Budding Prospects: A Pastoral (Contemporary American Fiction)

by T. Coraghessan Boyle

  We walked on. I glanced up and saw that the streetlights were truncated, dissolved in cloud, earth and sky become one. “You know, that Jones is a real pussy,” Raul said, and Rudy sniggered. I realized at that moment that I liked Rudy about as much as I liked snakes or trunk murderers, and that I liked his hunchbacked friend even less. And Jones—Jones was one of ten thousand people you meet casually and will never lay eyes on again, but still there was something about him that unsettled me. It was the name, I guess. Or the cool, faintly ironic look of appraisal he’d given me as we were introduced.

  Suddenly I felt very weary of the whole business. Everything—Rudy and Raul, the dream of the summer camp, the fog, the hour, the city, my own lust-ridden, drugged and exhausted body—was shit. I wanted to go home to bed, but I didn’t. I kept walking, listening to the mesmeric scrape of our footsteps on the wet pavement. Halfway down the block, as if to let me know he was still there and functioning, however minimally, Gesh pressed something into my hand. It was the stub of the joint we’d been smoking, cold and long dead. I flung it away. A moment later we reached the end of the block and crowded into the doorway of what looked to be a deserted storefront. Raul knocked.

  “Yeah?” came a voice from within.

  “It’s me, Raul. I brought some friends.”

  There was the sound of a bolt sliding back. Fog closed in on us like the breath of a beast. “What is this place, anyway?” Gesh said.

  The door opened on a dimly lit interior: bare linoleum floor, bare white fluorescent tubes, two graffiti-scrawled folding chairs leaning forlornly against the back wall. We shuffled in, hands in pockets, shoulders hunched. I had no idea what to expect—neither Rudy nor Raul would say anything other than “It’s a trip,” and “You’re really going to dig this”—and found myself suppressing an urge to whistle as Raul closed the door behind us.

  Inside, to the left of the door and invisible from the street, stood a makeshift desk—a slab of plywood set across the seats of four folding chairs. A man in suspenders and a dirty Toms & Jerry T-shirt was easing himself down behind the desk as we entered. He said nothing, merely glanced up at us without interest. A calendar hung crookedly on the wall behind him, open for some obscure and aggravating reason to November. The man’s face was inflamed with some genetic skin disorder, corrugated with angry red lumps as if he’d blundered into a beehive, and strands of lank hair descended from his balding crown to his shoulders. A cigar box, a copy of The Wall Street Journal and a nightstick lay on the desk before him as if they’d been designed to complement one another. I’d expected a party, an after-hours club, a sleazy apartment with a couple of girls. But this? What was this?

  The man—host, proprietor, whatever he was—looked bored. He pushed the hair out of his face and gestured at the blank wall that ran half the length of the room—plasterboard, painted white and already gray with grime, a cheap addition. I was puzzled. Storage room? Office? Then I noticed the holes. Holes punched at random in the flat smooth plasterboard face. There must have been ten or twelve of them, none higher than waist-level and all about two and a half inches in diameter.

  “Ten bucks a pop,” the man said.

  Enlightenment came more quickly to Gesh than me. “You mean … you mean we stick our … and somebody … ?” It was as if he’d asked the waiter at Ma Maison what the silverware was for. The man behind the desk simply stared at him. “Shit,” Gesh laughed, “and we don’t even know who’s back there, right? Be it man or beast.”

  We all swiveled our heads, even the proprietor, to contemplate the silent inanimate face of the wall.

  “Who gives a shit?” Raul said, his eyes pools of oil. “What you going to do, go home and jerk off?”

  I was stunned. This was crude, this was obscene, the ultimate in depravity, moral turpitude and plain bad taste. Talk about the zipless fuck, this was real anonymity, cold and soulless as an execution. I was repelled. But as I watched Raul, Rudy and Gesh count out their money, I began to see the perverse allure of it too. Dear Mom, don’t try to find me or anything but I’m writing to tell you I’m all right and I’ve got a steady job and plenty to eat. I stepped up to the desk and gave Tom-&-Jerry a ten-dollar bill.

  “Pick your hole,” he said, handing me a ticket stub.

  “What’s this?” I said.

  “This place is hetero, right?” Gesh’s voice was slow. He was already standing before the wall, fumbling with his zipper.

  No one answered him.

  “The ticket goes in the hole, pal,” Tom-&-Jerry said. And then his face changed expression for the first time, the hint of a grin lifting his lip a millimeter or two. “Like at the movies.”

  I moved to the far end of the wall, feeling foolish, feeling ashamed and naked, feeling stoned. The hole was neatly cut, edges smoothed, but it was encircled by a corona of dirt and some sad joker had scrawled Abandon hope, all ye who enter here just above it. What is lust? I thought, dropping the ticket into the aperture. What is flesh? What is mind? I unfastened my zipper, found that I had an erection, and penetrated the wall. Gesh was laughing, Rudy concentrating. Beside me, pressed to the wall like a penitent, Raul moaned softly, his features bloated with rapture. I could hear the hum of the fluorescent lights, sadness crushed me like a fist and someone—something—took hold of me with a grip as moist and gentle as love.

  Chapter 3

  Grim, silent, dehydrated and disappointed, hemmed in by eight bags of clean laundry, miscellaneous groceries and three coolers of ice, we passed under the great arching portals of the Golden Gate Bridge, skirted Sausalito and plunged into the blistering hellish heat of Route 101 North. We had six dollars left—for gas—the ravaged exhaust system screamed like a kamikaze coming on for the kill, and a cordon of semis—STAY BACK; DON’T TREAD ON ME; PETROCHEM LTD.—spewed diesel fumes in our faces. Gesh lit a cigarette. I flicked on the radio and got fire and brimstone, static, and Roy Rogers singing “Happy Trails.” We were on our way back to bondage.

  The previous day—the Fourth—we’d awakened sometime after noon to a barrage of cherry bombs and the tat-a-tat-tat of firecrackers. Startled from concupiscent dreams, I thought at first that war had broken out, made the groping but inescapable connection between the hiss of Roman candles and the birth of the Republic, and then snatched desperately for the glass of water standing on the night table. If I could just manage to reach that glass, there was a chance I might survive; if not, I was doomed. Sun tore through the curtains like an avenging sword, the sky was sick with smog and the stink of sulfur hung on the air. Straining, my fingers trembling with alcoholic dyscrasia, monkeys shrieking and war drums thumping in my head, I managed to make contact with and knock over the glass, and I lay there gasping like some sea creature carried in with the tide and left to the merciless sun and the sharp probing beaks of the gulls. My eyes failed at that point and I dozed (dreams of staggering across the Atacama Desert, ears and nostrils full of sand, tongue stuck to the roof of my mouth), until I was jolted awake again by the next concussive report. There was nothing for it but to get up and drink a quart of orange juice and six cups of coffee.

  Gesh was sitting at the kitchen table, calmly spooning up poached egg with ketchup and green chili sauce, when I stumbled into the room. I tilted my head under the faucet and drank till I could feel it coming up, then tossed the coffee pot on the stove and found a can of orange-juice concentrate in the freezer. Gesh cracked a beer and smoothed out the sports page. “So what’s on for today?” he said without glancing up.

  As the block of orange juice sucked back from the can and dropped into the pitcher with a fecal plop, the ramifications of Gesh’s query hit me, and I realized with relief that he was no more inclined than I to dwell on the previous night’s debacle—spilled milk, water under the bridge and all that—but was looking instead, with courage and optimism, to the future. “There’s a cookout,” I said, and explained that I was planning to visit some friends, consume charred meat and watermelon, and lie creatively about my where
abouts over the course of the past four months. After that, there were the fireworks at Fisherman’s Wharf, and then I was going to check out Aorta’s band, the Nostrils, at a club on Haight Street.

  Gesh scraped an English muffin and said he thought he’d pass on the cookout. He’d been thinking about getting cleaned up and going downtown around six for dinner and the fireworks.

  When I got back at six-thirty, Gesh was just heading out the door. He was wearing a Hawaiian shirt that featured yellow parrots and blue palm trees, his hair was slicked down with water and he reeked of aftershave. “Great,” he said, too loudly. “I thought you weren’t going to show up. Listen”—he was drunk, excited, wound up about something—“can you give me a ride downtown?”

  “Where to?”

  He drew a crumpled bar napkin from his pocket, read off an address and then hustled me down the steps and into the car. “Listen,” he said, “I’m going to have to can the fireworks—if that’s all right.”

  I shrugged, watching him. “Sure.”

  It seemed that he’d wandered into a bar full of women that afternoon—“Incredible, Felix: all of them foxes and they must have outnumbered the guys three to one”—and had made a date with one of them for the evening. Her name was Yvette, she was tall and high-busted and wore a slit skirt. Gesh tapped his comb to the beat of the radio and rhapsodized about her all the way downtown. “See you later,” he said as I dropped him off, and he sauntered up the sidewalk like the romantic lead in a Broadway musical. Suddenly I felt depressed.

  The fireworks went up and came down. Pop-pop. Bang. I watched them glumly, had a couple of greasy eggrolls and then drove over to the club where the Nostrils were playing. Three dollars at the door, a handstamp that showed two pig’s nostrils like a pair of bifocals, more earrings and pink hair. I picked a table near the stage, chain-drank tequila and tonic because I felt conspicuous—who is this joker sitting by himself, anyway?—and settled down to wait for the show to start.

  An hour later the Nostrils stepped out on the darkened stage, tuned their instruments and blasted into a pulse-pounding version of “God Bless America” as the lights came up. Almost immediately people began slam dancing under the stage, and a couple of harried-looking waitresses in change aprons began to clear the tables out of the way. I got up, stood at the bar, and because service was slow, ordered two drinks at once.

  The Nostrils were an all-girl band. The lead singer, who looked like Bela Lugosi in drag, played guitar and fronted the group, while Aorta, standing beside a co-backup vocalist so emaciated she could have stepped out of one of the photographs of Dachau, ululated weird falsetto chants over the buzzsaw guitar riffs. At the rear of the stage, huddled over their instruments like praying mantises, the bass player and drummer hammered away at tribal rhythms. The music went on, without change, for an hour. One song segued into another, and all were alike—or perhaps they were simply doing an extended version of a single song. I couldn’t tell. Then, in mid-beat, the music died so abruptly I thought the plug had been pulled, the lights faded and the dancers stopped slamming one another long enough to bellow incoherent threats through the sudden silence.

  “Felix,” Aorta said, threading her way through the crowd. “Glad you could make it. Got the weekend off, huh? How’d you like us?”

  I shook her hand, forever cold, and wondered how to respond to this effusive rush of communication. For Aorta, this was practically filibustering. “Gesh and I came down for the weekend,” I said.

  “He here?” craning her neck to scan the crowd.

  “No.” I took a sip of my drink, and then lied: “The music was hot.”

  This was polite, and a neat conversational ploy as well, but Aorta didn’t have a chance to respond. A girl had appeared beside her, and through the sweat, runny mascara and streaked pancake makeup, I saw that she was the Lugosi impersonator. “Vena, this is Felix—he’s a friend of Vogelsang’s.”

  Vena shot me a quick cool glance and then turned to Aorta. “You see who’s in the crowd tonight?”

  Aorta, never one to let her emotions show, imperceptibly widened her eyes as Vena named a name that meant nothing to me. “Who’s that?” I said, and both women turned to look at me as if I’d just emerged from seventeen years in a Siberian gulag. From the gist of what passed between them, I gathered finally that he was a record producer.

  “Let’s tear his head off,” Vena said, lighting a cigarette. “I think we ought to open with ’Burn Ward’ and then hit him with ’Pink and Dead.’“

  “The music was hot the first set,” I said. “Anybody want a drink?” Elbows jostled me, voices shrieked with laughter, the ubiquitous jukebox started up with a roar. Vena was leaning into Aorta and shouting something in her ear. I tapped Aorta’s arm, and she looked up a moment to give me a glance as empty as the spaces between the star—Drink? I pantomimed. Do you want a drink?—and then she turned back to Vena. What could I say? I backed up to the bar and ordered another tequila. I don’t know what I’d expected from Aorta—sympathy, excitement, conversation, sex—but it was clear I wasn’t going to get it. Feeling sorry for myself, feeling as alone and friendless as a dieter at the feast of life, I went home to bed.

  Now, buffeted by the chattering exhaust, billowing fumes and dust devils, I snuck a look at Gesh and saw that he hadn’t exactly been exhilarated and revivified by the holiday either. He was staring out the window of the car, moodily sucking at his cigarette, stolid and silent as a rock. “Some bust of a weekend,” I said, without taking my eyes from the road.

  Gesh merely grunted, but there was an unfathomable depth of bitterness in that grunt, and though he hadn’t said anything about his date with Yvette, I understood that it, too, had been a bust. He morosely tossed his cigarette out the window and into a clump of grass beneath a FIRE HAZARD sign, and then turned to me. “You don’t know the half of it,” he said.

  “Yvette?”

  Gesh flicked off the radio. “I wasn’t going to tell you this—it’s embarrassing—but the more I think about it, it’s so pathetic it’s funny.” He paused to reach behind him and fumble through the cooler for a splinter of ice. “You know, right from the beginning I thought there was something strange about her—it was too good to be true, right? Paradise. A bar full of beautiful women and all of them hot. At first I thought she might be a hooker or something, the way she came on to me in the afternoon, but she wasn’t. We did some kissing and groping at a booth in back and she didn’t say anything so I asked her if she wanted to go somewhere else. ’I’ve got an appointment,’ she says. ’But I’m free tonight.’

  “Okay. So I’m all pumped up and I go over to her apartment thinking I’ve got it made and she meets me at the door in a pair of jeans and a tube top. She looks fantastic, but there’s something about her that just doesn’t sit right. She’s big. Her shoulders are too wide. Then it hits me. But no, I think, that’s crazy, and I look at her again and she’s beautiful, stunning, like she just stepped off the cover of some women’s magazine.

  “We have a drink. She starts coming on like a nymphomaniac but I’m holding back because of that funny feeling I had. I’m on top of her, I’m trying to get her top down and her hands are all over me. ’Listen,’ I say, ’I don’t know how to put this, I mean I hope you won’t be offended or anything, and this is probably insane, but could you tell me something—it’s really important to me.’

  “She looks up at me, cold green eyes, eyes like the water under the Bay Bridge when you go fishing. ’What?’ she says in this tiny little voice.

  “ ’Christ, I don’t know: this is crazy. But tell me, do you … I mean, you wouldn’t happen to have a penis by any chance?’

  “Suddenly her eyes look like they’re sinking into her head, her pupils shriveling up, and she looks like she’s about to cry. And then she holds her hand up in front of my face, two fingers an inch apart. ’Yes,’ she whispers, and I jerk back as if my shirt’s on fire, ’but it’s only a little one.’ “

  It must have
been around seven when we hit the outskirts of Willits. The sun was dropping in the west and igniting the yellow grass of the hills, trees began to leap up along the road, and we passed a succession of neat little houses, as alike as pennies. Gesh was asleep, his head propped up on one arm and playing to and fro like a toy on a spring. I was thinking of the summer camp, of the plants flourishing in the stark sun, of the candy man who was going to buy the whole crop—cash up front—and of what I could do with a hundred and sixty-six thousand dollars, when I noticed that the car in front of me, a VW Bug of uncertain vintage, was behaving erratically. The car had slowed to a crawl and seemed to be listing to the right, as if the road had given way beneath it. As I drew closer and swung out to pass, I saw that the car was mottled with primer paint, bumper-blasted and rusted, and that the right front tire was flat to the rim.

  I was already accelerating, humping up alongside to roar past and reduce the crippled Bug to a dot in the rearview mirror, when I turned to glance at the driver. What I saw was arresting: eyes you could fall into, a nimbus of black ringlets, the long, sculpted fingers and the open palm waving frantically for help. There was a desperation in that face, a needfulness that made my heart turn over. What she saw in return could hardly have inspired confidence—i.e., the battered Toyota, Gesh’s big lolling shaggy head, my intrusive eyes and sweat-plastered hair—but she waved all the harder. My foot fell back from the accelerator.

  Having been raised in New York, I was accustomed to turning my back on all such appeals for aid from strangers. I routinely gave the stiff arm to panhandlers, slammed the door in the faces of Bible salesmen, Avon ladies and Girl Scouts, ground the receiver into its cradle at the hint of a solicitation and strenuously avoided all scenes of human misery and extremity. Ignore him, my mother would say of a man twisted like a burned root, the stubs of three crudely sharpened pencils clenched in his trembling fist. Don’t get involved, she’d hiss as a couple slugged it out over a carton of smashed eggs in the supermarket parking lot. But this was different. This was no half-crazed wino, wife-beater or terminal syphilitic—this was a flower, a beauty, a girl with a face that belonged to Amigoni’s Venus. She pulled over to the shoulder, her damaged wheel rim clanking like a cowbell, and I swung up just ahead of her.