T. C. Boyle Stories

by T. C. Boyle

  It was sometime during our third or fourth round that the burlier of the two Teamster types erupted from his barstool with the words Communist and faggot on his lips and flattened Jack, Ricky and me beneath a windmill of punches, kicks and elbow chops. We went down in a marijuana-weakened puddle, laughing like madmen, not even attempting to resist as the other Teamster, the bartender and even the waitress joined in. Half a purple-bruised minute later the three of us were out on the icy street in a jumble of limbs and my hand accidentally wandered to Ricky Keen’s hard little half-formed breast and for the first time I wondered what was going to become of me, and, more immediately, where I was going to spend the night.

  But Jack, heroically Beat and muttering under his breath about squares and philistines, anticipated me. Staggering to his feet and reaching down a Tokay-cradling spontaneous-prose-generating railroad-callused hand first to Ricky and then to me, he said, “Fellow seekers and punching bags, the road to Enlightenment is a rocky one, but tonight, tonight you sleep with big Jack Kerouac.”

  I woke the next afternoon on the sofa in the living room of the pad Jack shared with his Mémère. The sofa was grueling terrain, pocked and scoured by random dips and high hard draft-buffeted plateaus, but my stringy impervious seventeen-year-old form had become one with it in a way that approached bliss. It was, after all, a sofa, and not the cramped front seat of an A & P produce truck or road-hopping Dodge, and it had the rugged book-thumbing late-night-crashing bongo-thumping joint-rolling aura of Jack to recommend and sanctify it. So what if my head was big as a weather balloon and the rest of me felt like so many pounds and ounces of beef jerky? So what if I was nauseated from cheap wine and tea and Benzedrine and my tongue was stuck like Velcro to the roof of my mouth and Ricky Keen was snoring on the floor instead of sharing the sofa with me? So what if Bing Crosby and Mario Lanza were blaring square Christmas carols from the radio in the kitchen and Jack’s big hunkering soul of a mother maneuvered her shouldery bulk into the room every five seconds to give me a look of radiant hatred and motherly impatience? So what? I was at Jack’s. Nirvana attained.

  When finally I threw back the odd fuzzy Canuck-knitted detergent-smelling fully Beat afghan some kind soul—Jack?—had draped over me in the dim hours of the early morning, I became aware that Ricky and I were not alone in the room. A stranger was fixed like a totem pole in the armchair across from me, a skinny rangy long-nosed Brahmin-looking character with a hundred-mile stare and a dull brown Beat suit that might have come off the back of an insurance salesman from Hartford, Connecticut. He barely breathed, squinting glassy-eyed into some dark unfathomable vision like a man trying to see his way to the end of a tunnel, as lizardlike a human as I’d ever seen. And who could this be, I wondered, perched here rigid-backed in Jack’s gone Beat pad on the day before Christmas and communing with a whole other reality? Ricky Keen snored lightly from her nest on the floor. I studied the man in the chair like he was a science project or something, until all at once it hit me: this was none other than Bill himself, the marksman, freighted all the way across the Beat heaving blue-cold Atlantic from Tangier to wish Jack and his Beat Madonna a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year!

  “Bill!” I cried, leaping up from the sofa to pump his dead wooden hand, “this is … I mean, I can’t tell you what an honor,” and I went on in that gone worshipful vein for what must have been ten minutes, some vestige of the Benzedrine come up on me suddenly, and Ricky Keen snapped open her pure golden eyes like two pats of butter melting into a pile of pancakes and I knew I was hungry and transported and headachy and Bill never blinked an eye or uttered a word.

  “Who’s that?” Ricky Keen breathed in her scratchy cracked throat-cancery rasp that I’d begun to find incredibly sexy.

  “’Who’s that?’” I echoed in disbelief. “Why, it’s Bill.”

  Ricky Keen stretched, yawned, readjusted her beret. “Who’s Bill?”

  “You mean you don’t know who Bill is?” I yelped, and all the while Bill sat there like a corpse, his irises drying out and his lips clamped tight round the little nugget of his mouth.

  Ricky Keen ignored the question. “Did we eat anything last night?” she rasped. “I’m so hungry I could puke.”

  At that moment I became aware of a sharp gland-stimulating gone wild smell wafting in from the kitchen on the very same Beat airwaves that carried the corny vocalizations of Bing and Mario: somebody was making flapjacks!

  Despite our deep soul brother- and sisterhood with Jack and his Mémère, Ricky and I were nonetheless a little sketchy about just bursting into the kitchen and ingratiating our way into a plate of those flapjacks, so we paused to knock on the hinge-swinging slab of the kitchen door. There was no response. We heard Mario Lanza, the sizzle of grease in the pan and voices, talking or chanting. One of them seemed to be Jack’s, so we knocked again and boldly pushed open the door.

  If there was a climax to all that had come before, a Beat epiphany and holy epitomized moment, this was it: Jack was there at the kitchen table and his mother at the stove, yes, but there was a third person present, arrived among us like one of the bearded mystics out of the East. And who could it be with that mad calculating bug-eyed big-lipped look of Zen wisdom and froglike beauty? I knew in an instant: it was Allen. Allen himself, the poet laureate of Beatdom, come all the way from Paris for this far-out moment with Jack and his mother in their humble little Beat kitchen on the cold North Shore of Long Island. He was sitting at the table with Jack, spinning a dreidel and singing in a muddy moist sweet-wine-lubricated voice:

  Dreidel, dreidel, dreidel,

  I made it out of clay,

  And when it’s dry and ready,

  Then Dreidel I will play.

  Jack waved Ricky and me into the room and pushed us down into two empty chairs at the kitchen table. “Flipped,” he murmured as the dreidel spun across the tabletop, and he poured us each a water glass of sticky Mogen David blackberry wine and my throat seized at the taste of it. “Drink up, man, it’s Christmas!” Jack shouted, thumping my back to jolt open the tubes.

  That was when Mémère came into the picture. She was steaming about something, really livid, her shoulders all hunched up and her face stamped with red-hot broiling uncontainable rage, but she served the flapjacks and we ate in Beat communion, fork-grabbing, syrup-pouring and butter-smearing while Allen rhapsodized about the inner path and Jack poured wine. In retrospect, I should have been maybe a hair more attuned to Jack’s mother and her moods, but I shoved flapjacks into my face, reveled in Beatdom and ignored the piercing glances and rattling pans. Afterward we left our Beat plates where we dropped them and rushed into the living room to spin some sides and pound on the bongos while Allen danced a disheveled dance and blew into the wooden flute and Bill looked down the long tunnel of himself.

  What can I say? The legends were gathered, we cut up the Benzedrine inhalers and swallowed the little supercharged strips of felt inside, feasted on Miss Green and took a gone Beat hike to the liquor store for more wine and still more. By dark I was able to feel the wings of consciousness lift off my back and my memory of what came next is glorious but hazy. At some point—eight? nine?—I was aroused from my seventeen-year-old apprentice-Beat stupor by the sound of sniffling and choked-back sobs, and found myself looking up at the naked-but-for-a-seaman’s-peacoat form of Ricky Keen. I seemed to be on the floor behind the couch, buried in a litter of doilies, antimacassars and sheets of crumpled newspaper, the lights from the Christmas tree riding up the walls and Ricky Keen standing over me with her bare legs, heaving out chesty sobs and using the ends of her long gone hair to dab at the puddles of her eyes. “What?” I said. “What is it?” She swayed back and forth, rocking on her naked feet, and I couldn’t help admiring her knees and the way her bare young hitchhiking thighs sprouted upward from them to disappear in the folds of the coat.

  “It’s Jack,” she sobbed, the sweet rasp of her voice catching in her throat, and then she was behind the couch and kneeling like a
supplicant over the jean-clad poles of my outstretched legs.

  “Jack?” I repeated stupidly.

  A moment of silence, deep and committed. There were no corny carols seeping from the radio in the kitchen, no wild tooth-baring jazz or Indian sutras roaring from the record player, there was no Allen, no Jack, no Mémère. If I’d been capable of sitting up and thrusting my head over the back of the sofa I would have seen that the room was deserted but for Bill, still locked in his comatose reverie. Ricky Keen sat on my knees. “Jack won’t have me,” she said in a voice so tiny I was hardly aware she was speaking at all. And then, with a pout: “He’s drunk.”

  Jack wouldn’t have her. I mulled fuzzily over this information, making slow drawn-out turtlelike connections while Ricky Keen sat on my knees with her golden eyes and Mary Travers hair, and finally I said to myself, If Jack won’t have her, then who will? I didn’t have a whole lot of experience along these lines—my adventures with the opposite sex had been limited to lingering dumbstruck classroom gazes and the odd double-feature grope—but I was willing to learn. And eager, oh yes.

  “It’s such a drag being a virgin,” she breathed, unbuttoning the coat, and I sat up and took hold of her—clamped my panting perspiring sex-crazed adolescent self to her, actually—and we kissed and throbbed and explored each other’s anatomies in a drifting cloud of Beat bliss and gone holy rapture. I was lying there, much later, tingling with the quiet rush and thrill of it, Ricky breathing softly into the cradle of my right arm, when suddenly the front door flew back and the world’s wildest heppest benny-crazed coast-to-coasting voice lit the room like a brushfire. I sat up. Groped for my pants. Cradled a startled Ricky head.

  “Ho, ho, ho!” the voice boomed, “All you little boysies and girlsies been good? I been checkin’ my list!”

  I popped my head over the couch and there he was, cool and inexplicable. I couldn’t believe my eyes: it was Neal. Neal escaped from San Quentin and dressed in a street-corner-Santa outfit, a bag full of booze, drugs, cigarettes and canned hams slung over his back, his palms hammering invisible bongos in the air. “Come out, come out, wherever you are!” he cried, and broke down in a sea of giggles. “Gonna find out who’s naughty and nice, yes indeed!”

  At that moment Jack burst in from the kitchen, where he and Allen had been taking a little catnap over a jug of wine, and that was when the really wild times began, the back-thumping high-fiving jumping jiving tea-smoking scat-singing Beat revel of the ages. Ricky Keen came to life with a snort, wrapped the jacket round her and stepped out from behind the couch like a Beat princess, I reached for the wine, Jack howled like a dog and even Bill shifted his eyes round his head in a simulacrum of animacy. Neal couldn’t stop talking and drinking and smoking, spinning round the room like a dervish, Allen shouted “Miles Davis!” and the record player came to life, and we were all dancing, even Bill, though he never left his chair.

  That was the crowning moment of my life—I was Beat, finally and absolutely—and I wanted it to go on forever. And it could have, if it wasn’t for Jack’s mother, that square-shouldered fuming old woman in the Christmas dress. She was nowhere to be seen through all of this, and I’d forgotten about her in the crazed explosion of the moment—it wasn’t till Jack began to break down that she materialized again.

  It was around twelve or so. Jack got a little weepy, sang an a capella version of “Hark the Herald Angels Sing” and tried to talk us all into going to the midnight mass at St. Columbanus’ church. Allen said he had no objection, except that he was Jewish, Neal derided the whole thing as the height of corny bourgeois sentimentality, Bill was having trouble moving his lips and Ricky Keen said that she was Unitarian and didn’t know if she could handle it. Jack, tears streaming down his face, turned to me. “Buzz,” he said, and he had this wheedling crazed biggest-thing-in-the-world sort of edge to his voice, “Buzz, you’re a good Catholic, I know you are—what do you say?”

  All eyes focused on me. Silence rang suddenly through the house. I was three sheets to the wind, sloppy drunk, seventeen years old. Jack wanted to go to midnight mass, and it was up to me to say yea or nay. I just stood there, wondering how I was going to break the news to Jack that I was an atheist and that I hated God, Jesus, and my mother, who’d made me go to parochial school five days a week since I’d learned to walk and religious instruction on Sundays to boot. My mouth moved, but nothing came out.

  Jack was trembling. A tic started in over his right eye. He clenched his fists. “Don’t let me down, Buzz!” he roared, and when he started toward me Neal tried to stop him, but Jack flung him away as if he was nothing. “Midnight mass, Buzz, midnight!” he boomed, and he was standing right there in front of me, gone Beat crazy, and I could smell the booze on his stinking Beat breath. He dropped his voice then. “You’ll rot in hell, Buzz,” he hissed, “you’ll rot.” Allen reached for his arm, but Jack shook him off. I took a step back.

  That was when Mémère appeared.

  She swept into the room like something out of a Japanese monster flick, huge in her nightdress, big old Jack-mothery toes sticking out beneath it like sausages, and she went straight to the fireplace and snatched up the poker. “Out!” she screamed, the eyes sunk back in her head, “get out of my house, you queers and convicts and drug addicts, and you”—she turned on me and Ricky—“you so-called fans and adulators, you’re even worse. Go back where you came from and leave my Jacky in peace.” She made as if to swing the poker at me and I reflexively ducked out of the way, but she brought it down across the lamp on the table instead. There was a flash, the lamp exploded, and she drew back and whipped the poker like a lariat over her head. “Out!” she shrieked, and the whole group, even Bill, edged toward the door.

  Jack did nothing to stop her. He gave us his brooding lumberjack Beat posing-on-the-fire-escape look, but there was something else to it, something new, and as I backpedaled out the door and into the grimy raw East Coast night, I saw what it was—the look of a mama’s boy, pouty and spoiled. “Go home to your mothers, all of you,” Mémère yelled, shaking the poker at us as we stood there drop-jawed on the dead brown ice-covered pelt of the lawn. “For god’s sake,” she sobbed, “it’s Christmas!” And then the door slammed shut.

  I was in shock. I looked at Bill, Allen, Neal, and they were as stunned as I was. And poor Ricky—all she had on was Jack’s pea coat and I could see her tiny bare perfect-toed Beat chick feet freezing to the ground like twin ice sculptures. I reached up to adjust my beret and realized it wasn’t there, and it was like I’d had the wind knocked out of me. “Jack!” I cried out suddenly, and my creaking adolescent voice turned it into a forlorn bleat. “Jack!” I cried, “Jack!” but the night closed round us and there was no answer.

  What happened from there is a long story. But to make it short, I took Meniere’s advice and went home to my mother, and by the time I got there Ricky had already missed her period. My mother didn’t like it but the two of us moved into my boyhood room with the lame college pennants and dinosaur posters and whatnot on the walls for about a month, which is all we could stand, and then Ricky took her gone gorgeous Beat Madonna-of-the-streets little body off to an ultra-Beat one-room pad on the other end of town and I got a job as a brakeman on the Southern Pacific and she let me crash with her and that was that. We smoked tea and burned candles and incense and drank jug wine and made it till we damn near rubbed the skin off each other. The first four boys we named Jack, Neal, Allen and Bill, though we never saw any of their namesakes again except Allen, at one of his poetry readings, but he made like he didn’t know us. The first of the girls we named Gabrielle, for Jack’s mother, and after that we seemed to kind of just lose track and name them for the month they were born, regardless of sex, and we wound up with two Junes—June the Male and June the Female—but it was no big thing.

  Yeah, I was Beat, Beater than any of them—or just as Beat, anyway. Looking back on it now, though, I mean after all these years and what with the mortgage payments and Ricky’
s detox and the kids with their college tuition and the way the woodworking shop over the garage burned down and how stinking close-fisted petit-bourgeois before-the-revolution pig-headed cheap the railroad disability is, I wonder now if I’m not so much Beat anymore as just plain beat. But then, I couldn’t even begin to find the words to describe it to you.

  (1993)

  HARD SELL

  So maybe I come on a little strong.

  “Hey, babes,” I say to him (through his interpreter, of course, this guy with a face like a thousand fists), “the beard’s got to go. And that thing on your head too—I mean I can dig it and all; it’s kinda wild, actually—but if you want to play with the big boys, we’ll get you a toup.” I wait right here a minute to let the interpreter finish his jabbering, but there’s no change in the old bird’s face—I might just as well have been talking to my shoes. But what the hey, I figure, he’s paying me a hundred big ones up front, the least I can do is give it a try. “And this jihad shit, can it, will you? I mean that kinda thing might go down over here but on Santa Monica Boulevard, believe me, it’s strictly from hunger.”

  Then the Ayatollah looks at me, one blink of these lizard eyes he’s got, and he says something in his throat-cancer rasp—he’s tired or he needs an enema or something—and the interpreter stands, the fourteen guys against the wall with the Uzis stand, some character out the window starts yodeling the midday prayers, and I stand too. I can feel it, instinctively—I mean, I’m perceptive, you know that, Bob—that’s it for the day. I mean, nothing. Zero. Zilch. And I go out of there shaking my head, all these clowns with the Uzis closing in on me like piranha, and I’m thinking how in christ does this guy expect to upgrade his image when half the country’s in their bathrobe morning, noon, and night?