by W. S. Penn
“Wait,” I said. “I’ll give you ten bucks for the trip in and out.” He was interested. “I need eight bottles.”
“Eight?”
“I’ve got people waiting for them.”
“Minors?” I nodded. “That’s ill-legal, boy.” He shook his head from side to side slowly, as if his neck was stiff. “Money up front?” I agreed. “Okay.”
I counted out the money. “You can take off with this, I know.” He acted offended. “If you do, it’s my ass with my customers. If you don’t, you make ten bucks this week. Next week, maybe more.”
Linc stood there in the dim light, squinting at me. “You know, Alleybird,” he said, finally. “You’re smart.”
“I learn fast,” I said.
I stood beside the unlocked trunk to William’s car and watched him inside the store. I could tell from the hesitant way he moved, the way he wanted to look around to see if I was watching, that his every instinct made him want to run out the back door. Take a sure thing, and not a promise from some boy he called Alleybird. But greed functions as effectively with a wino as with a rich man, and even Linc could add up what two or three weeks of this would mean. Maybe not in dollars, but in bottles of Ripple, for sure—if, after a week or two, Linc hadn’t moved up to something a little more palatable like muscatel or Thunderbird.
I came to like making those trips over into East Palo Alto on Friday and, as volume increased, Saturday nights. William began to worry more about getting caught; I began to look forward to the day I’d be old enough to get my own car.
“So we get caught,” I said. “Worst they’ll do is pour the booze out. Maybe take us down to the station and book us. They can’t hold us. We’re too young.”
“We’ll have a record,” William said. “What’ll our parents say?”
“Look,” I said, slightly bored by William’s fear, “the trick is not to get caught. If we do, records can be sealed.”
“My father is a lawyer,” William protested.
“We can keep it in the family,” I said.
I should have known, as I heard William try to ask indirect questions of his father about sealing police records, or as I heard him stumble over the reasons he needed the car, that I’d be left holding the ball. But with the enjoyment I took in hanging out in East Paly, I ignored the future. Sometimes, I’d send William back with the liquor and hang out with Linc. I learned to shoot pool. I learned why a young man without a job and without the hope of an income might buy an expensive pool cue, and it was a reason similar to why a Chicano will spend thousands of dollars on chrome and fur for his car before he’ll pay the rent. Money was fun to have and fun to spend, and more importantly, money could always be gotten: It was hope that was priceless, fear expensive, and despair that was free.
Line never liked William the Black. “He’s black as day,” Linc said. “What color’s his old lady?” When I pretended not to hear him, he added, “Betcha she’s as light as scotch.”
“What’s wrong with that?” I replied, angrily. “What does it matter?”
Linc laughed. “Let me tell you, Alleybird, my friend. You can’t be both in this here world. If you’re black, you’re black. If you’re red, you’re red. Try to be black and white or red and white, you come out lookin’ like dirty laundry.”
I knew he was right the night cops pulled into a parking space beside William’s car. Without waiting, William started the car and drove legally away, and I was left holding the metaphorical ball.
“Ah, shit,” Linc said as he set the case of liquor on the sidewalk. The cops were already out of their car, tucking their night sticks into their holders on their belts. “Sorry, Alleybird.” He meant it.
“I am, too,” I said, watching the taillights of William’s car signal left and disappear.
“Why don’t you take off. Lose ’em around the corner. Cut through the lot …”
“I’ll stay.”
“Hell, boy, don’t worry about me. Not much they can do to me. You, t’other hand …,” but it was already too late.
Cops have a hard job. Full of questions like Dr. Bene, they rarely get the right answers.
“Come on, boy, what’s your real name,” the red-haired cop kept asking, with the suspicion of a nearsighted man used to dealing with delinquents. I watched him pace back and forth, clenching and unclenching his fists and fingering his night stick. “They should never have allowed your kind off the reservation,” he said.
“We should’ve made stricter immigration laws,” I replied, calling him Joe Friday because he was stiff and stubby, leaning slightly forward beneath the cause and effect of his simplified morality.
“My name’s not Friday,” he hissed. “Cut it.”
“Does it matter?” I asked, allowing my face to relax and, with a narrowing of my eyes and lowering of my eyebrows, to suggest a grin.
“Leave the kid alone, Randy,” Officer Lindel said.
Answering Lindel’s questions, I tried to make Joe Friday dissolve. Whether it was the fluorescent interference from the buzzing lights encasing me and bleaching the room white, or the fact that I wanted to repay Lindel by paying attention, I couldn’t.
Lindel telephoned my house and talked to mother, and I watched his face change from politeness to amusement to utter confusion. When he hung up, he looked at me with understanding and sympathy.
“What did she say?” I asked.
“Are you sure you gave me the right number?” I nodded. “Let me try again. That was 968–4123, right?” He dialed and again spoke to mother.
“So? What’d she say?” I asked again.
“She said ‘Catsup. Ketchup.’ The first time, she asked if I knew it could be spelled both ways, and pointed out that tests performed by an independent agency proved no preference for either spelling. The second time, it was like she knew she was speaking to me again. She said that it didn’t matter because both have rat hair in them.”
“That was mother,” I said. “She’s into market research, these days.”
“Is she …”
“Crazy?” I knew he wouldn’t say the word out of some notion of kindness or tact. “Not really. Confused, sometimes, but aren’t we all, at times?” He shrugged. “She’ll move on to something else as soon as she figures out why soft toilet paper is so important to women.” He started to laugh. “No,” I said, “it’s not funny, really. You see, it’s not that we all prefer soft toilet paper over newspaper; it’s why the commercial claims it is important to women and not men.”
“I’ll take you home,” he said.
On the way, he told me that the ball was in my court, that not much would come from this misdemeanor, and that I could have my record sealed. That way on job applications, I wouldn’t have to say that I’d ever been arrested. As for Linc, he would spend a month in the city jail, drying out and putting on weight, which he liked to do every so often anyway.
When I said, “See you,” he said, “I hope not soon.” I had no idea how soon it would be.
Years later, as I stood before the judge with my lawyer, having my record sealed for the second time, having been arrested and booked an average of three times a year, I decided that I would never again allow someone else to have the kind of power over me that could leave me holding the ball. It was a decision that resembled Laura P.’s determination not to let Louis Applegate near her painted pots or kachinas; though until I’d made the decision, I’d believed that Laura P.’s determination involved a strange and unbelievable mysticism to which Buddhists, Indians, hippies, and Californians seemed prone.
22.
Conversations with Allison DeForest tended to repeat themselves, the only differences being time and detail and ending with whether we were or were not a couple. A boy can feign interest in these conversations only so many times and, regardless of how many that is, Allison had surpassed my limit long ago. Grandfather had taught me that Indian time was a timeless present that contained both past and future. Allison’s time was an untimely pr
esent that discarded both past and future according to the needs of fashion. This time, fashion required us to uncouple and see other people, because I, as Mrs. DeForest so carefully explained to Allison, was a bad influence.
Over the past year, Allison had sometimes suggested that perhaps she and I ought to see other people, while we continued our affair. I had finally come to realize that “seeing other people,” like “I’m not a whore,” was a phrase invented for the convenience of Allison and women like Allison. For Allison, love was power, and she enjoyed the power of making a man want her, instinctively recognizing that what he might want would be her body and not her mind. Some nights, William and I would hide in the bushes in front of Allison’s house and eavesdrop on her tussling with her date in his parked car, listening to the strains of her stock phrases frustrate him as much as they had me. It made me feel better when Allison grew weary and asked, “Just what do you want?”
If Allison was a test of one’s patience, as well as the challenge, then Mrs. DeForest was a proctor for all of the struggles of life. I came to see that Mrs. DeForest assumed Allison was a whore, and that it was her mother’s disease that Allison had, a disease not uncommonly found in women like her. Mrs. DeForest would send Allison off for a snack of milk and cookies and sit me down on the patio for a “little chat,” lugubrious affairs of questions and answers in which the questions didn’t ask what they were meant to and the answers were assumed.
“What plans do you have,” Mrs. D. would ask me, crossing her legs to reveal a calculated amount of thigh, “after college?” I had trouble seeing her eyes in the glare.
“What are your plans for the future,” she’d say, without a question mark in the inquisition of her tone.
“Where is your colored friend today?” or “Where is William this afternoon?” she’d say, grinning slyly, as though I’d misplaced William like a coin purse.
Sometimes, her tone became sensuous and the chats were implicitly sexual, and through Mrs. DeForest, I began to learn the technique of the inquisitor who examines you as though you are already guilty, keeping you off base with shady eyes and the tonal implication that she knows much more about an affair than you would want her to know.
“Allison and I are very close, you know,” Mrs. D. would begin. She’d pause, staring at me knowingly and allowing the suspense to build. “She’s very young, you understand. At her age, it’s not good to be tied down to just one person. I’m sure you’d agree that you’re both too young to become, well, very serious.”
Some nights, as I dropped Allison at home, stopping in for a Coke or coffee, Mrs. DeForest would send Allison to bed, offer me a baby beer, and time me as I drank it, asking if we’d had fun on our date. I went so far as to imagine that Allison and her mother were in league together, that they had arranged for Allison to warm me up and Mrs. D. to finish me off.
“I’m confused,” I told William the Black. “I don’t know if Mrs. DeForest wants to fuck me, or only to keep me from fucking Allison.”
“I’ll let you know,” William said.
The inquisitory sessions dragged on and I began to fear, then hate them. I wondered vehemently why Allison was so cooperative about leaving me alone with her mother, and I began to experiment with answers to her questions.
“Rich man, poor man, beggar man, thief,” I told Mrs. DeForest, admiring her thigh, “after college.”
When she asked where William was, I discovered that saying “He’s probably at the library” was not only sufficient but thoroughly acceptable.
“Really,” Mrs. DeForest would say, her eyes shining with her own private dreams and visions.
“I’m very close with my whole family,” I’d reply, staring back at her the way she stared at me. “Especially to my father. He agrees that Allison is too young.” I would let this sink in and then add, “After all, she is only a year older than I am.”
At times, I would simply say, “Yes,” uncertain of what I was saying yes to, and eventually not caring.
What with the notoriety I’d acquired by procuring liquor for my schoolmates, not to mention the money I made and spent with abandon, Allison’s friends were all too willing to go out with me. Their mothers and fathers were pushovers. Without waiting to be asked what I wanted to be, depending on their occupations, which were easily discerned from the literature on bookshelves and coffee tables, I’d tell them, “Doctor,” or “Lawyer,” or “Indian Chief.”
Some days, I’d have two dates, taking one girl to the coral cove near Half Moon Bay, where we’d roll around in the fog, and taking another to the movies or a dance that night. Always, as the frustrations that Allison so enjoyed creating were satisfied, the parents approved. I could hear them thinking aloud, “What a nice young man.” Even though I was hardly what they would have called a nice young man, had they known, I’d fooled them. “Thank you Mrs. DeForest,” I’d think. “Without you and your silly chats, when asked what I wanted out of life, I wouldn’t have had an inkling of the answers. Not a farthing.”
As for all of the times I listened to Allison say that she would rather we be friends, they were enough to teach me how to use the same phrase as an escape from a situation I’d become dissatisfied with, saying to a girl that “it might be better if we were friends” and not lovers. Women understood what I was about to say even before I finished. I found I could say, “It might be better if …,” and let them finish the sentence. Very few interesting variations occurred; always the variation was one I could say yes to.
“It might be better if …,” I’d say.
“We stopped seeing each other?” she’d say. “We were friends?” she’d say. “We saw other people?” “You cut your dick off?” she’d say.
Even to the last one, I’ve said yes, saying it with penitential regret, as if to underscore the seriousness with which I accepted responsibility for the mistake of indulging our physical passions. It was best, when that occurred, to underscore the underscoring by adding, “Listen, I …,” and then sink into pained speechlessness.
But all that came later. A knowledge gained only after I decided not to use it, not so much because it is cruel as because it is simply not fun. Still, for the beginnings of that knowledge, for teaching me that women know these tricks as well as men, for being the cause which allowed me to learn that satisfying my physical lusts was easy and therefore not as important as it might have seemed otherwise, for frustrating me until I dated most of her friends with a vengeance, respecting the ones who either refused to sleep with me or even to go out with me because they were her friends—perhaps, for these things, as well as the skill of experimenting with answers to authoritarian questions, I owe something to Allison DeForest (the little bitch). Perhaps I ought to say, ‘Thank you, Allison.’
Maybe I will try.
23.
Father was unfooled by the answers I experimented with. At first, he picked on the way I dressed. “You’d think we were poor, the way you go around looking like a gypsy.”
“It’s an image,” I’d say. “In a world of images.” He was unmoved. “Besides, this jacket cost thirty bucks.”
I knew I’d made a mistake when he stood up from washing the car and told me I had no business spending that on a jacket. Father wasn’t cheap but he was frugal, having bought the notion that one earned money the hard way. It was a difference between father and me. Grandfather had said that the nature of gold was its color.
“So what’s all the fuss about it?” I’d asked.
“Some people are colorblind,” Grandfather had said. “They mistake gold’s weight with its nature. They like to heft it around like mules.” Grandfather had always tried to unload the gold, knowing that money was the easiest thing to obtain—much easier than love or a happy death.
“Where,” father said, bending over the hood of the car and scrubbing the bird-doo from it, “did you get that much money to spend on a jacket?”
“Would you believe playing poker?” I asked, experimentally.
&nb
sp; He stood again, and looked the way Mrs. DeForest might look at me, except father’s eyes lacked the bleakness of her curiosity. He knew, and didn’t know. Rather, he knew that I wasn’t going to tell him the truth as well as that I’d gotten the money in a way he wouldn’t approve of, and he was going to let me off the hook by not insisting.
“You’ve not spent much time around the house, lately,” he said.
I shrugged as if to say that being busy in the day-to-day muck of life, I had no choice but to be out and around.
“I think you’d better start. And you can start with this.” He tossed me the washing sponge. “Earn a buck honestly.” Father was formidable. There was no arguing with him. When I tried, he told me that after I finished that car, I could do the other one. “And then,” he added for effect, “mow the lawn.”
I did. I didn’t mind too much, that day, because I was grateful for being let off the hook. Nonetheless, father tried to make a habit of it. A sinlessly early riser, he banged on my bedroom door at seven a.m. every Saturday and told me to come on out and help wash the cars or mow the lawn or spray malathion on the roses. Out of simple self-defense, I took up residency in the one room in the house that had a lock on the door, the bathroom. No matter how tired I was, on Saturday mornings I would rise before father and sneak into the bathroom and hide behind the locked door. As bathrooms are really very uninteresting places—unless they’re someone else’s bathroom—I began to install a continuous and rotating supply of reading material. Eventually, my habitude of the bathroom would become so refined that there were not only books and magazines spread conveniently around the toilet, but blank books and pens as well, and I’d deduct that portion of the rent which represented the bathroom from my taxes.
About the time that father had told me that I’d better start taking a part in the family, mother fell in love with the word “boom.” Evidently, mother had learned to appreciate the power of Boom through her intricate preparations to torture dinner on her gas range. She especially liked to light the oven. She would crank the gas full on and stand holding a lit match until we could all smell the corn odor of leaking natural gas, then lean down and toss the match at the pilot light hole in the oven.