one understood that more than I did. Which was why I needed to stop sitting on the fucking curb, drinking warm beer, and get moving.

  “Let’s go to Graceland, Benny.”

  “Are you serious?”

  I looked at him. He looked back at me. At the cast. The hair. All of it.

  “Why not?” he said. “I owe you that much.” He grinned, pulled out his phone, and called a cab. “OK,” he said, hanging up. “Let’s go see the King.”

  JESSE PRESLEY

  August 8

  Told the skywriting story today. Katherine just looked at me, and we both started laughing at the same time. “Do you need me to say it?” she said. I just laughed and said, “No, I think I can figure out the symbolism of that one!”

  THE CABBIE DROPPED US ACROSS the street from Graceland, in a strip mall where the tours load up and you can buy everything from Elvis and Nixon paperweights to “Love Me Tender” hand cream. Across the boulevard was the house, a white-columned mansion that didn’t seem like much from a distance. A wrought-iron gate with musical notes on it was adjacent to the guard shack, and a stone wall about six or seven feet high ran the length of the property. It looked easy enough to get over.

  Benny and I trotted across desolate Elvis Presley Boulevard. Walked as far away from the guard booth as possible and assessed the situation.

  “We can go right over here,” I said.

  “What about your cast?”

  “Boost me, then lift yourself up.”

  “I don’t know, Ray. I stopped working out when all the shit started. I don’t think I can do it.”

  I looked at him. I think he saw his brother’s disapproval staring back at him. The guy was a stud athlete.

  “No worries,” he said. “I’m good.”

  We looked around. No people. No cars. Still another hour or so before sunrise. He gave me a boost. Jagged rocks lined the top of the wall as a deterrent, but the hell with it. I placed my good hand on the sharp stones and tumbled over the wall. No lights came on. No alarm was tripped.

  “We’re good,” I whispered. “Come on.”

  I waited for him, and then whap. I felt an incredibly sharp pain along my left shin. It was all I could do not to scream. “What the fuck?”

  I looked down. He had tossed our four remaining tallboys over the wall. After a good deal of grunting and groaning, Benny fell over on my side.

  “Thanks for the heads-up on the beers,” I said, nursing my shin.

  “Thanks for the heads-up on the fucking rocks,” he answered, showing me his hands, which were bleeding. His khakis were torn up as well.

  We stayed low to the ground and crept across the grass. I looked up at the house. It wasn’t any more impressive up close. Somehow I’d thought it would be more Gone with the Wind.

  “I thought it’d be bigger,” I whispered.

  “I thought the same thing yesterday,” Benny said. “And the inside is the tackiest thing you’ve even seen in your life. Shit you wouldn’t even buy at a flea market.”

  We sneaked up the right side of the grounds. Wound our way past an unimpressive swimming pool.

  “What the hell’s that? Over there.”

  “Gravestones.”

  “He’s buried here?”

  “Yeah. So is his stillborn twin brother. Jesse. He was born thirty-five minutes before Elvis, according to the guide.”

  “That’s weird. I wonder what it was like to be Elvis’s brother.”

  “You know what stillborn means, right?”

  I thought about Elvis. It might have been nice for him to have a brother. It probably would have made a big difference in his life.

  “You know where there are more fugitives than any place else on earth?” he asked. He was getting drunk. “Alaska.”

  “Why are you telling me that? I’m not going to fucking Alaska. I’ve got two million dollars in a bag on a private airplane. I’ve got a plan.”

  “What?”

  “Nothing.”

  “What exactly is the plan here, Ray?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “The wall was as far as I thought it through. We’re doing pretty good, though. I guess the next step is we sneak in the back somehow, and then we find out where the hell they are. Take it from there.”

  “Are you sure they’re here? It doesn’t make any sense.”

  “Gaffney said they were.”

  “Gaffney’s a shithead.”

  “I’ll tell you what he’s not.”

  “A man who walks down the street?”

  “Right,” I said, grabbing a beer from him. Boy, had I missed Benny Fowler. “I really would have liked to have seen that guy cut a steak off him, to be honest.”

  “You and me both. Not for nothing, Ray, but you can’t trust Gaffney. Elyssa hates you as much as Hope does.”

  “Hate’s a strong word.”

  “I know. That’s why I used it,” he said, killing another beer. “I don’t know why he would help you. Hell, he sent out a mass email with that video of you and the jockey.”

  “T
hat motherfucker.”

  “Shhhh.”

  “What?”

  “Get down,” he whispered.

  “Is someone coming?”

  Someone was definitely coming. A flashlight swept across the gravestones. I looked around. There was nowhere to hide.

  “Get in the pool,” I said.

  “I’m not—”

  “Get in the fucking pool and keep your head down.”

  We both put our cell phones and wallets down. I lowered myself into the swimming pool and clung to the side. Benny did the same. It might have even worked if Renée hadn’t texted me at that very moment. The flashlight landed right on my beeping phone. Then it shifted right onto us.

  “Get out of the pool,” came a voice from the darkness.

  “Call me Raoul,” I whispered to Benny.

  “What?”

  “Call me Raoul. I’m Raoul.”

  “Jesus Christ, Ray.”

  We crawled out of the pool. Stood there soaking wet. Shielded our eyes from multiple flashlights.

  “Welcome to Graceland, gentlemen,” said the voice. “Two-oh-one Poplar will be the next stop on your tour.”

  I grabbed my wallet and phone and quickly texted Renée as the cops approached: “Code Red! Fly to Memphis NOW!!!” In my mind, I was thinking—what was I thinking? That she could bail me out? I have no idea. It didn’t matter anyway. I figured once I forked over the phone and the Raoul McFarland ID by the Graceland gate, it was all over. It would be only a matter of time before the Tennessee authorities figured out who I was and alerted the New York authorities, and then that would be that. Tackled on the one-fucking-yard line like Kevin Dyson on the last play of the Super Bowl back in 2000 (and naturally, he played for Tennessee).

  I guess I had it coming to me. The reality was, I had never really suffered. I hadn’t even experienced American suffering. I had never been to a Western Union. Never slept in my car. Never packed my life’s belongings into a Hefty bag. Never eaten just ketchup. And I had never been incarcerated. It had all caught up to me, though. Once that door closed, there was no telling when it was going to open up. I was looking at a serious problem.