Exes

by Max Winter

  On his mother’s side, Father was a direct descendant of Rhode Island’s founder, Roger Williams. Our mother, meanwhile, was a second-generation Russian Jew, daughter of a local slumlord, Ike Hafkin, who made his nest egg renting triple-decker tenements the color of restaurant mints and worn-out dog noses.

  Father’s decision to wed a Jewess vexed the Blackalls and Hafkins alike, though for opposite reasons. So much so, that my parents quickly—and, in my mother’s case, temporarily—found themselves cut out of their respective inheritances. Father increased his drinking and his tinkering commensurately. Few know that the basement-workshop-perfected formula for the popular sports drink/pediatric hydration therapy that would eventually earn my father his personal fortune had in fact been conceived of as a hangover cure for unathletic adults like himself. (Apple brandy is a son of a mothereffer the morning after, and, drunk or not, backyard catch with Pa was a farce.) But Eli and I both like to call in sick and sweat it out with a cup or two of hot black coffee, seeing hangovers as both inevitable and edifying.

  Liked. I mean, he liked to.

  I looked out the window. The sky was nearly blue. My quiet little sighs come from the Hafkin side of me; a Blackall sigh is strictly rhetorical.

  Speaking of genes, young Eli, who from Father inherited far more than senatorial good looks, spent the entire weekend of our parents’ funeral tucked into the uppermost crotch of a crabapple, where, clad in his favorite yellow swim trunks, he took quick, eye-crossing sips from a pilfered fifth of Pomerol. “But it makes me vanish,” he told Libby when she had climbed up and said, “That’s enough now” and “Come on—give it.” Then she sat beside him while he combed her long blond hair with a pink pocket comb, now and then lifting loose golden strands from its wide plastic teeth and balling them into his pocket. Libby balls, Eli called them. He kept them under his pillow.

  As soon as my parents were in the ground, Eli, Sis, and I went to live in Grandpa Ike and Grandma Tillie’s colonial just off Hope on the East Side’s easternmost side.

  But Dad’s folks could hold a grudge like you read about. After their only son’s death, Bink and Meezy had little to do with any of us, least of all Coney Island–looking me. In fact, the only physical evidence—apart from a long-since-destroyed ER chart—that my father’s parents were ever charged with our care is the framed snapshot that I brought with me. In it Eli (five?) and I (that makes me nine) sit astride a beloved roan mare, Abigail, precariously occupying the same pair of tooled leather chaps that, minutes prior to the camera’s click, Pappy Bink had taken down from the wall of his den in a fit of gin-fueled hysterics. “Meezy! Look!” he’d cried. “They’ll each get a leg!” We blink into the low Newport sun, hot, frowning, scared, and looking, despite our age gap, like the ethnically split halves of a single Judeo-Christian self: Eli, the fair-haired, long-limbed, sun-bronzed Viking; and me, a freckled little cartoon. To my knowledge, this is the only photograph of Eli and me that still exists. The nag threw us shortly thereafter, and I landed atop my little brother, breaking his arm. Pappy didn’t take us to the naval hospital until the following morning, when, over flakes and juice, Eli continued to complain of the pain in his now strangely angled ulna. “Christ,” Pappy muttered, loading us all into the Estate Wagon one last time.

  • • •

  The sun was nearly up when I remembered the boat. The neighbors and boatyard employees would almost certainly notice its absence from the dock and call Fud or send someone to check the house.

  Flashlight in my mouth, I raided the armoire in the master bedroom for a suitable disguise should I be spotted at the skiff’s helm, and found a dingy oxford, a pilled crewneck, a jacket lined with a tasteful pattern you couldn’t see, pants made of an ugly one you could, and, finally, the obligatory ball cap faded the red of overcooked lobster shells. Shit, I thought. Shit. Shit. Shit. Shit.

  In the near dark, I slid the jon boat from the basement and into the water, lashing it to the skiff with a heart-size knot. I motored back to Bull Point. At the shore, I undid the knot then retied the line to the dock, doubling and redoubling it till it was the size an owl, then a newborn child, and finally a Christmas ham. I rowed back to the rock, panting. The sky was bluer than seemed possible. Whatever shorebirds were the first ones up squawked at one another. The crewneck smelled like cheese and hormones. It smelled like me.

  _____________

  Before I knew it, I’d passed three full weeks alone in the house on the rock, but that didn’t mean I couldn’t find ways to get in my own way. A mere week in, I cut my foot on the sweat-honed toe crease of an unlost sock. (I only had two pair.) No aspirin. I sucked on spice drops pried from the roof of a hard-to-date gingerbread house. Mohels insist that sugar is an anesthetic, but they also think their mouths are antiseptic, so I chased the gumdrops with slugs of rum—Eli’s drink of choice. Or was at one point, at least. We’d lost touch for a good ten years after he got fired for fucking his favorite high school student—but not because of that, as he and others thought. Quite the opposite, in fact. I wanted to hear all about it. About Alix. Even that bothered him.

  But five Mays ago, Eli drove his car into that house at the foot of Providence’s steepest street for the second and last time. He was thirty-three.

  And although, that time, the house did belong to a former student’s mother, it did not, as some still insist, belong to the mother of Eli’s aforementioned favorite. The first time he had driven into the house, some nine years earlier, he had meant to hit the place right next door, which belonged to some rich lady who wouldn’t let him use the can. (He had spent the entire workday in her yard, yanking weeds and planting standards.) But the two houses—Victorian twins sitting side by each, one putty, the other gray—are hard to tell apart at night. And the second time around, Eli had been mad only at himself and so hopeless that any old house at the foot of Jenckes would do. The car was an all-but-rusted-out Plymouth Volare he had bought minutes earlier from his upstairs neighbor for all the money he had, which wasn’t much. The news split me in two. One of me stayed in bed, and the other one walked around, kept busy, got into trouble. We keep doubling back.

  While my sister and I had attended the Amos Fox School, a local Quaker Friends prep of some renown, Eli had been homeschooled, against the wishes of the state and his grandparents—who, as soon as they had some say in the matter, enrolled him in a public elementary. “Maybe Clay Two, maybe he could make a go of it with this one, rest his soul, but me, what do I know from English?” Grandpa Ike said. And Eli did okay at MLK and elsewhere, but even so, upon graduating college, he took a job at Fox and began the impossible task of making up for lost time. He used to pore over Libby’s and my yearbooks as if they were Christmas circulars.

  Now, out on the rock, it was nearly June, and still, no visitors. But I couldn’t get too comfortable. Athletic blondes, back home from college, spent whole afternoons dangling their legs from nearby diving docks and indulging in all manner of catalog-model horseplay. Back on land, scotch was being swapped out for gin. Sleeveless shifts and go-to-hell slacks were getting unmothballed. I had nowhere left to hide.

  I tried my damnedest to graph Eli’s last ten years, but couldn’t. Truth was, I had no idea what my decade looked like, let alone his. I spread out. Back when I paid taxes, my tax man used the floor as his filing cabinet. Each client got a pile. “This poor lady,” he’d say, pointing at a tilted stack of manila folders. “She’s in real trouble.” Now I made piles of my documents, too. Except each pile was a person Eli might’ve known, or known to say hi to. I spread them out, these exes, friends, and neighbors. These stand-ins and one-night stands, body doubles and doubles. I mixed them up. I filled in gaps with facts and news items. I used scissors. For glue, I used local honey. I stacked them back up. If I squinted, the piles looked like people.

  Against my better judgment I started using one of the many taped-off toilets that flushed directly into the bay, rather than the composting model in the master ba
th. I was already off schedule, so generally it wasn’t too hard to wait until after dark or just before sunup. But one morning, less than an hour after I pushed my luck on a can of expired hash, I heard knocking, and hi there–ing and yoo-hooing and anybody-homing. I stumbled, knocked things from shelves, fell down the stairs and up them. I hid in the cellar, then in the closet, then under the kitchen sink. There was even more knocking and anybody-homing, and then the door opening, and more and louder yoo-hooing and all manner of ayyy-upping and sports whistling. The intruder tramped around the house, picking up odds and ends, setting them down too hard. Opening cupboards. Rifling.

  His weight strained the floorboards, and I all but smelled how he shaved. The door under the sink creaked open. Top-Siders with salt in their cracks, socks made of hairless skin.

  “Hi there!” he yelled.

  I reached into my pocket for the ball cap but found only snack wrappers. I rolled out from under the sink, spending more time than I’d’ve liked to on my back. He put out his hand, but I picked myself up. Now we were face-to-face. My back was against the sink, and he didn’t step back. “Howdy,” I managed.

  “Frank,” he said, extending once more his hand. It looked strong, and good at knots. “Frank Duffy.”

  I took it. “Eli,” I said without thinking. “Hafkin.” It felt good just to say it.

  “I know you,” he said, squeezing. “Fud around?”

  “No.” I took my hand back.

  “A little early in the season for guests, isn’t it?”

  “Guest!” I said too loudly. “Ha! I’m the plumber. I’ve come to fix the sink.” I pointed to my hiding spot, noticing—at the same time as he did, I’m guessing—the lack of tools.

  “The plumber?”

  “Yes, my toolbox is back on land. Left it behind like a regular idiot!”

  “I’ll take you ashore,” he said, putting his hand on my shoulder and giving me a little push out of the kitchen.

  I stumbled. “Oh, boy,” I said, grabbing the metal detector case on the way through the living room. “It’s my whattayoucallit . . . my snake.”

  “Sure thing, Clay.”

  I turned around and looked at him. He looked back like a print-ad cowboy looking at something far off.

  “I knew your old man,” he said. “Through the law office.”

  “Fishing?” I asked, smelling something on his boat.

  “False albacore,” he said, his eyes crinkling at the far dock now, like a cowboy sailor. “The gals in the office love it.”

  There was a cruiser waiting for me onshore. “You Claiborne Blackall?” the woman cop asked me.

  “The Third?” added the man cop with a voice that smirked. His face did nothing.

  I nodded.

  “You’re going to have to come with us,” she said, taking the metal detector.

  “Okay,” I said.

  “Is this a weapon, Clay?”

  “No, ma’am,” I said, looking at my store shoes, brown with worn-out soles, and at Fud’s ill-fitting cords, mine now, that whisked when I walked. “Metal detector.”

  “You’re a real creep, you know that?” the man cop said. My stomach was in my throat.

  “Watch your head,” the woman said. Then she eased me into the car and shut the door behind me. The backseat was hard, hollow plastic, like the seat of a Big Wheel or Green Machine, and I slid from one side to the other and slammed into the windows when we took corners. We took them hard. “It’s slippery back there,” she said. “You might want to hold on to something.”

  I was about to say I am, but caught myself. “I will,” I said, and held on tighter.

  Aloha

  Vince Vincent

  HI ALIX (IF THIS IS YOU),

  YOU DON’T KNOW ME, BUT THAT’S NOT IMPORTANT. I FOUND THIS IN SOME PANTS VINCE LEFT AT MY PLACE AND THOUGHT WHAT THE HELL? HOPE THIS FINDS YOU.

  Nobody believed me when I told them who I could’ve been, so I started pretending I was Judge Reinhold instead. This they believed. Hey, I know that dude, they’d think or say. It didn’t even matter that we actually look alike, because they barely remembered how he looked then, let alone now. No, it worked mostly because when I watched that one scene I was thinking the same exact thing they were: that should be me.

  In Hollywood we use hot actresses instead of seasons to measure time because every month is cruel, and hot, and dry. Except for when it’s cold as hell. We’re up by five and home by seven and drunk by eight. In bed by nine or ten. At dawn your next-door neighbor scoots to his car like he just committed a crime. Nothing is on the way to anything and everything is an hour away. It’s neither here nor there, and there’s no here here, either. We’re all just brains for our cars. Or something our cars ate and can’t digest. They call where I live now the desert. But isn’t it all the desert? All I know is I’m finally far enough away from a 24 Hour Fitness to void my contract, and that I’d called L.A. home for as long as I could.

  It’s been more hot actresses than you can name since I could even read for a lead, let alone get called back. The last time was for the role of Brad Hamilton in Fast Times at Ridgemont High, which wasn’t Judge Reinhold’s yet. We were the same type, of course, but they went with him, because who knows? The whole thing took so long to not work out that the casting director felt bad, and gave me Brad’s Bud #2. Then the DP pointed out that people might mistake us for brothers, and my scenes got cut.

  It’s okay, I thought. I’ll get ’em next time, not knowing that next time meant the boyfriend part in a music video for a singer too old to play himself. Then came the cool dude from work in a sitcom that never got picked up. I got mugged in unconvincing lighting. I shouted funny drink orders in quiet clubs. Twice I played a corpse. But mostly I got by with embarrassing print ads. I gaped at home computers, threw footballs to pretend sons, and pointed at things you couldn’t see in denim outfits.

  People used to stop me on the street or in parking lots to ask if I was that guy, you know—what’s his name? Oh, you know . . . I’d just smile and wave to them out my window as I drove off, still thinking it was only a matter of time before I was him for real, whoever they meant this time. I used to look like a lot of people, I guess.

  But before long, and for all the usual reasons—afternoons in the sun, long nights out—no one could even squint me into the boy next door anymore. I was just some guy. You know the kind of noncharacter I’m talking about: irritable, doughy, sexless. A night manager or desk clerk. I read for parts in movies with apes and dogs in them, or talking babies and dogs or baby spies. I’d get there early, do some funny yelling, make faces, strain my voice. They never called me back and I didn’t blame them. A man can get so down on his luck that he can’t play anything but. I quit the business and settled into the role of some guy in real life.

  Which is one thing. But, like I said, no one would even believe me when I told them I almost made it. They’d yeah-right me and sure-thing-Vince me every time. Whatever you say, man. “No, man,” I’d go, pointing at the TV from my barstool, my shirt riding up, exposing half my butt. “They called me back. Twice!” Then they’d imitate me squeakily, or sneak their drinks onto my tab, or make fun of the lemon pie I made for my birthday.

  Eventually, I found some new bars, and talked about the news instead of my hard luck. Whenever they changed the subject to women, I’d just laugh. What could I add? My one-night stands were like low-budget shorts, shot and screened out of sequence. One minute it’d be just me and my drink, the next I’d be on a roof . . . downtown? I’d wake up sandy, for some reason. The next time I saw her, whoever her was, she’d give me a vague look, and I’d try to return it.

  Then I thought, hey, why not? By now—at some point between Pee-wee and Woody; or maybe the Bobbitts and OJ?—Judge had been out of the public eye long enough that he seemed like fair game and, well . . . like I said. So I switched to straights, crinkled my eyes, worked on my smirk. Pretty soon I had him down.

&n
bsp; I only meant to get free drinks, maybe lunch. I’d nod up at the bar set, playing Stripes or Gremlins on afternoon cable, do that thing with my eyebrows, and get ready for the double-take. (I’d check the TV listings in advance, ask the bartender to change the channel before it came on, pretend to watch whatever, nurse my second drink.) A couple hundred bucks’ worth of well pours every year was well worth a drunken Doesn’t anyone fucking knock anymore? or an ironic You’re a single, successful guy or two. Or Man, you got topless-kissed by Phoebe Cates! Then, How many takes? Or Did you really whip it out in the bathroom? It had been a closed set for those scenes, but I’d seen and heard enough over the years to tell them what they wanted to hear. Me being there, with them—in that shithole on Rosecrans at two o’clock in the afternoon on Tuesday—told them what not to ask. And soon enough they’d be on to Phoebe anyway, and talk about those eyes of hers and that mouth some, and how she looked great wet—how that’s some kind of test, in fact: Does she look hot wet? Hot girls look even hotter wet, they’d say. Then, What happened to her? She get fat or old or something? Did it all fall on her?

  I read somewhere where Fast Times rental tapes used to wear and snap at the exact same spot: right when Phoebe unhooks her top. The shops had to splice and resplice, then splice some more because over time the tapes kink and the tracking gets fucked. The image waves and jerks and freezes—a staticky mess of worn and grainy frames from all the pausing and slo-moing and frame-by-framing. All these years and Phoebe’s still our fantasy. I can only imagine how she feels.