by T. C. Boyle
“Nice hat,” the man said. He looked to be in his thirties, long hair slicked back close to his scalp and tucked behind his ears, the beard neatly clipped, big hands dangling from his doubled-up sleeves. He was grinning. At least there was that.
“Oh, this?” Raymond’s hand went reflexively to his head. “It’s just…it’s nothing. It used to belong to my girlfriend.”
“Yeah, I guess so, because why would a guy wear a hat like that, right?”
The hat—it was a cheap baseball cap made of plastic mesh—featured a black badge on the crown, and a legend, in a tiny, looping, gold script, that read: You Can Pet My Cat, But Don’t Touch My Pussy. To Dana’s mind, this was the height of subversive humor and she insisted on wearing the thing whenever they went out bar-hopping, which was every night except when they gave up all pretense and got a bottle at Von’s and drank at home in front of the TV. He’d snatched it off her head the night she shoved him out the door with nothing but the clothes on his back, and it served her right, because she had his boombox and his other pair of shoes and his books and bedroll and shaving kit, and by the next afternoon the locks had been changed and every time he went over to demand his things back she just sat there in the window with her knifeblade of a face and waited for one of the neighbors to call the cops.
Raymond was new to all this. He was shy, lonely, angry. It had been something like five or six days now, and during that time he’d kept away from the street people, bedding down wherever he could (but not on the sidewalk, that was crazy, and he still didn’t know how that happened), eating when he felt like it and steadily drinking up what was left of his last and final paycheck. He ducked his head. “Right,” he murmured.
The man introduced himself through his shining wet-toothed grin, because he was just there to get a little drink of fresh H2O himself, and then he was thinking about maybe going into the convenience store on the corner and picking up a nice twelve-pack of Keystone and maybe sitting down by the beach and watching the A-types jog by with their dogs and their two-hundred-dollar running shoes. His name was Schuyler, Rudolph Schuyler, though everybody called him Sky for short, and his dog was Pal.
The light was like a scimitar, cutting the alley in two. Raymond didn’t think he’d ever seen a line so sharp, a shadow so deep, and that was a kind of revelation, a paean to what man had built—a rectilinear gas station and a neatly proportionate fence topped with a spray of pink-tinged trumpet flowers—and how God had come to light it like a photographer setting up the trickiest shot of his life. And there was a shot just as tricky played out over and over throughout the city, the country, the world even. He patted down his pockets, felt something there still, a few bucks, anyway. When he looked up at Sky, when he finally looked him in the eye, he heard his own voice crawling out of his throat as if there were somebody else in there speaking for him. “Am I hearing you right, or is that an invitation?”
AFTER THE FIRST twelve-pack, there was another—Raymond’s treat—because the great and wise and all-knowing people who brewed the beer in their big vats and sealed it in the shining aluminum cans that were like little pills, little individual doses delivered up in the convenient twelve-ounce format, had foreseen the need and stocked the shelves to overflowing. “You know,” Raymond said, easing back the flip-top on a fresh can, “I read in the paper a couple years ago about that time the mudslides put Big Sur out of business, I mean going both ways on Highway 1—did you hear about that? They had no beer, I mean—they ran out. You remember that?”
Sky was leaning back against one of the polished boulders the city had dumped along the beach as a seawall, both jackets spread out beneath him, his bare chest and arms exposed to the sun. He was tanned right down to the roots of his hair, tanned like a tennis pro or maybe a diving instructor, somebody vigorous and clean making a clean living under the sun. Out here, on the beach, he didn’t look like a bum—or at least not one of the mental cases you saw on the streets, immured in the walking dungeon of their own stink. “Yeah,” he said. “Maybe. I mean, I don’t know—no beer?” He laughed. “How’d they survive?”
Raymond shrugged. He was looking out to sea, out to where the shimmer of the waves met the horizon in an explosion of light as if diamonds were being ground up in a thin band that stretched laterally as far as you could see. “They’re all rich people up there. I guess they just dug the single-malt scotch and green Chartreuse out of their liquor cabinets and forgot about it. Or their wine cellars, or whatever. But the trucks couldn’t get through, so there was no beer, no potato chips, no Slim Jims.”
“What, no Pampers and underarm deodorant? What’s a young mother to do?”
“No Kotex,” Raymond said, tipping back his beer and reaching for another one. The cans were getting warm, though he’d stowed them in the shade, in a crevice between two boulders the size of Volkswagens, but he didn’t mind: warm was better than nothing. He was enjoying himself. “No condoms. No Preparation-H.”
“Yeah,” Sky said, “but let me tell you, those people suck up there. Big-time. And I know from experience, because if you haven’t got a motel key on you to show the cops—right there, show me a motel key, motherfucker—they put you in the car and drive you out to the city limits, period, no arguments. As if this wasn’t America or something.”
Raymond had nothing to say to that. He understood where the city fathers were coming from: who wanted an army of bums camped out on the streets? It turned off the tourists, and the tourists were what made a place like Big Sur click in the first place. Or this town. This town right here.
“So how long?” Sky asked, turning to him with eyes drawn down to slits against the sun.
Raymond took a pull at the fresh beer in his hands and felt warm all over, felt good, felt superior. “I don’t know, a couple days. A week maybe. I had a place but my girlfriend—she’s a bitch, a real queen bitch—kicked me out.”
A rope of muscle flashed across Sky’s shoulders as he reached for another beer and felt for the pop-top. “No,” he said, “I mean how long were the roads closed down, like a week, two weeks, what?”
“Months. Months at least.”
“Wow. Picture that. But if you had beer and jug wine—and maybe a little stash of canned food, Dinty Moore and the like, it must have been like paradise, if not for the cops, I mean. But even the cops. What are they going to do, kick you out of a place that’s already closed off? Kick you out of nowhere? Like, I’m sorry, officer, I’d really like to accommodate you here, but where the fuck you expect me to go, huh, motherfucker? Like, suck on this.”
Raymond took a moment to think about that, about the kind of paradise that must have been, or might have been—or could have been under the right conditions—and then, unaccountably, he found himself staring into the glazed brown eyes of a German shepherd with a foam-flecked muzzle and a red bandanna looped round its neck. One minute there’d been nothing there but the open vista of the sea, and now here was this big panting animal crowding his frame of reference and looking at him as if it expected him to get down on all fours and chase it round the beach. “Nice dog,” Raymond said, giving the broad triangular head a pat. The dog panted, stray grains of sand glistening along the black seam of its lips. Pal, curled up at Sky’s feet, never even so much as twitched a muscle. In the next moment two girls in tube tops and shorts jogged by on the compacted sand at the foot of the waves, beautiful girls with their hair and everything else bouncing in the shattered light, and they shouted for the dog and Raymond eased back and popped another beer, wondering why anybody would want to go to work nine-to-five and live in an apartment you had to kill yourself just to make the rent on when you could just kick back, like this, and let the dogs and the women present themselves to you as if you were a potentate on his throne.
THE NEXT THING HE KNEW, the sun was going down. It balanced there on the flat cobalt palm of the ocean, trembling like the flame of a gas stove, till the water took hold of it and spread it across the surface in even, rippling stroke
s. The palms turned pink overhead. Birds—or were they bats?—hurled themselves from one shadow to another. Raymond was drunk, deeply, blissfully drunk, the original pair of twelve-packs transubstantiated into short-necked pints of wine, then into liters of Black Cat and finally wine again, out of the gallon jug. Somewhere along the line there had been food—Stagg chili, cold, straight from the can—and there was an interlude during which he sat by the fountain at the foot of the pier while Pal, tricked out in a little blue crepe doll’s dress Sky had dug out of the bottom of a Dumpster, danced and did backflips for the tourists. Now there was the beach, the deep-anchored palm against which he was resting his complicit spine, and the sun drowning itself in color.
The jug came to him, fat and heavy as a bowling ball, and he lifted it to his lips and drank, then passed it on to Sky, who lingered over it before passing it to a tall, mad-haired, slit-eyed guy named Dougie—or was it Droogie? Droogie, yeah. That was it. Like in that old movie, the Kubrick one, and why couldn’t he remember the name of it? Not that it mattered. Not really. Not anymore. All that—movies, books, the knowledge you could wield like a hammer—belonged to another world. Things were more immediate here, more elemental, like where you were going to relieve yourself without getting busted and where the next bottle was coming from.
During the afternoon, he’d spent a fruitful hour removing the left sleeve of his jacket, to give the thing proportion—to make it look as if it were a fashion statement instead of a disaster—but now, as the sun faded, he began to feel a chill at his back and wished he’d left it alone. There was still the problem of where he was going to sleep. It was one thing to sit around and pass a bottle in a circle of like-minded souls, the sun on your face and the sea breeze ruffling the hair at the back of your neck, and another thing altogether to wake up on the sidewalk like some terminal-stage loser with Swiss cheese for a brain.
Droogie—or maybe it was Dougie after all—was going on about the Chumash Casino, how he’d hit a thousand-dollar payoff on a slot machine there one night and booked himself into the bridal suite with a lady and a case of champagne and couldn’t find so much as a nickel in his pocket come morning. Another guy—beard, tattoos, one lens gone from his glasses so it looked as if his eye had been staved in—said that was nothing, he’d scored five g’s at Vegas one time, and then Sky cut in with a question for the group, which had grown to six now, including a woman about thirty who kept picking at the dirty yellow dress she wore over her jeans as if she were trying to break it down into its constituent fibers. Sky wanted to know if anybody felt like a nice pepperoni pizza—or maybe one of those thick-crust Hawaiian jobs, with the pineapple and ham?
Nobody said anything. The jug went round. Finally, from the echoing depths of his inner self, Raymond heard a voice saying, “Yeah, sure. I could go for it.”
“All right, my man,” Sky said, rising up from the cradle of his tree, “you are elected.”
It was all coming from very far off. Raymond didn’t know what was required, didn’t have a clue.
“Come on, man, let’s hump it. I said pizza. Didn’t you hear me? Pizza!”
Then they were making their way through the deep sand above tide line and into the parking lot with its shrouded cars and drifting trash, Pal clicking along behind them. The last pay phone in the world stood at the far end of the lot. Sky dropped two coins into it and gave him his instructions: “Be forceful, be a man who knows what he wants, with his feet up on the padded stool in his condo—and don’t slur. They’ll want a call-back number, but they never call back. Make one up. Or your girlfriend. Use your girlfriend’s number.”
Later, much later, when the fog had settled in like an amphibious skin stretched over everything and the driftwood fire had burned down to coals, Sky pushed himself up from the sand and stretched his arms out in front of him. “Well,” he said, “how about that pizza?” Raymond blinked up at him. The others had wandered off separately, ghosts dissolving in the mist, all except for the woman. At one point, Dougie had bent over her and tugged at her arm as if he were trying to tear a fistful of weeds up out of the ground, but she wasn’t giving an inch and they’d hissed at each other for what seemed like a week before Sky said, “Why don’t you just give it up already,” and Dougie stalked off into the mist. She was sitting beside Raymond now, her lips wet on the neck of the bottle, nothing but dregs and saliva left at this point. “I don’t know if I could eat,” she said.
“Everybody’s got to eat, right, Ray? Am I right?”
Raymond didn’t have an opinion. He wanted to go get another bottle before the stores closed, but his money was gone.
“I don’t know,” the woman said doubtfully.
But Sky roused them, and a moment later they were all three stumbling through the sand to the sidewalk and along the sidewalk to the boulevard, Pal leading the way with his tail thrust up like a banner. It was unnaturally quiet, everything held fast in the grip of the fog. Cars drifted silently by as if towed on a wire, one pulled along after the other, their headlights barely visible. There was a faint music playing somewhere, saxophone and drums, and it came to them in snatches as they walked in the deep shadow of a bank of condos thrown up for the convenience of the tourists. Raymond didn’t know what he was doing or where he was going, and he didn’t care, because Sky was there and Sky was in command. His feet hit the pavement and he tried to keep from lurching into the shrubs that bristled along the high stucco walls of the condos. At one point the woman bumped up against him and he put his arm out to steady her, and in that moment of casual intimacy, he mumbled something along the lines of, “You know, I don’t even know what to call you.”
“Her name’s Knitsy,” Sky said over his shoulder. “Because her fingers are always knitting in the air—isn’t that right, Knitsy? I mean, knitting nothing, right?”
Her voice was breathy and shallow, with a sharp rural twang to it. “Sure,” she said, “that’s right.”
“And what’s that rhyme with—ditzy, right?”
“Sure, whatever.”
Raymond wanted to ask her about that, make a joke, but it would have been a cruel joke, and so he kept it to himself. Knitsy. Let her knit, and let the guy with the broken glasses stare out at the world like an ambassador with a pince-nez and let Sky lord it over everybody. What difference did it make? The world was nothing but cruelty and stupidity anyway. And he himself? He was drunk, very drunk. Too drunk to keep walking and too drunk to lie down.
They were away from the beach now, trailing down the alley behind Giulio’s Pizza Kitchen and the One-Stop Travel Shop. Sky motioned for silence, and they hung back in the shadows, whispering—hide-and-seek, that’s what it was, hide-and-seek—while Pal trotted across the pavement to reconnoiter the Dumpster. Reeling, watching the spots swell and explode before his eyes, Raymond felt Knitsy’s cold rough hand snake out and take hold of his own. His heart was thrumming. The fog sifted through the alley, etherized and unreal. Lit by the dull yellow glow of the streetlight on the corner, the dog might have been onstage somewhere, on TV, in a video, going through the repertoire of his tricks, and they watched as he sniffed and squirmed, prancing back and forth, till he finally went up on his hind legs and began to paw at the belly of the Dumpster. And then Sky was there, lifting the metal lid and retrieving the two large pies, still snug in their boxes, one decorated with pepperoni, the other with pineapple and ham.
IN THE MORNING—the morning, that was the hurtful time—Raymond woke to a shifting light, the peeling tan upthrust trunks of a grove of eucalyptus, and the sky revealed in a frame of leaves. He was on his back, something underneath him—a plastic tarp—and a blanket, heavy with dew, thrown over the cage of his chest. Beside him, snoring lightly and twitching in her sleep, was a woman with dirty fanned-out blondish hair and the deep indigo tattoo of a scorpion crawling up her neck. But that was no surprise—nothing was a surprise, unless it was the sidewalk, and this wasn’t the sidewalk. This was—he lifted his head to take in the half-collapsed tee
pee fashioned of blue tarps backed up against a chain-link fence, the scrub at his feet, the trash scattered over the leaf litter and the pregnant rise of the mound giving onto the railroad tracks—this was the woods. He saw Pal then, Pal poking his whiskered head out of the teepee to give him an unfathomable look, and beyond Pal, Sky’s red Mongoose mountain bike, for which—and it was all coming back to him now—Sky had paid nearly a third of his monthly SSI disability check. So this was Knitsy, then, and that was Sky inside the collapsing teepee. Or wigwam. Call it a wigwam. Better sound to it.
His head slipped back to the tarp. He tried to close his eyes, to fight down the stirring in his lower abdomen that was like the first stab of stomach distress—what his mother used to call the runs—but the thirst wouldn’t let him. It was there again, powerful, imperious, parching him all the way from his throat up into the recesses of his skull. I’ve got to get out of here, he was thinking, got to get up and out of here, find money, find work, a toilet, a tap, four walls to hide myself in. But he couldn’t move. Not yet.
That first night, the night she locked the door on him, they’d been drinking bourbon with beer chasers, and all his muscles were sapped—or his bones, his bones seemed to have melted away so that all he wanted to do was seek the lowest point, like water—and the best he could do was hammer on the door and shout the sort of incoherent things you shout at times like that until the police came and she told them she paid the rent around here and she didn’t know him anymore and didn’t want to. He wound up sleeping in the back of the building, under the oleanders against the fence, which made his face and hands break out in shining welts that were like fresh burns. He was planning on using his key after she left for work, but she didn’t leave for work, just sat there in the window drinking bourbon and waiting for the locksmith. That night he pounded on the door again, but he melted away when he saw the police cruiser coming up the street, and after that, he gave it up. First month, last month, security: where was he going to get that? He tried calling his brother collect in Tampa but his brother wouldn’t take the call. The bars were open though, and the corner stores with the Coors signs flashing in the windows. He got loaded, got hammered, wound up on the sidewalk. Now he was here.