Cold Plate Special
Page 8
“I guess y’all met my cousin, Jarvis, right?” he said to the room.
Only Summer said yes. Kenny and Klavin were silent.
“I need a damn beer,” Shred announced. “Anybody else?”
He got his beer and came back and took a bong-hit. Summer threw on a Patsy Cline disc. Maybe she was just venturing into country oldies as an experiment. A break from the punk. Or she was being ironic. Couldn’t tell for sure.
“So, Jar,” Shred asked. “You wanna go to a show with us?”
“I dunno. I’m pretty tired from the drive.”
“Shit—that drive’s, what—it’s less than three hours. Come on.”
“I got up really early today.”
“Bah.”
Shred was no longer gloomy Evan from the Goth netherworld, now he was one of those energetic, persuading types. He had a kind of insanity in his eyes. Summer was looking at me like she was amused again.
“Yeah,” I said. “Pretty beat. I’ll probably just crash here on the couch, if that’s cool.”
“That’s where Kenny sleeps. Come on, it’s a great band—Burnt Thunder.” He started doodling an air guitar with a manic intensity.
Kenny nodded his head to Shred’s imaginary beat.
“They have a girl who plays accordion through a distortion pedal,” Summer said from the floor where she was scratching one of her dogs.
“Come on,” Shred pleaded.
I wasn’t that tired. I just wanted to focus on my mission. I needed to practice zingers. And I actually didn’t want to be seen in public with these people. I knew that was ridiculous, since no one in Richmond knew me. My stomach was swamping up, too. I just wanted to drink some coffee and go to sleep.
“If you don’t go with us, you can’t stay here,” Shred said with a smart-ass smile.
“Are you ever gonna drink your damn beer?” Kenny said.
“You going, Kenny?” Shred asked.
Kenny answered by staring at him with his glazed-over eyes. Then he made a vague “nah” sound and looked back over toward the wall.
I realized that if I didn’t go, I’d be stuck sitting here with Kenny. Plus Shred and Summer would think I was lame. Also, where the fuck was I supposed to be sleeping anyway? The sides were closing in on me.
“Okay,” I said. “I’ll go.”
“Yes!” Shred said.
We piled into Summer’s giant, rusted, late 70s Buick—me, Shred, Klavin, Summer, dogs and all. The chocolate lab sat on my lap and panted dog breath directly into my face. I think I heard Summer calling him Moosie. She could barely see up over the dashboard. She needed to be sitting on some telephone books or something.
Took about four minutes to get to the Ditch, a small old brick building that stood by itself, like a box. I knew it had to be the Ditch, because the only other things around were an old warehouse-looking building across the street and a parking lot. Everything around here was so old, I half expected to see some Civil War soldiers walking up the street. The Ditch didn’t even look open, until I saw tiny Christmas lights strung up across the front door. Summer parked in the parking lot and we all got out, dogs included.
“They let dogs in here?” I said.
No one answered me. Summer was smiling a little on the side of her mouth. I was so amusing.
Two dollar cover for humans. The doorman seemed to know the dogs and they got in free, disappearing into the forest of legs. The Ditch was packed with art freaks, punkers, Goths, people with blue hair, girls wearing combat boots and glitter on their cheeks and now me—a preppo in a red polo shirt. My cohorts immediately scattered into different conversations with people they knew. Shred seemed to know everybody.
I walked up to an innocuous looking spot near the end of the bar and tried to pretend I was invisible. I wanted coffee, but I didn’t see any coffee pots going, only beer, liquor and a rack of soda guns. A Coke would do, but the bar was crammed with people ordering real drinks.
I started noticing some stares, not really dirty looks, but one punker dude did look at me like he wanted to kick my ass. I couldn’t see Shred or his gang anywhere and it was making me nervous. Did I look like a cop? Were these people really giving me unfriendly stares or were they just weirdos and that’s how they looked at people?
After fifteen minutes or so of standing there looking vaguely at the ceiling, I heard the whoops and pops and bits of feedback of the band getting ready to start burning their thunder. There was a dividing wall with two arched passageways between the bar and the stage area, so I could only see part of one band member’s arm from where I stood. One of Summer’s dogs squeezed by in front of me. I reached down to pet him, but he ignored me and kept going.
Starting with a crackled punch, a searing guitar sound came blasting out from the amps in a sonic death orgy of red noise and drums. It sounded like a major malfunction of equipment at a hydro-electric power plant, where all the workers were schizophrenics on meth. No way I’m gonna be able to stand here and think up zingers for Motorcar with that going on. Not that I could anyway, with all these freaks around, looking at me. What was that? That sound. A loud burning sound, like someone playing a lawnmower with a radioactive violin bow. I craned my head around to the see the stage through the archway, but I could only see more of the bass player’s arm. Then I remembered: the girl who plays the accordion through a distortion pedal. I thought my brain was going to implode, but people seemed to like it, they were bobbing their heads. It was the strangest music I’d ever heard, a turbo-powered electric accordion throbbing against a pounding hybrid of punk and metal. Punkle? Munk? I wondered what they called it. Some pushing was going on up front near the archway, which at first I thought was a fight, but it turned out to just be a warm-up for a mosh pit.
You cock-suckin-mother-fuckin-sonofabitch.
No.
You ruined my life, you worthless piece of sub-human raw sewage.
Better, but basically terrible. Too noisy to concentrate. It was going to be less than twenty-four hours before the showdown and I couldn’t think of shit. For all the zinger raw material floating around my head, the perfect combo of burning cold hit-words still eluded me.
Maybe I should just kill him instead. I chuckled to myself at the thought. Of course, I wasn’t going to abandon my mature, non-violent approach—I’d come so far already. In such a short stretch of time, I’d gone from having sick execution fantasies to making this healthy verbal confrontation a real reality. If I could just spew out the verbal ammunition, just the right words, in just the right order—then the permanent sunbeams of righteousness would glare from my head forever, showing me the way.
I tried nodding my head to the music along with all the other rockers or punklers or whatever they were, but it didn’t feel right so I stopped. I wanted coffee. I wanted iced tea. The bar was still crammed with drinkers trying to order, and now there was a biker dude with a sleeveless, spiked leather jacket taking up a bunch of the space. This was the strangest bar I’d ever been to in my life—I half expected the Village People to come popping out. I cussed myself for not having just stayed in a hotel with a pad and pen and perfected my zinger speech.
Then Summer appeared in front of me, screaming, “You like ’em?”
“Yeah,” I yelled back. “You like em?”
“Oh yeah, they’re awesome.”
“I thought you were a country fan.”
“What?”
“I said I thought you were a country music fan!” I screamed louder.
She looked at me like I was an idiot, then she stepped in closer to my ear: “What kind of music do you like?”
“Oh, all kinds,” I said. “Billy Joel?”
Her little elf nose curled up like she something smelled bad. Then Klavin showed up and handed her a beer. She said something to him, but I couldn’t tell what. Then she squeezed my elbow and leaned in again.
“We’re gonna go back up front,” she said.
They headed back into the wall of people. My elb
ow felt all warm where she touched it. What the hell was up with that? No way I could be attracted to such a freaky chick. Maybe I was just still feeling vulnerable because of the break-up thing with Carly. I started getting a little sleepy. Hard to believe someone could yawn during a heavy metal accordion solo, but I did.
After the show, I overheard talk of folks heading Shred’s to do bong-hits and drink more beer. These people were non-stop. Party professionals. There were two extra people for the ride back, not that Summer’s giant car couldn’t handle it. This time I had the golden retriever-Lassie mix half on me. Verty, I believe Summer called her. Her big eyes looked like marinated olives. Verty’s other half was on Shred. Good thing this was a four-minute drive and not a road trip to Europe.
11
We fell up into the house and loudly woke up Kenny, but he seemed like he was used to it. Summer immediately cranked the Burnt Thunder CD, which must have felt like a hundred jackhammers going at once in Kenny’s head. That’s what it sounded like in my head, anyway. The place flowed with beer and bong-hits, cigarette smoke and laughter. This was not the best environment to be thinking up hot zingers and honing my mission focus. Shred was acting like a nut. I couldn’t understand half of what he was talking about. He kept mimicking the distorted accordion player’s weird swaying arm motions. I think he had a crush on her.
“She had that, like…did you hear on ‘Andalusia’ that one fucked-up part where she hit the delay pedal and Braaaang…” He started flapping his arms like a chicken trying to fly. No one ever introduced me to the other two dudes who came. They talked to Kenny about his leg and some art festival they had all gone to. Summer played with her dogs on the floor. The little black one was trying to eat the tip of one of her Chucks.
Shred finished packing everyone their first bong-hit and came over to where I was sitting on an upside down milk crate by the orange chair.
“Come on down here, Jarvis. I wanna show you something.”
We went down the hall and into one of the closed rooms. It was Shred’s studio, I guess, for lack of a better word. A total mess, junk and beer cans and clothes on the floor, with half-finished paintings lying all around, his cartoony drawings taped to the wall. He led me to a crap-cluttered table and sat down to warm up his computer.
“Check this out,” he said.
I thought he was going to show me his artist’s website, or some astrology charts or something. For some reason, I thought he was into astrology. But what he did pull up on the screen was even weirder. It was a blown-up, slow-motion clip of the Zapruder film. Poor doomed Kennedy with his fists against his chest, and then a couple frames later, blammo. Gruesome, that up-close.
“Look,” Shred said, running the clip back again. “They blew half his face off. See? Now check this out,” he said, pulling up a string of black-and-white photographs from JFK’s autopsy. “The back of his head’s all blown apart, but his face is fine? Now look at the hit again.”
“Think I pretty much got it.”
“See? They got him in the face. The autopsy is of a wax dummy.” Shred clicked back to the autopsy photo. “See how phony it looks?” He turned in his chair and looked at me, as if for approval.
“Come on, man,” I laughed. “The Evan I know isn’t a sucker for conspiracy theories.”
“Don’t ever call me that. I’m Shred now. And it’s not a theory, it’s a conspiracy fact. Patton, John Lennon, Marilyn Monroe—the government wasted all of them. The blue-blood shadow government, I mean.”
“Suuuurrrre,” I said. “You mind if I put on some light in here?” I hit the switch for the overhead light, which was bright as fuck. Shred was squinting like he just bit into an unripened grapefruit. “Now, why do I need to know all this? So nine guys shot Kennedy. So what?”
“Well, for one thing, being a lawyer, you should be aware of—”
“Whoa, hold on here. I’m not a lawyer.”
“I thought you were down here to interview for lawyer gigs.”
“No, I’m just looking for a paralegal job.”
“Mom said you were in law school.”
“No,” I said. “I want to go to law school.”
“Oh.” Shred blinked his eyes. He looked confused.
Bursts of group laughter were coming in from the living room. “Shouldn’t we get back to the party?” I asked.
We went in and I sat in the corner on the floor. There was so much pot smoke in the room now, by just sitting there for a couple of minutes and breathing, I was buck stoned. I wanted to get my instant iced tea out of my backpack and make a strong glass, but I felt like I didn’t have permission to move. Summer was making herself right at home, though, playing with her dogs and laughing a lot. She had the joy of life.
I couldn’t follow the conversation very well. I did catch something about a friend of theirs named Farns who drove his van up to the front of city hall to protest his high water bill with a megaphone. He spent the night in jail. Shred recounted a special on cable about Hitler’s doctor injecting him with liquefied bull testicles. I didn’t believe him. People were making references to things I’d never heard of, underground movies I’d never seen, music I didn’t know existed. Never felt so isolated in my life. I was sure everyone could see the sterile medicine fog surrounding me. What’s that boring medical smell? Oh, look, it’s that yuppie Jarvis.
I needed to get in my own space and zing it up. I waited for Shred to go in the kitchen and followed him in.
“Thanks again for the hospitality, Ev—I mean Shred.”
“You’re having a good time, right?” he said, opening the fridge and looking around.
“Yeah. Tired, though, um…” I pointed vaguely toward the living room. “Place to…crash?”
“Already?”
“Well, I got that interview tomorrow.”
“Oh, yeah. What time is that?” He popped open a beer and started guzzling.
“Um…four o’clock?”
“Cool, then we got time to go out for breakfast.”
“So, do you have like a…sleeping bag or—”
“Kenny’s room.”
“Oh. So he is your roommate.”
“Yeah—what do you think this is, a convalescent home for gimpos? Actually, I guess it is. Captain Gimpo sleeps on the couch. Easier on the leg.”
Wow. Shred had gone from being a deadly quiet vampire to a quick-witted zing tosser in just a few years. And for a pot-smoking, hard drinking, weirdo art freak, that was pretty impressive. Damn him. I went to get the instant iced tea out of my backpack to make a glass before bed. I opened the freezer, psyched to find a bag of store ice. That was one good thing about drinkers—they usually had ice. I thought about sticking my head in, but I didn’t feel the need. Plus, what if someone saw me.
Back in the living room, one of the nameless dudes was on the floor playing with Summer’s dogs. It also looked like he was kind of hitting on her. That bothered me for some reason.
“Watch the leg,” Kenny told the guy.
Some of the party spirit seemed to have left the room. I was careful to hold my iced tea steady as I leaned over to picked up my backpack from the floor. Then I stood up straight and looked around and wondered what to say. So pleased to have made your respective acquaintances, fine gentlefolk? That wouldn’t exactly have been audible above the music. They’d gone from Burnt Thunder to Dylan to some strange punk jazz sounding stuff to Black Sabbath, cranked.
Kenny’s eyes looked like distant planets that had been tweaked off their orbits by a deranged comet. Still, he looked straight up at me and read my awkwardness.
“Didn’t even touch your damn beer and now you’re drinking iced tea?” he said. “That’s alcohol abuse!”
“Oh…uh…sor—” I stopped myself. Apologizing sounded too weak. I put my backpack over my shoulder instead. He was right, though. My opened and full, unsipped beer sat there on the edge of the coffee table. Kenny looked down at the beer and then up at me like I’d committed high crimes against hu
manity. A look made all the more eerie due to his floating eyeballs.
Fortunately, Shred walked up and said: “It’s down here,” nodding toward the hallway.
“Are you going to sleep?” There was a sweetness in Summer’s voice that seemed completely incongruous with the tattoos and piercings. I was surprised she even cared.
“Yeah, um…” I looked at Shred. “I’ve got an interview tomorrow, so—”
“We should go, then,” she said. “Come on, Moosie.”
“Oh, don’t go on my account.”
Everyone started to get up. Dogs too. Except Kenny, of course. I felt super lame. A party-destroying party pooper. Now I just wanted to get down to Kenny’s bedroom and close the door before he made some shitty comment.
“It was very nice to meet you,” Summer said. “Good luck tomorrow.”
“Thanks.” I couldn’t stop looking at the way the edges of her smile curled up. She shook my hand. Very lady-like. “Nice to meet you, too.”
“Oh, jeez,” Kenny said.
Everyone said their “Laters” and their “Later ons.” I followed the throng down the hallway. Shred closed the front door behind them and led me into Kenny’s room. The wall was covered with skydiving posters so I guess he wasn’t lying about his leg. Unless he was just extremely delusional or stoned. Aside from a pile of rotten clothes in the corner, the room was actually kind of neat. The bed was even made.
“Don’t mind Kenny,” Shred said. “He’s going through withdrawal.” He nodded toward the skydiving scenes.
“Oh, no problem. Sorry about the beer.”
“Eh,” he said, waving it away.
“I meant to ask you, your neighborhood here—”
“What, Oregon Hill? What about it?”
“It’s a little bit…I dunno, different, huh?”
He laughed. “A little bit, yeah. What about it exactly?” He had a sort of insane wolf look in his eyes but also a tiny smile.
“Oh, nothing. Just the neighbors are kind of…not what I’m used to, I guess.”
“Oh, the Hillites?”
“The who?”