Roy felt he had made a great discovery: the secret of marketing. He trained the chicken to do pistachios also, and then installed a hotplate under the floor of the cage and advertised “See the Dancing Nut-Shucking Chicken—500 yards—Bait for Sale.”
“When are you going to do something about radio?” his mother inquired in November.
“I have sent off dozens of applications. I’m waiting for word,” he said, testily.
“You don’t get anywhere waiting. Your father is proof of that.”
“All things come to him who waits,” he reminded her.
“God helps those who help themselves,” she added.
What she didn’t know was that he was salting away money, thanks to the chicken, and could afford tuition at the best radio schools, whenever he felt ready.
Royell was wondering when the marriage would take place. She had found work as a babysitter, but had plenty of time to hang around and pester him with queries. When is the wedding, where would they live, what style of silverware should they have, modern or antique, and white or colored sheets and pillowcases? Did he like wicker chairs, and should they be dark green or white? The china pattern: traditional or contemporary? Aluminum or cast-iron cookware?
“You decide all that,” he said. “I don’t plan on being home all that much.”
“I want you to be happy,” she said.
He did not know how to tell her that he was now about as happy as he knew how to be. He was happy enough.
Of course he would marry her. A broadcaster does not lie. But he was noticing that fifteen minutes a day of Royell was enough for him, thirty at most.
Then, one night, the chicken suffered a stroke. The corn Roy fed it was seed corn, treated with mercury. The chicken had to be put to sleep. Bait sales fell off and Roy closed the stand. He got a job as cabin boy on the Piscacatawamaquoddymoggin Packet, which carried salt and nails and whiskey and roofing to the coastal islands, and then Roy got seasick; he went to work at the Piscacatawamaquoddymoggin Puzzle Plant, working the jigsaw, making the curvy lines through the Winslow Homer seascapes, cutting through the big waves pounding the rocks, carving out the five thousand pieces. One puzzle per day—cutting it in the morning, a break for lunch, and assembling it in the afternoon.
“What happened to your wonderful dream of radio?” his mother asked him pointedly one night as she and Roy and Royell ate supper. Doc was out fishing.
Radio had changed, he explained. He had hoped to become a radio news analyst, only to find out that the age of news analysis was over—newscasts were now three minutes long, interrupted every twenty seconds by a half-minute commercial for a hemorrhoid cream, a pimple pump, an enema pack you could carry around in your pocket. What should he do? be a shill for a lot of junk he’d be ashamed to be associated with?
“There’s public radio,” she said.
He shook his head. “Public radio, it’s nothing but a cult, like Christian Science—it denies the reality of human nature. Public radio believes that if everyone only wore sensible shoes, there’d be no more suffering. Crazy.”
Roy sighed. “There’s no place in radio for an honest man,” he said sadly.
“Why not talk to my cousin Brad Beale?” said Royell.
Brad often drove up to Piscacatawamaquoddymoggin in his red T-bird with a beautiful babe named Sugar to pick up fresh scallops and stroll along Main Street wearing his mirror shades and a snappy white beach outfit and be admired by the locals. Roy had always been too shy to approach him, and The BBC Handbook made it clear—“Never impose on the privacy of a famous man in order to gain a personal advantage.”
Brad was visiting for Thanksgiving, Royell said. “You could come over for dessert,” she told Roy. “He is a nice person, not at all stuck up.”
“Okay,” said Roy. Secretly, he wondered if Brad could introduce him to Avis Burnham, the frontier librarian, a WBE star whom Roy kept a picture of in his sock drawer, a snapshot from Radio Mirror magazine of a slender shadowy woman with bobbed hair and a cool lopsided smile.
And on Thanksgiving Day, there he was, sitting down at the Dobbs table next to Royell, across from Brad Beale, a real radio man.
Royell didn’t wait a moment. “This is my fiancé, Roy, Brad—he is a broadcaster himself, or will be as soon as he finds a job. Do you know of any openings for a real steady worker?” Roy blushed.
Royell’s dad cleared his throat. “Some say that radio is on the way out,” he noted.
Brad said he would gladly inquire about openings at WBE and put in a good word for Ray if an opening came up.
“Roy,” said Royell.
Later, Roy cornered Brad by the refrigerator and obtained not only Avis Burnham’s address—Number 7J, Dalemoor Apartments, Bangor—but also her home telephone number. “Her real name is Montana Montez,” said Brad. “Mexican.” He winked.
Roy kept the number in his billfold for three days. The BBC Handbook was rather definite on this point: “Never phone radio celebrities at their homes,” it said. “Radio is a strenuous life, and broadcasters require relaxation and rest. Unsolicited phone calls, well meaning as they may be, are a drain on their energies. If you should ever come into possession of a radio star’s private phone number, destroy it immediately so that it can’t fall into the wrong hands.”
But Roy needed the company of an older and wiser woman. Royell was trying to hurry along the marriage by luring him into compromising situations. She lay in his arms on the Bradleys’ basement couch and planted hot kisses on him, stroked the front of his pants, unbuttoned her blouse, placed his hand on her breast. Her breast felt small and damp. “Not yet,” he said, “not yet.”
“When?” she whispered.
“When I get into radio and get settled in a long-term position.”
“Sometimes I wonder if you really love me, Roy Bradley,” she said, putting her breast back into its hammock.
That evening, Roy slipped over to the Cape Hope Cafe and dialed Avis’s number from the pay phone in the foyer.
Five rings, his heart pounding, and then a click, and a deep female voice said, “Yeah? Who’s this? What you want?”
Roy let out his breath. He said, “My name is Roy Bradley and I’m calling from Piscacatawamaquoddymoggin. You ask, who am I? and I suppose to you I’m only a fan, and yet I think I truly know you, Miss Montez. At least, I’d like you to give me that chance.”
There was a long pause, and then she laughed. “Well, ain’t you something!”
She laughed again and Roy heard the tinkle of ice in a glass. “I’m in no shape to meet anybody at the moment,” she said. “I’m standing by the window in nothing but a dirty silk chemise, one strap falling loose over my shoulder, my lipstick smudged, a glass of Coke and bourbon in my hand, watching a green neon EAT sign flash on and off across a deserted street, and weeping like a teenage shopgirl because my lover, Leo Wynn, phoned about fifteen minutes ago and told me he forgot that this is his bowling night and he ain’t coming. Do you believe that, Mr. Bradley?”
Roy had to admit that he didn’t. It was Sunday and no bowling league in the world conducted scheduled matches on Sunday nights.
She took a drag on a cigarette. “I’m a woman, Roy. And women have needs too.”
“I’d like to be there with you now. It would be entirely up to you, of course, but I would like to be.”
“What would you like to do if you were here, Roy?”
His hand shook and he had to brace it against the wall, but his voice was calm. “I’d like to remove that dirty silk chemise, strap by strap, and hold you close to me. I’d like to take the glass and the cigarette and put them on the bedside table and kiss you. I’d like to do anything you’d want me to do.”
Just then, there was a knock on her door. She excused herself and set down the phone. The door opened. Somebody came into the room. “Hi,” she said softly, and then Roy could hear the unmistakable silence of a close embrace. The embrace went on and on, a long long kiss, and the glass fell
to the floor and shattered and the ice skittered across the floor. Then there were footsteps, one pair, and the creaking of bedsprings. She moaned. Roy could hear the silk chemise lifted from her body. Whoever it was had a little trouble unfastening the strap. Then a jacket hit the floor, then shoes, then a belt and holster and a gun, then a pair of pants with change and keys in the pockets, then a pair of boxer shorts. The mystery lover did not remove his socks, Roy noted. Then the springs creaked again. “Oh,” she said. “Oh yes. Oh darling.” The bed began to rock and Avis moaned and finally Roy put the telephone receiver back on the hook and hiked home.
Avis was off the air the next day. In her place was Karen Comfort, Front Line Nurse, sponsored by L’Amour Brand Nougat and Macaroons—“the story of a beautiful woman torn between the needs of others and…the hunger in her own heart”—had Avis been canceled?
He went to the Cape Hope Cafe and called her, and her number was busy. He sat at the counter and ordered a coffee. “You still at the puzzle plant?” asked Sandy Doodad, the waitress. “People say you’re going to be leaving Piscacatawamaquoddymoggin, Roy.” She was sweet on him, though she was married to Bobo.
“That’s correct,” said Roy. “I’ll be leaving soon, perhaps next week.” This astonished him, his saying it out loud before he had even thought it.
Poor Sandy. Married to a Doodad, living in a dumpy yellow bungalow with a yardful of trash and two nasty dogs who bit children and other dogs.
He dialed Avis’s number again and she answered, her voice hollow with fatigue.
“What’s wrong, Montana?” he asked.
“Oh, you don’t have time to listen to my troubles, Roy, you’re young, you have your whole life ahead of you,” she said. “My life is over. I just can’t see that there’s any good in people. They all seem pretty rotten and low-down to me. I don’t know why I’m still living.”
“Don’t talk like that,” he said.
“Roy, I’m thirty-four. I’m too old to start over. I want a regular fellow. I’m sick of used furniture, Roy. This radio life is nothing but a cheat. My heart has been broke so many times it won’t ever be normal again.” She sobbed into the phone, and Roy began to feel weepy too.
“I’ll come to you tonight,” he said. “I’ll come and I’ll never leave you, Montana. I promise.”
“It’s too late, Roy,” she said. And then she hung up. When he called back, her line was busy. Off the hook, he figured. He ran home, fished a twenty out of his cash jar, and caught the last bus to Bangor, arriving at two a.m., and dashed to the Dalemoor Apartments and rang her buzzer. No answer. He buzzed again and again. He knocked, and the door slowly swung in to reveal an empty room, dusty, and a day bed, coverless, and a hotplate and a kettle of cold beans with marshmallows in them, and a wall calendar with a photo of a Vermont winter scene, a cheap nightstand with a gooseneck lamp (no bulb) and a black ashtray containing four butts with lipstick smudges. Roy held one to his lips.
Royell was anxious as Christmas approached. “We could scoot up to New Hampshire and get hitched by a justice of the peace,” she said. “No need for a big hullabaloo. I’ll keep my babysitting job, and you can quit at the puzzle plant and look for a position in broadcasting.”
“I’ll think about it,” said Roy.
“We’ve been thinking about it for years,” she pointed out. “I don’t think that thinking is what we need to do. Doing is what we need to do. That’s what I think.” She cried, “What more does a person need than someone to love them and a couple grand in the bank?” She was starting to notice her classmates’ pictures in the Piscacatawamaquoddymoggin Pilot, slender and radiant brides on the arms of earnest and sincere young husbands. “Why should we wait until we’re old to start living?” she told Roy.
“What’s wrong with me that I can’t get started in life?” Roy asked his dad one morning over breakfast, waffles with maple syrup oozing from the pores. “One day I want to be a broadcaster and the next day I don’t.”
“Radio is not your métier,” Doc said. “You’re a fisherman, and you don’t realize it yet, that’s all.”
Roy shook his head. “I’m almost nineteen and I’m still living at home.”
That day he consulted a local career counselor named Aadlund who also sold trailer hitches and motorized TV antennas. He gave Roy a test, which consisted of stirring water in a basin. “The patterns of stirring show a lot about you,” he told Roy. He watched Roy stir for a while and suggested barbering.
Barbering, he explained, is like broadcasting, except that the announcer stands behind the listener and snips his hair. “There’s an opening for a barber in Smallton, just up the pike. The one they had went berserk a week ago, and the shop is for sale cheap. My cousin is the real-estate agent. He’s particular about who it goes to, but I’ll put in a good word.”
Roy had not been to Smallton since he was eleven and attended the Smallton Swine Exposition. He remembered the pigs screeching as their owners whacked them with canes, trying to steer them up chutes. Smallton was inland, populated by farmers, a torpid breed. On the other hand, the puzzle plant was not thriving—sales of puzzles of seascapes had declined with the advent of television—and it was rumored to be on the verge of shutting down. And Royell was breathing harder and harder down his neck. She called four times a day, she dropped in to talk, she wanted to go driving, she wanted to take her clothes off.
“I’m an old-fashioned guy. I don’t take advantage of women,” he told her when she hoisted her skirt to show him a small bruise on her thigh.
“It’s not taking advantage if the woman offers,” she said.
So he decided to buy the barbershop, using the two thousand dollars in bait shop profits as a down payment, and learn to cut hair. Royell offered to come along as a manicurist, but he said Smallton was not a manicure town. “We’ll save up our money, get married, find a radio job, and settle down,” he told her. “You see if it doesn’t happen just that way.”
She made him make love to her one night while her parents were at bingo. It was better than he thought it would be. “You’re getting me all hot and bothered,” he said, panting, groping around with his tongue. “You see?” she said. “It’s better in bed with all your clothes off, isn’t it.” He groaned and moaned and slid around until his body was slick with sweat and he thought his heart would burst like a milkweed pod. He lost his mind for a moment and his voice went high and warbly.
“It’s good, isn’t it,” she cried, as he lay back, trembling, his ammunition spent, his cannon crew exhausted. “You see what marriage could do for you? It could make you smile, Roy Bradley.”
He went to Smallton and took over the barbershop the next day. It was a drafty one-room storefront with four chairs, green beadboard paneling, big prints of hunting dogs, and a plate-glass window that looked out on an empty street, a vacant lot, and Bud’s Pamphlet&Magazine Rental, which seemed to be mainly in the porno business. There was a picture of a woman in the front window unzipping her leather bodice. She looked much as Roy had imagined Avis.
The barber, whose name was Poodles, sat in one of the shop’s two chairs, crooning to himself, rocking, jiggling his right foot. He was pudgy and pink and nicely dressed for a lunatic. Mr. Aadlund’s cousin the agent was with him. “Take it easy, honey,” he told the barber. “You’ll get your burger in a jiffy. And then we’ll go home and watch Sea Hunt.”
“Here’s the clipper,” he said to Roy. “The combs are in the alcohol jar. The thing to remember about haircuts is, if it don’t look good at first, keep trying and eventually it will come out right. And if it don’t, then it’ll grow back. So don’t be afraid to cut. There’s no permanent loss with a haircut.”
The two of them helped the barber to his feet and out the door to the car, a late-model Eldorado. “Poodles here was a heck of a barber in his day, but he took the work too seriously,” the agent said. “Don’t you make that mistake. Enjoy!”
There were fourteen regular customers, Roy learned, all of whom
wanted a little off the top and not too short on the sides. It took weeks for their hair to grow out, and Roy passed the time reading some of Bud’s rental pornographic materials so as to have interesting remarks to make on a range of topics, but it soon dawned on him that barbering was a long stretch of sameness: same haircuts, same talcum, same talk. Sometimes, a customer would carry on both sides of the conversation by himself. “So—how you been?” he’d say. “Well, can’t complain,” he’d reply. “Yourself? I’ve been worse. Looks cloudy. Yessir. Looks like we might get some rain. Looks like it, all right. Should be good for fishin’. I heard someone say they were biting pretty good out around the sewage outlet. Izzat right? Yeah, I heard a couple guys got their limits. Huh. Well, isn’t that something. You can say that again.” Roy slept sixteen hours a day, and summer passed quickly, and the fall.
One day, noticing that his own hair was a mite long, Roy asked Bud for a trim, not too short, and Bud said, “Sure, no problem,” and he took the scissors in hand and snip-snip-snipped while talking Roy’s ear off about a favorite brochure of his in which fat girls wrestled in a vat of cream-of-celery soup, and ten minutes later, Roy’s head looked like a used-carpet remnant. “How do you like it?” asked Bud. “I think like would be too strong a word,” murmured Roy.
He locked the door, pulled the CLOSED shade, turned out the lights, and lay on the floor with his knees drawn up to his chin. He remained in seclusion for days, overwhelmed by waves of sadness. “You are no good,” he thought. “No good to yourself or anyone else. Not worth the powder to blow you to hell.” The haircut seemed to bear this out. “You will never amount to anything and certainly not in broadcasting.”
The Book of Guys Page 12