T.C. Boyle Stories II: The Collected Stories of T. Coraghessan Boyle, Volume II

by T. Coraghessan Boyle

  And what was I thinking? “How about a hit of that acid, Kurt?” I said, locked away behind my shades.

  He looked dubious. Lean, naked and suntanned and caught between two impulses. “Sure,” he said, shrugging, the green mottled arena of the untrodden woods opening up around him, “why not? But the lake’s maybe a mile off and I can still hear the parkway, for Christ’s sake, but yeah, sure, it’s going to take a while to kick in anyway.”

  It was a sacramental moment. We lined up naked under the trees and Kurt tore off a hit for each of us and laid it on our tongues, and then we hoisted our packs, I picked up the cooler, and we started off down the path. Kurt, who’d been here before, was in front, leading the way; the two girls were next, Adele and then Helen; and I brought up the rear, seeing nothing of the sky, the trees, the ferns or the myriad wonders of nature. No, I saw only the naked buttocks of the naked women as they eased themselves down the path or climbed over a downed tree or a spike of granite, and it was all I could do to keep cool in a vigilantly hip and matter-of-fact way, and fight down an erection.

  After a while, the lake began to peek through the trees, a silver sheen cut up in segments, now shining in a gap over here, now over there. We came down to it like pilgrims, the acid already starting to kick in and alter the colors and texture ever so subtly, and the first thing we did was drop our packs and the cooler and cannonade into the water in an explosion of hoots and shouts that echoed out over the lake like rolling thunder. There was splashing and frolicking and plenty of incidental and not-so-incidental contact. We bobbed like seals. The sun hung fat in the sky. There was no finer moment. And then, at some point, we found ourselves sitting cross-legged on a blanket and passing round the bota bag of sangria and a joint, before falling to the sandwiches. After that, we lay back and stared up into the shifting shapes of the trees, letting the natural world sink slowly in.

  I don’t remember exactly what happened next—maybe I was seeing things, maybe I was dozing—but when I came back to the world, what I saw was no hallucination. Kurt was having sex with Helen, my Helen, my Alien, and Adele was deeply involved too, very busy with her hands and tongue. I was thoroughly stoned—tripping, and so were they—but I wasn’t shocked or surprised or jealous, or not that I would admit to myself. I was hip. I was a man. And if Kurt could fuck Helen, then I could fuck Adele. A quid pro quo, right? That was only fair.

  Helen was making certain small noises, whispery rasping intimate noises that I knew better than anyone in the world, and those noises provoked me to get up off the blanket and move over to where Adele was lying at the periphery of all that passionate action as if she were somehow controlling it. I put one hand on her shoulder and the other between her legs, and she turned to me with her black eyes and the black slash of her bangs caught in the depths of them, and she smiled and pulled me down.

  —

  What happened next, of course, is just another kind of wreckage. It wasn’t as immediate maybe as turning over a car or driving it into the trees, but it cut just as wide a swath and it hurt, ultimately, beyond the capacity of any wound that can be closed with stitches. Bang up your head, it’s no problem—you’re a man, you’ll grow another one. Broken leg, crushed ribs—you’re impervious. But if there’s one thing I’ve learned, it’s that the emotional wrecks are the worst. You can’t see the scars, but they’re there, and they’re a long time healing.

  Anyway, later that day, sunburned and sated, we all came back to our house at the end of the lane on the muddy lake, showered—individually—and ordered up takeout Chinese, which we washed down with frozen margaritas while huddling on the floor and watching a truly hilarious old black-and-white horror film on the tube. Then there came a moment when we all looked at one another—consenting adults, armored in hip—and before we knew it we were reprising the afternoon’s scenario. Finally, very late, I found my way to bed, and it was Adele, not Helen, who joined me there. To sleep.

  I was stupid. I was inadequate. I was a boy playing at being a man. But the whole thing thrilled me—two women, two women at my disposal—and I never even heard Helen when she told me she wanted to break it off. “I don’t trust myself,” she said. “I don’t love him, I love you. You’re my man. This is our house.” The aluminum eyes fell away into her head and she looked older than ever, older than the mummy’s ghost, older than my mother. We were in the kitchen, staring into cups of coffee. It was a week after the restaurant had opened up again, four in the morning, impossibly hot, the night alive with the shriek of every disturbed and horny insect, and we’d just got done entertaining Kurt and Adele in the way that had become usual and I didn’t want to hear her, not a word.

  “Listen,” I said, half-stoned and rubbed raw between the legs, “listen, Alien, it’s okay, there’s nothing wrong with it—you don’t want to get yourself buried in all that bourgeois shit. I mean, that’s what started the War. That’s what our parents are like. We’re above that. We are.”

  The house was still. Her voice was very quiet. “No,” she said, shaking her head slowly and definitively, “no we’re not.”

  —

  A month went by, and nothing changed. Then another. The days began to grow shorter, the nights took on a chill and the monster in the basement clanked and rumbled into action, devouring fuel oil once again. I was tending bar one night at the end of September, maybe twenty customers sitting there staring at me, Jimmy Brennan and a few of his buddies at the end of the bar, couples lingering over the tables, when the phone rang. It had been a slow night—we’d only done maybe fifty dinners—but the bar had filled up after we shut the kitchen down, and everybody seemed unnaturally thirsty. Helen had gone home early, as had Adele and Kurt, and I was getting drinks at the bar and taking orders at the tables too. I picked the phone up on the second ring. “Brennan’s,” I said, “how can I help you?”

  It was Helen. Her voice was thick, gritty, full of something I hadn’t heard in it before. “That you, Les?” she said.

  “Yeah, what’s up?” I pinned the phone to one shoulder with my chin to keep my hands free, and began dipping glasses in the rinse water and stacking them to dry. I kept my eyes on the customers.

  “I just wanted to tell you I’m moving out.”

  I watched Jimmy Brennan light a cigarette and lean out over the bar to fetch himself an ashtray. I caught his eye and signaled “just a minute,” then turned my back to the bar. “What do you mean?” I said, and I had to whisper. “What are you saying?”

  “What am I saying? You want to know what I’m saying, Les—do you really?” There it was, the grit in her voice, and more than that—anger, hostility. “What I’m saying is I’m moving in with Kurt and Adele because I’m in love with Kurt. You understand that? You understand what I’m saying? It’s over. Totally. Adioski.”

  “Sure,” I whispered, and I was numb, no more capable of thought or feeling than the empty beer mug I was turning over in my hands, “—if that’s what you want. But when, I mean, when are you—?”

  There was a pause, and I thought I heard her catch her breath, as if she were fighting back the kind of emotion I couldn’t begin to express. “I won’t be there when you get home,” she said.

  Somebody was calling me—“Hey, bartender!”—and I swung round on a big stupid-looking guy with a Fu Manchu mustache who came in every night for two or three drinks and never left more than a quarter tip. “Another round here, huh?”

  “And, Les,” she was saying through that cold aperture molded to my ear like a compress, “the rent’s only paid through the thirtieth, so I don’t know what you’re going to do—”

  “Hey, bartender!”

  “—and you know what, Les? I don’t care. I really don’t.”

  I stayed late that night. The bar was alive, roaring, seething with camaraderie, chaos, every kind of possibility. My friends were there, my employer, customers I saw every night and wanted to embrace. I drank ever
ything that came my way. I went out to the kitchen and smoked a joint with the busboys. Muddy Waters thumped through the speakers with his mojo workin’ (“All you womens, stand in line, / I’ll make love to you, babe, / In five minutes’ time, / Ain’t that a man?”). I talked a couple of people comatose, smoked a whole pack of cigarettes. Then came the moment I’d been dreading since I’d hung up the phone—Jimmy Brennan got up off his barstool and shut down the lights and it was time to go home.

  Outside, the sky seemed to rise up out of itself and pull the stars taut like separate strands of hair till everything blurred and there was no more fire, just ice. It was cold. My breath steamed in the sick yellow glow of the streetlights. I must have stood in the empty parking lot for a full five minutes before I realized Helen had the van—her van—and I had no way to get home and nobody to call. But then I heard a noise behind me, the rattle of keys, a slurred curse, and there was Jimmy Brennan, locking up, and I shouted, “Jimmy, hey, Jimmy, how about a ride?” He looked puzzled, as if the pavement had begun to speak, but the light caught the discs of his glasses and something like recognition slowly transformed his face. “Sure,” he said, unsteady on his feet, “sure, no problem.”

  He drove like a zombie, staring straight ahead, the radio tuned so low all I could hear was the dull muted snarl of the bass. We didn’t say much, maybe nothing at all. He had his problems, and I had mine. He let me off at the end of the dark lane and I fumbled my way into the dark house and fled away to unconsciousness before I could think to turn the lights on.

  Two days later I put down five hundred dollars on a used Dodge the color of dried blood and moved in with Phil Cherniske, one of the waiters at Brennan’s, who by a cruel stroke of fate happened to live on the next street over from the one I’d just vacated, right on the shore of the same muddy lake. Phil’s place stank of mouseshit too, and of course it lacked the feminine touches I’d grown accustomed to and cleanliness wasn’t all that high on the list of priorities, but who was I to complain? It was a place in which to breathe, sleep, shit, brood and get stoned.

  In the meanwhile, I tried to get hold of Helen. She’d quit Brennan’s the day after our phone conversation, and when I called Kurt and Adele’s, she refused to talk to me. Adele wouldn’t say a word the next day at work and it was awkward in the extreme going through an eight-hour shift behind the bar with Kurt, no matter how hip and impervious I tried to be. We dodged round each other a hundred times, made the smallest of small talk, gave elaborate consideration to customers at the far end of the bar. I wanted to kill him, that’s what I wanted to do, and I probably would have too, except that violence was so unhip and immature. Helen’s name never passed my lips. I froze Kurt out. And Adele too. And to everybody else I was a combination of Mahatma Gandhi and Santa Claus, my frozen smile opening up into a big slobbering insincere grin. “Hey, man,” I said to the cheapazoid with the mustache, “how you doin’?”

  On my break and after work, I called Kurt and Adele’s number over and over, but Helen wasn’t answering. Twice I drove my Dodge down the street past their house, but nobody was home the first time and then all three of them were there the next, and I couldn’t face going up those steps. For a while I entertained a fantasy of butting down the door, kicking Kurt in the crotch and dragging Helen out to the car by her hair, but it faded away in a pharmaceutical haze. I didn’t run through a checklist of emotions, like one of those phony Ph.D.s in the women’s magazines Helen stacked up on the coffee table like miniature Bibles and Korans—that wasn’t my way at all. I didn’t even tell my parents we weren’t together anymore. I just got high. And higher.

  That was what brought about the culminating wreck—of that series anyway. I was feeling bad one day, bad in every sense of the word, and since it was my day off, I spent the afternoon chasing down drugs in every house and apartment I could think of in Westchester and Putnam Counties, hitting up friends, acquaintances and acquaintances of acquaintances. Phil Cherniske was with me for part of the time, but then he had to go to work, and I found myself driving around the back roads, stoned on a whole smorgasbord of things, a bottle of vodka propped between my legs. I was looking at leaves, flaming leaves, and I was holding a conversation with myself and letting the car take me wherever it wanted. I think I must have pulled over and nodded out for a while, because all of a sudden (I’d say “magically,” but this was more like treachery) the leaves were gone and it was dark. There was nothing to do but head for the restaurant.

  I came through the door in an envelope of refrigerated air and the place opened up to me, warm and frank and smelling of cigarettes, steak on the grill, fresh-cut lime. I wasn’t hungry myself, not even close to it, so I settled in at the bar and watched people eat dinner. Kurt was bartending, and at first he tried to be chummy and unctuous, as if nothing had happened, but the look on my face drove him to the far end of the bar, where he tried to keep himself urgently occupied. It was good sitting there with a cigarette and a pocketful of pills, lifting a finger to summon him when my drink needed refreshing—once I even made him light my cigarette, and all the while I stared hate into his eyes. Adele was waitressing, along with Jane Nardone, recently elevated from hostess. I never even looked at Adele, but at some point it seemed I tried to get overly friendly with Jane in the corner and Phil had to come out of the kitchen and put a hand on my arm. “Brennan’ll be in soon, you know,” Phil said, his hand like a clamp on the meat of my arm. “They’ll eighty-six you. They will.”

  I gave him a leer and shook him off. “Hey, barkeep,” I shouted so that the whole place heard me, all the Surf ’n’ Turf gnashers and their dates and the idiots lined up at the bar, “give me another cocktail down here, will you? What, do you want me to die of thirst?”

  Dinner was over and the kitchen closed by the time things got ugly. I was out of line and I knew it, and I deserved what was coming to me—that’s not to say it didn’t hurt, though, getting tossed out of my own restaurant, my sanctuary, my place of employ, recreation and release, the place where the flame was kept and the legend accruing. But tossed I was, cut off, eighty-sixed, banned. I don’t know what precipitated it exactly, something with Kurt, something I said that he didn’t like after a whole long night of things he didn’t like, and it got physical. Next thing I knew, Phil, Kurt, Jimmy Brennan and two of the busboys had ten arms around me and we were all heaving and banging into the walls until the door flew open and I was out on the pavement where some bleached-out overweight woman and her two kids stepped over me as if I were a leper. I tried to get back in—uncool, unhip, raging with every kind of resentment and hurt—but they’d locked the door against me, and the last thing I remember seeing was Kurt Ramos’ puffed-up face peering out at me through the little window in the door.

  I climbed into my car and fired it up with a roar that gave testimony to a seriously compromised exhaust system. When the smoke cleared—and I hoped they were all watching—I hit the gas, jammed the lever into gear and shot out onto the highway on screaming tires. Where was I headed? I didn’t know. Home, I guessed. There was no place else to go.

  Now, to set this up properly, I should tell you that there was one wicked turn on the long dark blacktop road that led to that dark lane on the muddy lake, a ninety-degree hairpin turn the Alien had christened “Lester’s Corner” because of the inevitability of the forces gathered there, and that was part of the legend too. I knew that corner was there, I was supremely conscious of it, and though I can’t say I always coasted smoothly through it without some last-minute wheel-jerking and tire-squealing, it hadn’t really been a problem. Up to this point.

  At any rate, I wasn’t really paying attention that night and my reaction time must have been somewhere in the range of the Alzheimer’s patient on medication—in fact, for those few seconds I was an Alzheimer’s patient on medication—and I didn’t even know where I was until I felt the car slip out from under me. Or no, that isn’t right. It was the road—the road slipped out from
under me, and it felt just as if I were on a roller coaster, released from the pull of gravity. The car ricocheted off a tree that would have swatted me down like a fly if I’d hit it head-on, blasted down an embankment and wound up on its roof in a stew of skunk cabbage and muck. I wasn’t wearing a seatbelt, of course—I don’t even know if they’d been invented yet, and if they had, there wouldn’t have been one in that car—and I found myself puddled up in the well of the roof like an egg inside a crushed shell.

  There was no sense in staying there, underneath two tons of crumpled and drooling machinery—that wasn’t the way things were supposed to be, even I could see that—so I poked my hands through the gap where the driver’s side window had formerly been and felt them sink into the cold ooze. There was a smell of gasoline, but it was overpowered by the reek of deconstructed skunk cabbage, and I didn’t give the situation any more thought or calculation than a groundhog does when he pulls himself out of his burrow, and the next thing I knew I was standing up to my ankles in cold muck, looking up in the direction of the road. There were lights there, and a shadowy figure in a long winter coat. “You all right?” a voice called down to me.

  “Yeah, sure,” I said, “no problem,” and then I was lurching up the embankment on splayed feet, oozing muck. When I got to the top, a guy my age was standing there. He looked a little bit like Kurt—same hair, same slope to the shoulders—but he wasn’t Kurt, and that was a good thing. “What happened?” he said. “You lose control?”