by Craig Grant
One of the funniest things on the trip was the sight of Rockstar doing a punk dance to “Waltzing Matilda” with Suzie in Hitler’s pub.
Then Dana asked Pete to dance, which upset me just a tad, and Jenkins took off somewhere, which left me and Patrick at this table alone with the freak. It was Patrick who asked him, in a real polite way, if he was a black albino.
The guy didn’t speak much English but Patrick knew a little German, and the story that came out is that this guy was born in a Nazi laboratory. Patrick told me this on our way back to camp. Pete had put buckets behind a few seats and Suzie was chundering up in one of them across the aisle from us.
Patrick had his new hat on and his cheeks were a rosy red. “He seemed to think,” Patrick said, “that he was the world’s first test-tube baby. Apparently the Nazis took the sperm from a black American soldier and the ovum from a Polish princess, mixed the two together in a stein and nine months later, presto, one Siggy Bortnik was born.”
Patrick had managed to drink six steins, just like me and Rockstar had (and what we got for it was this dinky little two-bit cap pin in the shape of a beer stein), and he thought what he said was real funny. Rockstar was sitting next to Suzie, yakking at her while he helped her keep her hair out of the bucket, and when he heard Patrick laughing, he said, “Hey, poofter, where’d you get the hat?”
Patrick ignored him.
“Hey, Muckle. What do you think of Patrick’s hat?” “Makes him look like a regular Dr. Livingstone,” I said. Patrick snorted. “Regular. I only wish.”
“Dr. Livingstone, huh?” said Rockstar. He’d been going on and on to Suzie about Charlie Putrid, about how Chuck gave him his Polaroid camera for his birthday and it was the first birthday present he ever got. “Dr. Livingstone, I presume!”
“When I asked him if he knew what happened to his parents,” Patrick said, looking right at Rockstar, making goggle-eyes at him above Suzie’s head but talking to me, “he said they were both melted down and made into lampshades. He said he has two of them in his bedroom.”
“A sentimental kind of guy, huh?” I said.
He said, “Indeed, Mr. McPherson. Very sentimental. And, perhaps, a bit of a prevaricator.”
Then we’re back in camp, and I’m watching Patrick saunter towards his tent. He’s walking just a little too close to Suzie. Real close. Even though they hadn’t been within ten feet of each other all night. I thought maybe it was because he was worried she might fall down.
And I’m watching Pete walk towards his tent with one arm draped over Dana’s shoulder. This is what happens when you don’t make your move quick. You’re damned if you do, damned if you don’t, and damned if you doesy-do, as the old man used to say. The square dance of life, he called it.
I’m in my sleeping bag, full of beer and full of regrets and almost asleep, when Rockstar says, “Muckle?”
“What is it, Rockstar?”
“What’cha think of Suzie?”
“Okay,” I said. If you like chubby little hedgehogs with big mouths, I almost said. “Why?”
“Just wonderin’,” he whispers, and then, in a soft quiet voice, he says goodnight, Muckle. Like he was almost human. Like he was in love or something. With Suzie, I mean.
Good thing Rockstar didn’t know what was going down, right about then.
Dana had gotten a little loaded and ended up seducing Pete, that was obvious, and so Patrick and Suzie had the tent to themselves and Suzie basically is one of these women who gets horny when she’s hammered and so she took advantage of Patrick, just like she did me, and I’ll explain how I know that when I get to Athens.
But what I was saying about women. They’ve got us wrapped around their little fingers. Just like Soon. She comes in every morning and she’s always so friendly and real concerned. Always got a smile on her face. She’s got this cute little turned-up nose and these black eyes that seem to twinkle with stars. These white perfect teeth and pink thin lips that I know would fit mine perfect.
This whole business between the sexes, what it comes down to is lip size. What it comes down to is the kiss.
First thing I think about every morning is kissing Soon.
Maybe this is fate. Maybe everything that’s happened to me is so I would end up here and meet Soon.
Helluva price to pay, though, my only right hand.
I could live on Ko Samui forever, if I could live with her.
But that’s my major problem. I fall in love too easily. I never learn. Because there hasn’t been once that I’ve fallen in love that I haven’t fallen into a lot of deep shit at the exact same time.
from Kelly’s diary
Oct. 15
It was maybe C’s cast that finally got us the ride to Cannes.
2 good-looking Spanish guys who asked us if they could buy us a glass of wine. The 1 guy had beautiful hazel eyes. C. said no. The beaches were tempting, & we did catch a couple of hrs. of sun, but the train, old & crowded with tourists, left at 3, & we took it as far as Verona, where suddenly the conductor came through & told us all to get off, the engineers had gone on strike. So we had a candlelight sandwich near Juliet’s tomb with a girl from Sweden who told us to be careful in Italy, the Red Brigade was running wild. Tonight we’re splurging on a pension, clean, not a roach in sight.
Mick
I woke up with a six-banger hangover the morning after our little visit to Hitler’s pub, and I thought about pancakes. The old man used to say beer pancakes were the best hair of the dog you could take for a six-banger hangover. So I say to myself, Mickers, you’re going to do yourself and a few other people a favour this morning.
Pete had bought about ten cases of Heineken in Munich and he’d stowed them in the undercarriage where it was cool.
When I’d seen him stowing the cases, I asked him if he was thirsty, and he said nope, they were just emergency supplies, that’s all.
Well, this was an emergency as far as I was concerned. So I heisted a few of his Heineken when he wasn’t looking. When he was over talking to Dana, getting all cow-eyed.
My old man used to make a great beer pancake. Every Sunday we had his beer pancakes for breakfast. He claimed he used the stale, leftover beers from Saturday night parties to make them, but he told us not to worry, he’d already strained all the cig butts and ashes from the beer.
But I guess I don’t have his skill with a skillet because my pancakes didn’t come out too well at all.
Teach put one forkful in her mouth and did her best to spit it into a hanky in a way that no one would notice.
That hurt my feelings.
As for Teach, well, I guess it was kind of an omen for the kind of day she was going to have.
“What did you put in the pancakes?” she said, when she saw that I’d seen her.
I shrugged. “Just a little beer,” I said.
She stared at me with her basic look of disbelief, and then got up from the table and stalked off to the ladies’ loo.
After breakfast Pete came up to me and said, “Another meal like that, mate, and you’re going to be on dishwashing duty for the rest of the trip.”
And he threw me onto dishwashing duty with Tim deLuca. It was supposed to be Dana’s turn.
“Quite the pancakes,” Tim said to me after we’d washed five or six plates without saying anything to each other. I was steamed at Pete and so I wasn’t feeling too friendly.
“Could’ve used a bit more beer,” I said.
Tim screwed up his bearded, beetle-like face—Patrick said once he had a face like Peter Lorre’s—and handed me a kitchen knife. “Or a little less beer,” he said.
Tim and Teach were people who didn’t have any bad habits, or at least they thought so, though of course they did have one bad habit which was putting down other people’s bad habits.
“Nope, not enough beer, I think,” I said.
End of conversation.
Our first loo-stop for the day was the Olympic ski slopes, where Rockstar went a little nu
ts. He grabbed this baby goat that was wandering around lost on the slopes and pretended to hump it. Teach got real upset. She didn’t see that Rockstar was just trying to be funny. She went up to him and told him to leave the little goat alone, and he said, “What’s the matter, Teach? Ya jealous?”
Teach didn’t know what to say, she just stood there flabbergasted. Then she ran off to the bus, where Tim deLuca was, reading some book, I think.
Tim deLuca didn’t even get off the bus to see half the things we stopped to see. He had this thick book of Buddhist prayer he was always reading.
A few minutes later, Pete gave the horn a honk and when I got on the bus I could see Teach was crying.
I felt a little sorry for her. I liked Teach a lot, though I don’t think she ever picked up on it. I guess it’s because she reminded me of my old lady. The old lady was always getting her knickers in a twist over nothing. Usually some pizza joint waitress the old man was having coffee with a bit too often.
Our second loo-stop was this castle with a mouthful for a name. Neuschwanstein, I think is the way it’s spelt. Pete told us it’s the castle that gave Disney the idea for Disneyland, and come to think of it, it looked a lot like that castle in Sleeping Beauty, which is maybe the third movie the old man ever took me and Hasheeba to. The first was a Tarzan movie.
This was a great looking castle. Way up high on a tall hill, surrounded by trees. All kinds of great turrets against clear blue sky.
Pete told us that the king who built the thing, King Ludwig II, was rich and more than a little wigged out. He heard weird voices in his head, said Pete, and one day the voices told him to go jump in the lake, and so he did.
Yeah, I guess there’s no getting around it. I guess I’m going to have to do it and this is as good a time as any to talk about Dave. That little voice I hear from behind my left ear. The little voice that tells me how to spell words like Neuschwanstein.
I’ve always had blackouts, as far back as I can remember. I think they might’ve started way back when I was three and the old man took off for the first time. He was gone for a year. He claimed it was because my old lady was crazy just because she was still breast-feeding me when I was three going on four. But the old lady claimed he’d shacked up with some waitress in Moose Jaw.
When he came back, the pots and pans flew for a while and a cast iron frying pan hit me in the head. When I came to, I was five going on six. After that I had maybe two or three blackouts a year. Some of them lasting six months. But the thing was, I kept going to school and my grades got better.
After a while, when my questions about what was going on got to be too much, my mother took me to a psychiatrist but he couldn’t find anything wrong. He said it was probably just a neurological dysfunction in some synapses and there wasn’t anything he could do about it.
I didn’t start hearing Dave’s voice until after the old man was killed. That was when I was eighteen.
I was with the old man when he got blown away at The Olde Salvador Deli. For a while I managed to blot it out, but then one day it came back to me and now it’s as clear to me as those palm trees outside the window. I’ll never forget his head just kind of disappearing in this huge shower of blood and the noise that didn’t seem to stop or the guys that did it. They were wearing stocking masks. One of them looked at me and said, “Have a Happy Father’s Day, kid.” And then the stock of a shotgun was coming straight for my eyes. And then I was swallowed up by a black hole and the next thing I know I’m waking up in a hospital but I can’t speak, and there’s this weird voice somewhere and it’s saying to me, come on, now, that’s it, you can do it, and I say I don’t know what happened, and the voice says I got whacked on the head. It said I went into some kind of shock, I was unconscious for a couple days. But now I’ve got to snap out of it, if I don’t, I’ll die, they’ll cut off my life support. So try opening your eyes, said the voice. When I opened my eyes it was dark, so I said who is it, who’s talking, and the voice said, well, it’s kind of complicated, but I’m your brother. My brother? I said. Yeah, he said. Your twin brother. The one our mother would’ve called Dave, if you hadn’t hogged all the food for yourself back there in the womb sweet womb. In the background there was some nice little cocktail-lounge piano playing “Stardust” and the next thing I know Hasheeba’s face floats into view and she’s saying oh, thank God, and then my mother’s face is there and then there’s nurses and doctors, and that was kind of a good feeling, to see how everyone was so happy that I’d decided to come back from the living dead.
I didn’t hear from Dave again for a while and I pretty much forgot about it, passed it off as a dream, until about a year later. I was trucking down the Pacific Coast Highway with Rice-Eater in the staff car, as we called it, that old black Buick which was the only thing the old man left behind, besides nine dozen beer bottles and fifty thousand dollars in gambling debts.
The old man was always betting on the Red Sox. They can’t lose forever, he’d always say.
Me and Rice-Eater were heading for Portland for a Who concert. I guess we were drinking tequila and smoking reefer and I guess I didn’t do a good job judging this one hairpin curve. A real Dead Man’s Curve.
I went through the front windshield and Rice-Eater went through the back. This time I almost died. I was in a hospital for four months, and what snapped me out of the coma I was in was a voice saying, wake up, Mickers, time for school, but it wasn’t my mother’s voice, it was the other voice, and that phony schmaltz-bar piano’s still playing. We’ll give it another shot a little bit later, says the voice. And then I get sucked into this big black pool of oil and I swirl around in there for I don’t know how long and when I come out of it, Dave tells me to try opening my eyes one more time. I do it, and this time I can hear things. I can hear Hasheeba reading something to me. The Catcher in the Rye, is what it was. Read the fart scene, I manage to say to her, and suddenly her face is looming over mine and after she gets her tears dried and everything under control, she tells me she loves me, and I say that I love her too and that everything’s cool.
To make a short story even shorter, I eventually get out of the hospital, about a week before Rice-Eater does, and one afternoon while the old lady’s watching “The Edge of Night” I ask her if she had any name in mind for my dead twin brother. She looks at me, as if to say, what’s it to you? I say, was it Dave by any chance? Which sort of surprises her. David, she says. How’d you know? I never told a soul about that, she says, not even your father. Just a lucky guess, I tell her, and then I am-scray, because Dave made me promise not to tell anybody about him. Otherwise we’d both end up in the
loony bin, he said.
And I never have. Up until this trip, I mean.9
Getting back to Ludwig’s castle. I ring up Dave on the telephone. That’s how he likes to talk to me. It’s a black pay telephone on some kind of wharf. Green waves in the distance and a ship or two. A little breeze blowing. And me, wearing a Bogey hat, to complete the scene. It’s how Dave first used to talk to me, in dreams. He’d ring me up and tell me things like how the old man’s ghost used to float around near me, watching what I was up to. Until he got so disgusted with my lifestyle, all the drugs and all the time I spent whacking off, that he took off to hang around an old girl friend he knew when he was going to high school in Boston.
Anyway, back to Ludwig’s castle. I ask Dave not to ever tell me to go jump in a lake and he says to me, I promise you I’ll never tell you to go jump in a lake. Unless, of course, you need a shower.
Which might’ve been a hint. I hadn’t had a shower since that Frosty Freeze in Bruges.
I told him I was real glad to hear that and then I hung up because I had to save my breath for walking.
Dave rang me up just a moment ago. He said he was glad to see I finally spilled the beans about him, and while I’m at it, I might as well mention that he’s helping me write this thing. I said how’s that? He said there’s no way I’d have the energy to write a book, with all
the germs I’ve got floating around in my body. Or with my lousy memory.
He’s probably got a point there.
And he says I better hope he doesn’t get an urge to go to Singapore because he can leave my body any time he wants to, he says, by jumping on a sneeze molecule and hitching a ride on the Ko Samui breeze.
I tell him to do me a favour and go ahead, and then I sneeze.
There’s this little silence but I can still hear a buzz on the line.
Then he says, maybe when the book’s finished.
Fine, Dave.
I gotta get back to the castle.
It was a mighty steep climb up to Ludwig’s castle. I was tempted to jump onto the back of one of these carts that old Clydesdale horses were hauling to the top, usually with a couple old ladies or an old couple on board. But they looked tired enough as it was.
I was walking up with Jenkins. Forget what we were talking about. Dave says it was about horses. How Jenkins had this favourite horse called Ginger, back home on the ranch. A Schmidecker horse. Good German breed, said Jenkins, and I got the feeling he was kind of apologizing for something. Dave says it’s because he was German on his mother’s side.
Jenkins said he loved that horse and he wished it hadn’t grown old. He hoped it would be a mild winter this year in Montana because if it was a tough winter the horse probably wouldn’t make it. He said his dad wanted to ship him to the glue factory in August but Jenkins wouldn’t let him.
“Dad doesn’t want to have to haul his body in off the pasture with a tractor,” said Jenkins. “But I don’t see what’s wrong with letting his bones lie out there. It’d be a way of remembering him.”
“I think that’s how I’d feel about it too, Jenkins,” I said.
When we got to the top we had to wait for the tour group that was in the casde to come out. And Rockstar takes his SX-70 out of its leather case, opens it up and points it at Dana, who was looking pretty nifty that day, probably for Pete’s benefit. Yellow T-shirt. Denim cut-offs cut just a bit too high. She ignores him. Rockstar plays with the focus and then he swings the camera over in Suzie’s direction. She’s standing right behind Dana. Presses a litde red button. Thing goes snap, whir and a picture slides out.