“What class is that?” Anything to encourage him to keep talking to me.
“Algebra.” His eyes stayed on mine just a few seconds longer than maybe they should have. “Can you take Lucy home?”
“Sure,” I said, but I was thinking, anything for you, gorgeous.
Lucy grabbed me practically by the neck, still holding the remains of the brownies in the tin tray. We would eat some more in the car.
We didn’t, however, drive to Lucy’s house to watch Freddy. At least not right away. We stopped at the garage where her dad worked, so I could meet him. He had jet-black hair, a big paunch, and a big laugh. He tousled Lucy’s hair. “You doin’ okay kiddo?” he asked.
We stopped to pick up much needed supplies of some sort from Freddy’s father, who, I had to agree with her, was cute.
We stopped to pick up alcohol, new guitar strings, and snacks, all for Paul to have later. By the time we did arrive there to relieve her mother of Freddy-care, it was about five o’clock. She was late for work, thanks a lot!
Thus began the two-month-long car ride with Lucy Bacchus. Most of the time she insisted on driving.
“You drive like shit!” she said. “You stop and start like this,” and she proceeded to show me. She hit the brakes, and then started again.
When I would be drinking orange juice, she would make sure it spilled down my shirt.
“Go ahead,” she smiled, “take a drink. I promise I won’t do it again.”
“I’m so thirsty. It’s funny and all, but I’m just so thirsty.”
“I know, I know, you’re really thirsty. So I promise.”
Then as soon as I would take a drink, she would hit the brakes and it would spill down my shirt again.
We drove all around town this way, or, I should say, she drove. She drove us over to Krishna’s, who would smoke a bowl with us. She drove us over to Ziggy’s, where Lucy shoved the money in his face. “Give us dope! Paul needs dope!”
“I know, Prego,” Ziggy said, laughing. “But I’m out.”
“How can you be out? Paul needs it!”
For a second I thought she was gonna hit him. She had made a fist.
“You said,” she continued. “You told Paul; you promised.”
“I told Paul I’d try,” he shrugged. “But I didn’t promise you anything.”
“Paul needs that for his creativity. He writes songs with that. He is losing time, he has to have it done by tonight!” she was yelling. Her big, Cleopatra eyes were burning. Ziggy just laughed.
“Paul will be okay, but will you?”
“Damn it!” She slammed her fist against the side of his house, which was badly in need of a paint job.
“Hey,” Ziggy’s ma yelled from the living room. I could see her lying down, reading on an elegant couch. The wooden floors underneath her hadn’t been refinished in years. “Tell that moron to peace out!” She had a southern drawl. A Virginia drawl.
Then we’d walk down his porch and leave. But we were back there again by nightfall, when he did have dope for Paul. Everyone was there.
EIGHT
“Okay, okay, I’ll do it again.”
“No, Paul, we have to go home,” said Lucy. “He’s got to get his sleep.” She was still laughing some, from the last time Paul did his thing, but the laughter was turning to concern.
“No, come on!” we all begged, like a Greek Chorus up there in that space between Glinda’s and Siegfried’s bedroom. We were huddled around the tiny black-and-white TV as if it were on, but it was off because the whole entertainment was us having Paul repeat that thing he did over and over and over.
“Really guys, I gotta go.”
“It’ll be the last time we promise, come on, pleeease, oh please, oh please do it again.”
“Okay,” Paul said. “But first,” he lit a smokeless, white pipe that looked like a spaceship, “I gotta refill this pipe.”
“Here, I’ll take care of that,” Ziggy said. “You’ll lose your moment.”
“Yeah, come on, go,” we all chanted in unison.
“Okay, okay, here goes,” Paul said.
“Hold on,” I said, or someone did. “We need another bowl first.”
“That’s what I said,” Paul said.
“Come on, Paul, we really need to get home, you are going to be so tired.”
Paul started as soon as the pipe started going around the group.
Now how did that thing he did go?
You know, truthfully I have no idea. It went on and on and on. It had a superhero in it. Something about a man with a plan. A man with a golden arm. A man who saved the day and came down from the sky. He told the whole thing in such a dramatic way, and so funny, but you know, I don’t think that what was so great about it was the story or the joke or whatever that ten-minute thing was–I think it was Paul. Because I just sat and stared at him, giggling. And I, right along with the rest of them, would continue to demand repeats until Lucy had to remove him by force.
One thing for sure, this thing he did had us rolling around holding our sides on the faded, worn, light-blue carpet under the low Victorian windows upstairs at the Sinclair’s house.
When Paul left with Lucy, I rolled under the curtain and crawled over to the window and watched his tan Buick pull away from the curb. His car really looked like a big boat. It turned in a U-turn, and I know it was going to Lucy’s house, because Paul slept there almost every night. Glinda wasn’t there; otherwise I wouldn’t have felt comfortable crawling in her bedroom over to her window to look out on High Street in the dark. You barely had to sit up to see out of those windows. They were so old, and the glass so thick and heavy. On Glinda’s vanity there were tiny bottles and brushes and golden mirrors. She slept on a futon, not a bed. There were posters of Sting and the Police on the wall. The Police, it turned out, were more new wave than punk, but I had the impression she didn’t care. Things in her area were pretty frilly compared to the rest of the upstairs, and I didn’t know about the downstairs; I’d never been in that part of the house yet,except for the hallway.
“Where did Jane go?”
And there were other things said, you know, the way a party sounds when you’re in the other room. Gay once told me that she and Glinda used to go upstairs, to right here where we are now, and giggle at the sound of multiple conversations going at once, down the stairs, in the Victorian dining room, parties held by the Professor of Library Science.
Gay pulled back Glinda’s curtain, and her boyish shadow appeared.
“You’re watchin’ Paul go, huh,” she whispered. And it was dark in there, so I couldn’t see her wink. But I’m sure she did.
NINE
. Except for the nights—when Paul slept on the double mattress on the floor of Lucy’s room—Lucy and I could have been married. We were inseparable. On the nights Paul slept there, he would sometimes sit with his guitar on her mattress, and Lucy and I would gather round him and watch him write songs. He would play a note, then try another note, and he would look at me and ask me if I could hear the harmony. We would play Beatles songs, and he would concentrate very hard and say, “There, did you hear that?”
“Yeah.” I guess I did; I tried to anyway.
“He’s very talented.” Lucy nodded over at me, tilting her head to the side, arms folded around her knees.
Paul would play the same note over and over, listening intently, as if he were looking for a certain sound. Then he’d play a different note. Then he’d play the two notes together, and Lucy would smile and nod. He focused so intently on what he was doing that it allowed me to just focus on him. Since it seemed that’s what Lucy wanted me to do as well, that’s what I did. I sat cross-legged on her bare floor and watched Paul. I didn’t feel comfortable sitting on that mattress with them.
On the nights when he wouldn’t stay there, we drove all around town: either looking for him or on errands, mostly for him. Sometimes we’d be in hot pursuit of him, like we were cops or something. I felt like a detective.
>
“Have you seen Paul?” she’d ask. First we’d stop at Ziggy’s, and he would try to be helpful, he honestly would, even if he was laughing the whole time. Then we’d try Raj, who stood matter-of-fact. He didn’t know. We’d cruise up and down Main Street. We’d try some of his dealers. Adam or Bill’s house, and at Adam’s we’d run into Krishna, who would smile one of her biggest and most amused smiles when she saw Lucy chasing madly like this. Then she would lean over to me and whisper, “Paul’s great, isn’t he?”
One time we ran into Paul, finally, but when we found him, it was so awkward. He was with Glinda. He had parked his car a few blocks away. Gay answered Ziggy’s door, dressed, as usual, like a boy who went to great lengths shopping for the least stylish clothes she could find. She told us Paul wasn’t there, but then Ziggy said, walking up from behind her and turning the corner up the stairs to their separate space, “Is that Lucy and Jane? Send them upstairs.”
Gay looked hesitant, and Lucy yanked open the screen door. We walked upstairs, Gay behind me.
“Glinda,” she yelled from behind me at the top of her lungs, “I got the Bobbsey twins here with me!”
Ziggy had already swung the door wide open and entered. “Real subtle,” he said, turning left into his room and shutting the door behind him. So Lucy was able to see Glinda and Paul sitting on the couch. They sat on opposite ends of the couch, smashed against the sides to move as far away as possible from each other. They faced in opposite directions from each other. Glinda was smoothing her hair with her left hand as she looked to her right, and made a remark to Ziggy that nobody could hear. She never even greeted us. Within a few minutes, she stood and went to her room behind the curtain. So now it was just me, Paul, Lucy, and Gay standing in Ziggy and Glinda’s in-between room. That was okay though, cause that was often how it was over there at Ziggy and Glinda’s. It felt like home to all of us, somehow.
Lucy went right over to Paul and demanded to know where he’d been and what he was planning, and Paul seemed really uncomfortable and asked her if they could go. Lucy left with him and they said nothing on the way out.
“You and Paul.” Gay grinned at me when it was just the two of us left. “You two would make a cute couple.”
TEN
“Oh my God, look at this one!” I grabbed the photo and showed it to Lucy. On the table were spread out all kinds of old photos for sale. And on other tables you could buy weird old memorabilia from the 1960s: cups with pictures of the Beatles on them, Ringo dolls, John Lennon plates, an alarm clock with the Fab Four on it. But all we were interested in were pictures of the young Paul McCartney.
Lucy and I didn’t argue about what it means to be punk, ever. I don’t think she gave a rat’s ass what it meant to be punk. We didn’t argue about the Beatles versus the Stones, and we didn’t even discuss the music very much—although we listened to it—and that day when we drove the hour and a half to Sheboygan to see the Beatlemania display, we listened to them the entire way, both back and forth.
“Oh wow,” she grabbed it. “I’m buying this one.”
They played the film Magical Mystery Tour
, and we watched it eagerly and never even noticed that was one of the worst, piece-of-crap movies ever made.
“That’s unbelievable,” I said. “It’s just like looking at a picture of Paul.”
“I know,” she said. “It’s weird.”
The display was held in a convention room at a Holiday Inn, and the movies were shown in the back area. It was daytime, and the light from the sun streamed in, making the movie that much harder to see. We sat on uncomfortable, metal, fold-out chairs. We were true Beatle maniacs. If we had been teenagers in the 1960’s, we would have been screaming, crying, and fainting at those concerts. But it was 1980, and the Beatles were in their mid-forties, and one of them—my favorite one—was dead.
You’d think by the way I acted that Paul was my favorite, but he wasn’t; it’s just that I was crazy in love with him—that’s all—but that certainly didn’t mean he was my favorite. But he certainly was Lucy’s, and I don’t even know if she liked the Beatles.
We brought a collection of Beatles junk to Ziggy and Glinda’s in-between space and dumped it in the middle of the floor. They all started picking through it. They loved it. Ziggy kept picking up various items, holding them upside down, turning them around in his hand, and laughing at them. He asked us for one item. It was a comic book: Batman. It had a mock article of the Paul death hoax. It wasn’t me that bought it, it was Lucy, and she didn’t seem too ready to give it up.
“Why did you buy this?” Ziggy held it up, smiling, and looking genuinely confused.
“I like Batman.”
“How much did you pay for this?”
“Two dollars.”
“Oh my God!” Ziggy shook his head. “You got so lucky!”
“Did you know what was in here?” Asked Raj.
“Well, no,” said Lucy.
“Since it was at a Beatles convention, and this is Batman, didn’t you wonder?” asked Ziggy.
“Well, no. I just like Batman,” said Lucy.
Ziggy laughed, and started thumbing through it.
“Can you give this to me?”
“No! Why should I?”
“Because you don’t even know why it’s valuable.”
“It’s valuable?”
“Why did you tell her?” Raj asked, standing near the door. He looked ready to leave. He’d been rummaging through a few of the things, had taken and offered money for an item or two, but then changed his mind.
“I don’t believe in tricking people,” Ziggy snapped. “I believe people should be allowed to make decisions on facts.”
“If she’s too stupid to realize something, then tough luck for her.”
“Hey, Raj,” Lucy snarled at him. “I am not stupid.”
“Okay, ignorant.”
“Same thing, and I’m not ignorant.”
“How about I pay you in dope?” Ziggy offered.
“Hmmm,” she said, “How much?”
Ziggy went into his room and brought out a quarter bag, unrolled it in the air, and held it up.
“You didn’t tell us you had that!” Krishna said. “You were holding out on us!”
But she was appeased quickly when he offered to roll a joint. Meanwhile, everyone still rummaged through the junk, finding more treasures here and there. Ziggy also found a missing square puzzle with the Fab Four painted on it, and this really cracked him up too. He told us he’d won something in a box of cracker jacks like this once.
I didn’t usually think of the Ziggy I knew back in the chess club such a long time ago, but at that moment, for some reason I saw the fat, drooling Ziggy from that club. He’d lost all that weight, and he’d grown tall, but he was still that fat, obnoxious kid. And he was obnoxious. Always teasing me, always making fun of the way I played chess, telling me I looked like Gene Simmons of KISS. And when I thought of Ziggy at the chess club, I always thought of Raj, just as fat back then, who always sat beside him, and always mocked me just like Ziggy did.
In walked Gay and Glinda, just seconds after Raj left.
“Oh my God,” Gay shouted, grabbing stuff immediately from the floor, stuffing things down her pants and shirt. Glinda didn’t even look at it. She went directly into her room, closing the big curtain behind her. The entry to her room was wide enough for double doors but had no doors, only that big, thick, maroon curtain that matched nothing. Ziggy’s room had a single door, and he could shut it.
“Gay, can you come in here please?” she called from inside.
“Just a minute,” she said. “I’ve got Paul McCartney stuck in my crotch.” Krishna went in there behind the curtain, and I could barely hear them whispering in there. But whatever it was they were saying, I certainly couldn’t hear it; no matter how hard I concentrated. The joint was smoked down to a roach, and Ziggy grabbed his long, metal roach clip, which I believe was actually some kind of hospital tool.
>
Then I was completely startled by a loud banging on the door.
“Glinda, your psycho is here,” Gay said, but she didn’t stop looking through the stuff.
Ziggy for some reason stuck his tongue out and to the side in an odd way right then to lick the metal roach clip he had just clamped onto the roach. I don’t know why he did this, but then Crystal, who had been silent all this time, chose this moment to snap a photo of all of us. The tiny burst of flash was followed by a zinger sound: Ziggy with his tongue on the roach clip, a new Batman comic on his lap, sitting on the couch over a small mountain of Beatles memorabilia, where Gay sat bent over, her hands in the pile.
The banging on the door was becoming worse. It sounded like he was going to break the door down. It echoed through the house. It made the walls sound hollow. Wooden walls carried sound very well, Paul had told me, and they certainly were now. And the Sinclair’s house was truly wooden, all wood. Not like mine, which was made from plaster and beams. The Victorian house they lived in seemed like a dollhouse. And now it seemed like the house made of sticks in the Three Little Pigs story. Finally Glinda turned the light off in her room and put her face in between the parted curtain.
“Shhh,” she whispered. “I turned out my lights. If you guys will be quiet, he might not know I’m here.”
“Maybe you can just tell him you’re not here,” Gay said. “Uh, I think he might wonder who turned that light off?”
“No,” she whispered, “I don’t think so, because the porch is directly under. He can’t see the window from there.”
That was true. The porch was under the upper floor, as in, the upper floor sat over it like a roof. The porch was inlaid. It had a curved, wood railing that went around it, and it might have looked quite pretty once, but now it was practically falling apart, and I was afraid it was too frail for this psycho boyfriend of Glinda’s who was banging on the door.
“Wouldn’t he have seen it from the street?”
Call me Jane (The Oshkosh Trilogy) Page 4