The next thing I knew we were on the porch, bathed in the dull yellow glow of a superfluous bug light, locked out and freezing; she gave me a ghostly smile, dug through her purse, dropped her keys twice, then her gloves and compact, and finally announced that the house key was missing. In response, I drew her to me and kissed her, my mind skewed by vodka and the joint we’d shared in the car, our breath steaming, heavy winter coats keeping our bodies apart—and then, with a growing sense of urgency, I tried the door. It was locked, all right. But I was feeling heroic and reckless, and I put my shoulder to it—just once, but with real feeling—and the bolt gave and we were in.
Upstairs, at the end of the hallway, was Helen’s superheated lair, a place that looked pretty much the way our mutual place would look, but which was a revelation to me at the time. There was order here, femininity, floors that gave back the light, books and records arranged alphabetically on brick-and-board shelves, prints on the walls, a clean sink and a clean toilet. And there was a smell connected to and interwoven with it all, sweet and astringent at the same time. It might have been patchouli, but I didn’t know what patchouli was or how it was supposed to smell, just that it was exotic, and that was enough for me. There were cats—two of them, Siamese or some close approximation—but you can’t have everything. I was hooked. “Nice place,” I said, working at the buttons of my coat while the cats yowled for food or attention or both, and Helen fluttered around the living room, lighting candles and slipping a record on the stereo.
I didn’t know what to do with myself, so I eased my haunches down on the floor in a pile of pillows—there was no furniture in the usual sense—and shrugged out of my coat. It was hot as a steambath, Helen had left the room through a set of bead curtains that were still clacking, and a beer had magically appeared in my hand. I tried to relax, but the image of what was to come and what was expected of me and how exactly to go about it without ruining everything weighed on me so heavily even the chugging of the beer had no effect. Then Helen returned in a white terrycloth robe, her hair freshly brushed and shining. “So,” she said, settling into the pillows beside me and looking suddenly as vulnerable and uncertain as I, “you want to get high?”
We smoked hash. We listened to music, very loud music—Buffalo Springfield; Blood, Sweat and Tears; the Moody Blues—and that provided an excuse for not saying much of anything beyond the occasional murmur as the pipe was passed or the lighter sprang to life. The touch of her hand as we shared the pipe set me on fire though and the music invested me with every nuance and I thought for a while I was floating about three feet above the floor. I was thinking sex, she was thinking sex, but neither of us made a move.
And then, somehow, Adele was there, compact, full-breasted Adele, with her sheenless eyes and the dark slash of her bangs obliterating her eyebrows. She was wearing a pair of black pantyhose and nothing else, and she settled into the pillows on my left, languidly reaching for the pipe. She didn’t say anything for a long while—none of us did—and I don’t know what she was thinking, so natural and naked and warm, but I was suffering from sensory overload. Two women, I was thinking, and the image of my father and my sad dumpy mother floated up in my brain just as one of the cats climbed into Adele’s lap and settled itself between her breasts.
That was when I felt Helen’s hand take hold of mine. She was standing, and she pulled me to my feet with surprising force, and then she led me through the bead curtains and down a hall and into her bedroom. And the first thing she did, before I could take hold of her and let all the rest unfold, was shut the door—and lock it.
—
And so we moved in together, in the house that started off smelling of freeze-dried mouseshit and wound up taking on the scent of patchouli. I was content. For the first time I was off on my own, independent, an adult, a man. I had a woman. I had a house. Two cats. Heating bills. And I came home to all that pretty religiously for the first month or two, but then, on the nights when I was working and Helen wasn’t, I started staying after closing with Jimmy Brennan and a few of the other employees. The term Quaalude speaks to me now when I think back on it, that very specific term that calls up the image of a little white pill that kicked your legs out from under you and made your voice run down like a wind-up motor in need of rewinding. Especially when you judiciously built your high around it with a selection of high-octane drinks, pot, hash, and anything else you could get your hands on.
There we were, sitting at the bar, the music on full, the lights down low, talking into the night, bullshitting, getting stoned and progressively more stoned, and Helen waiting for me in our little house at the end of the road by the frozen lake. That was the setting for the second wreck—or it wasn’t a wreck in the fundamental, literal sense of the word, because Helen’s VW bus was barely damaged, aside from some unexpected wear and tear on the left front fender and a barely noticeable little twist to the front bumper. It was four or five in the morning, the sky a big black puddle of nothing, three feet of dogshit-strewn snow piled up on either side of the road till it looked like a long snaking bobsled run. The bus fired up with a tinny rattle and I took off, but I was in a state of advanced confusion, I guess, and I went right by the turnoff for our road, the one that led to the little house by the frozen lake, and instead found myself out on the main highway, bouncing back and forth between the snow berms like a poolball that can’t decide on a pocket.
There was something in the urgency of the lights flashing behind me that got me to pull over, and then there was a cop standing there in his jackboots and wide-brimmed hat, shining a flashlight in my face. “Out of the car,” he said, and I complied, or tried to, but I missed my footing and pitched face-forward into the snow. And when I awoke this time, there were no firemen present and no flames, just an ugly pale-gray concrete-block room with graffiti scrawled over it and three or four hopeless-looking jerks sitting around on the floor. I got shakily to my feet, glanced around me and went instinctively to the door, a heavy sliding affair with a little barred window set in the center of it at eye level. My hands took hold of the handle and I gave the door a tug. Nothing. I tried again. Same lack of result. And then I turned round on my companions, these pathetic strangers with death masks for faces and seriously disarranged hair, and said, as if I was in a dream, “Hey, it’s locked.”
That was when one of the men on the floor stirred himself long enough to glance up at me out of blood-flecked eyes and a face that was exactly like a bucket of pus. “What the fuck you think, mother fucker,” he said. “Your ass is in jail.”
—
Then it was spring and the ice receded from the shore of the lake to reveal a black band of dead water, the driveway turned to mud and the ditches along the blacktop road began to ululate with the orgasmic cries of the nondescript little toads known as spring peepers. The heating bill began to recede too, and to celebrate that minor miracle and the rebirth of all things green and good, I took my Alien—Helen, that is—out for dinner at Capelli’s, where all the waiters faked an Italian accent, whether they were Puerto Ricans or Swedes, and you couldn’t pick up a cigarette without one of them rushing over to light it for you. It was dark. It smelled good. Somebody’s grandmother was out in the kitchen, cooking, and we ate the usual things—cannelloni, baked ziti, pasta primavera—and paid about twice what we would have paid in the usual places. I was beginning to know a little about wine, so I ordered a bottle of the second-highest-priced red on the menu, and when we finished that, I ordered another. For dessert, my balled fist presented Helen with two little white Rorer Quaaludes.
She was looking good, silver-eyed and tanned from an early-spring ski trip to Vermont with Adele and one of the other waitresses. I watched the rings glitter on her fingers as she lifted her glass to wash down the pills, and then she set the glass down and eased back into her chair under the weight of all that food and wine. “I finally met Kurt,” she said.
I was having a scotch and Drambuie
as an after-dinner drink, no dessert thanks, and enjoying the scene, which was very formal and adult, old guys in suits slurping up linguine, busty wives with poodle hair and furs, people of forty and maybe beyond out here in the hinterlands living the good life. “Kurt who?” I said.
“Kurt Ramos? Adele’s ex?” She leaned forward, her elbows splayed on the tabletop. “He was bartending at this place in Stowe—he’s a Sagittarius, very creative. Funny too. He paints and writes poetry and had one of his poems almost published in the Hudson Review, and of course, Adele knew he was going to be there, I mean that was the whole point. He’s thirty-four, I think. Or thirty-five. You think that’s too much? Age-wise, I mean? Adele’s only twenty-four.”
“Almost published?” I said.
Helen shrugged. “I don’t know the details. The editor wrote him a long letter or something.”
“He is pretty old. But then so are you, and you don’t mind having a baby like me around, do you?”
“Four years, kiddo,” she said. “Three years and nine months, actually. I’m not an old lady yet. But what do you think—is he too old for her?”
I didn’t think anything. Helen was always giving these speeches about so-and-so and their sex life, who was cheating on who, the I Ching, reincarnation, cat-breeding, UFOs and the way people’s characters could be read like brownie recipes according to their astrological charts. I gave her a sly smile and put my hand on her leg. “Age is relative,” I said. “Isn’t it?”
And then the strangest thing happened, by way of coincidence, that is—there was a flurry of activity in the foyer, the bowing and scraping of waiters, the little tap dance of leather soles as coats were removed, and suddenly the maître d’ was leading Adele and the very same Kurt Ramos past our table.
Helen saw them first. “Adele!” she chirped, already rising up out of the chair with a big stoned grin on her face, and then I glanced up and saw Adele there in a sweater so tight she must have been born in it (but no, no, I had vivid proof to the contrary). Beside her, loping along with an athletic stride, was Kurt Ramos, half-German, half–Puerto Rican, with crazily staring eyes and slick black hair that hung to his shoulders. He was wearing a tan trenchcoat, bell-bottoms and a pair of red bowling shoes he’d borrowed from a bowling alley one night. There were exclamations of surprise all around, the girls embraced as if they hadn’t seen each other in twelve years and I found myself wrapping my hand round Kurt Ramos’ in a complicated soul shake. “Good to meet you, man,” I said in my best imitation of a very hip adult, but he just stared right through me.
—
In May, Ski Sikorski quit to move up to Maine and live among goats and liberated women on a commune, leaving his wife and kid behind, and I found myself elevated to head bartender at the ripe age of twenty-three. I was making good money, getting at least a modicum of exercise rowing Helen around the defrosted lake every afternoon, and aside from the minorest of scrapes, I hadn’t really wrecked anything or anybody in a whole long string of weeks. Plus, I was ascending to the legendary status I’d sought all along, stoked by the Fireman Calabrese incident and the high drama of my unconscious dive into the hands of the state police. I’d begun dealing Quaaludes in a quiet way, I tripped and had revelatory visions and went to concerts with Helen, Adele and Kurt, and I pretty generally felt on top of things. The prevailing ethos was simple in those days—the more drugs you ingested, the hipper you were, and the hipper you were, the more people sought you out for praise, drugs and admiration. I even got to the point where I could match Jimmy Brennan drink for drink and still make it home alive—or at least partially so.
Anyway, Ski quit and on my recommendation we hired Kurt Ramos as second bartender, and the two of us made quite a pair behind the bar, he with his shower-curtain hair and staring eyes and me with my fixed grin that was impervious to anything life or the pharmaceutical industry could throw at it. We washed glasses, cut fruit, mixed drinks, talked about everything and nothing. He told me about Hawaii and Amsterdam, drugs, women he’d known, and he showed me his poetry, which seemed pretty banal to me, but who was I to judge? When work was over, he and Adele would come over to our place for long stoned discussions and gleeful drug abuse, or we’d go to a late movie or another bar. I liked him. He had heart and style and he never tried to pull rank on me by virtue of his greater age and wisdom, as Jimmy Brennan and his drinking cronies never failed to do.
It was a month or so after Kurt started working behind the bar that my parents came in for the first time. They’d been threatening to make an appearance ever since I’d got the job—my mother wanted to check the place out because she’d heard so much about it, everybody had, and my father seemed amused by the idea of his son officially making him a drink and pushing it across the bar to him on a little napkin. “You’d have to give me a discount,” he kept saying. “Wouldn’t you?” And then he’d laugh his high husky laugh till the laugh became a smoker’s cough and he’d cross the kitchen to the sink and drop a ball of sputum in the drain.
I was shaking a martini for a middle-aged guy at the end of the bar when I glanced up and saw my father looming there in the doorway. The sun was setting, a fat red disc on the horizon, and my father extinguished it with the spread of his shoulders as he maneuvered my mother through the door. The hostess—a terminally pretty girl by the name of Jane Nardone—went up to him with a dripping smile and asked if he’d like a table for two. “Yeah, sure,” I heard him say in his rasping voice, “but only after my son makes me a vodka gimlet—or maybe two.” He put his hands on his hips and looked down at the little painted doll that was Jane Nardone. “That okay with you?” Then he made his way across the room to where I stood behind the bar in white shirt and tie.
“Nice place,” he grunted, helping my mother up onto a barstool and settling in beside her. My mother was heavily made-up and liquid-eyed, which meant she’d already had a couple of drinks, and she was clutching a black patent-leather purse the size of a refrigerator. “Hi, honey,” she said, “working hard?”
For a minute I was frozen there at the bar, one hand on the shaker, the other on the glass. There went my cool, the legend dissolved, Lester the ultra-wild one nothing more than a boy-faced boy—and with parents, no less. It was Kurt who saved the day. He was thirty-five years old after all, with hollow cheeks and the faintest weave of gray in his mustache, and he had nothing to prove. He was cool, genuinely cool, and I was an idiot. “Mr. Rifkin,” he said, “Mrs. Rifkin. Lester’s told me a lot about you”—a glowing, beautiful, scintillating lie. “What can I get you?”
“Yeah,” I said, adjusting the edges of my fixed smile just a degree, “what’ll it be?”
And that was fine. My father had three drinks at the bar and got very convivial with Kurt, and my mother, perched on the edge of the stool and drinking Manhattans, corralled anybody she could—Jane, Adele, Helen, random customers, even one of the busboys—and told them all about my potty training, my elementary school triumphs and the .417 batting average I carried one year in Little League. Jimmy Brennan came in and bought everybody a round. We were very busy. I was glowing. My father was glowing. Jane showed him and my mother to the best table in the house and they kept Helen and two waiters schmoozing over a long, lingering, three-course dinner with dessert, after-dinner drinks and coffee. Which I paid for. Happily.
—
The summer that year was typical—heat, mosquitoes, fat green flies droning aimlessly round the kitchen, the air so dense with moisture even the frogs were sweating. Helen and I put off going to bed later and later each night, hoping it would cool off so we could actually sleep instead of sweating reservoirs on each other, and we saw dawn more times than I’d like to remember. Half the time I wound up passed out on the couch, and I would wake at one or two in the afternoon in a state of advanced dehydration. Iced coffee would help, especially with a shot or two of Kahlúa in it, and maybe a Seconal to kill some of the pain of the previous night’s
afflictions, but by the time we got around to the deli for a sandwich to go, it was four and we were on our way to work. That became a real grind, especially when I only got Monday nights off. But then, right in the middle of a heat wave, Jimmy Brennan’s mother died and the restaurant closed down for three days. It was a tragedy for Jimmy, and worse for his mother, but for us—Helen, Kurt, Adele and me—it was like Christmas in July. Three whole days off. I couldn’t believe it.
Jimmy flew back to California, somebody pinned a notice to the front door of the restaurant, and we took advantage of the fact that Kurt had recently come into twenty hits of blotter acid to plan a day around some pastoral activities. We filled a cooler with sangria and sandwiches and hiked into the back end of Wiccopee Reservoir, deep in Fahnestock Park, a place where swimming was prohibited and trespassing forbidden. Our purpose? To swim. And trespass. We could have spent the day on our own muddy little lake, but there were houses, cabins, people, cars, boats and dogs everywhere, and we wanted privacy, not to mention adventure. What we wanted, specifically, was to be nude, because we were very hip and the puritanical mores of the false and decrepit society our parents had so totteringly constructed didn’t apply to us.
We parked off the Taconic Parkway—far off, behind a thick screen of trees where the police wouldn’t discover the car and become overly curious as to the whereabouts of its former occupants—shouldered our day packs, hefted the cooler, and started off through the woods. As soon as we were out of sight of the road, Kurt paused to strip off his T-shirt and shorts, and it was immediately evident that he’d done this before—and often—because he had no tan line whatever. Adele was next. She threw down her pack, dropped her shorts, and in a slow tease unbuttoned her shirt, watching me all the time. The woods were streaked with sun, deerflies nagged at us, I was sweating. I set down the cooler, and though I’d begun to put on weight and was feeling self-conscious about it, I tried to be casual as I rolled the sweaty T-shirt up over my gut and chest and then kicked free of my shorts. Helen was watching me too, and Kurt—all three of them were—and I clapped on my sunglasses to mask my eyes. Then it was Helen’s turn. She gave me a look out of her silver-foil eyes, then laughed—a long musical girlish laugh—before pulling the shirt over her head and dropping her shorts and panties in a single motion. “Voilà!” she said, and laughed again.
T.C. Boyle Stories II: The Collected Stories of T. Coraghessan Boyle, Volume II Page 53