by Charles Bock
“Well, the cops just laughed, like: What are you complaining about? But tell you what, when the Review-Journal did the big story, who was laughing then? Even that didn't matter though. Turns out, the cops still clear Fremont all the time, and the bums keep coming back anyway.”
Newell was finally looking at him.
“I'm not making sense,” Kenny admitted.
A yellow light. The Reliant stopped short. “What I'm saying—wait. Okay, here, when I was little . . .” He paused again, concentrating now, his bottom lip pinching over the top.
“Okay, like my dad. He used to tell me they purposefully built those freeways to surround the Strip and Fremont. If the race riots came, the army'd put tanks on top of the freeway. I guess they were supposed to fence off the black section of town from the casinos. My dad told me that this way, the tourists would be safe to gamble.”
A passing beat. Kenny added: “You can't really believe anything he says when he's drunk, though.”
“This is all I mean.” He paused once more. “My dad. He's like everyone else, you know? Like the police and the mayor and all the plans people make. Or, or—like driving around with the extinguisher. How people say stuff. Or when I . . . I mean.” Kenny grimaced. He took a long breath. “You do something. And maybe it feels right just then. Or you just do something to, you know, just to do it. Don't mean you want it to come out like it does. You can't know how it's gonna come out. You don't really think about it, you know?”
He glanced over, waiting for an answer.
6.4
Ponyboy always thought of it as a crutch, to be honest. A defense mechanism, only with more self-promotion. Cheri would harp on the redemptive powers of the imaginative act, saying Really, and I'm serious, and Fine, fuckhead, be condescending. A million times, Ponyboy had heard the lecture: how imagining the worst moments of her life being projected onto the silver screen was the very thing that allowed Cheri to survive those moments; how envisioning herself as a character in that movie created the distance that was so key to calming her. She'd go on about character arcs and emotional journeys until the friggin’ cows came home. Only, this one time, about a week after everything between them and Jabba went down, Cheri hadn't lectured Ponyboy. She'd merely looked at him with all this pity and sadness, and said she'd been thinking. “My character's getting to the point where she should be learning from her mistakes, you know? I think maybe I should be acting like that in real life, too.”
Didn't need to be Sherlock f'in Clouseau to decipher the undertone there. Didn't need to be some nautical engineer to understand rough waves were ahead. Although, even without the trouble in their relationship, even if the movie of Cheri's life hadn't included cryptic jibes, Pony-boy would have been distrustful of the whole device. Why? He couldn't say. Maybe it was as simple as someone getting turned off by qualities in other people that they can't stand in themselves. It could have been that Ponyboy shunned Cheri's movie fantasies as a reaction to his own inclination for drama. Maybe since Ponyboy's life already involved an act of flight, one that was particularly real and gritty and physical, he saw something plastic in the notion of mentally depositing himself in a theater's back row, using the dispassionate eye of a surgeon to consider the gamut of reactions at his disposal. It was too desperate. Too pathetic.
Except now he was in back of that ice cream truck and the girl with the shaved head kept looking at him and her eyes were deep and doelike and smudged black with kohl, so very resolute in her belief in him—almost as if she were willing Ponyboy to be worth her belief. And in her gaze, Ponyboy felt exposed. Her remark about people hurting people for no reason had nailed him in a particularly sensitive area, and while he could tell her comment hadn't been specifically pointed toward him; while he could see the girl didn't know what she was saying, was buzzing too hard to have a clue about the gravity of, well, anything, still, Ponyboy felt all sorts of intense and contrary emotions. Whether he should keep making moves on the girl with the shaved head? If he should try to keep her on the hook like he had promised Cheri? The thing about the tattoos sounded like the direct opposite of what the girl had said about unnecessary cruelty. But then again, her remark pretty much applied to every fucking single thing that Ponyboy had gotten Cheri involved with. Trying to juggle all these thoughts just about had Ponyboy's head exploding.
So then, a world premiere. The first-look sneak preview.
A gradual fade, an edit that properly conveyed the distance of Pony-boy's thoughts at the current moment, the viewer transported away from the darkening and blurry events in the ice cream truck, and toward a newly forming scene. The entrance of the Slinky Fox. Cheri Blossom emerging from the padded doors, Cheri moving at a hurried clip, having changed from her work clothes into her current fave outfit: satiny canary-yellow sweatpants with the word JUICY on the ass and a coordinated tank top. Her dominatrix boots had given way to flip-flops, which were making scratchy sounds, as they weren't built for fast walking. Cheri passed the bouncer and told him she was in a hurry and was sorry, she would settle up with him tomorrow, and as she kept on going, she cursed under her breath because leaving early had not excused her from tipping out everyone, and these finances were only furthering her doubts concerning the wisdom of what she was doing. In this scene, the strap of Cheri's gym bag was digging into her shoulder, and the bag was open, and some of her work supplies (a sports bra, a box of tampons with all their strings cut off, a backup pack of fake nails) were jostling. When something fell out, Cheri didn't notice.
Which was an opportunity.
In his imagined movie, Ponyboy's vision of the comic book guy took the form of a thirty-year-old five-hundred-pound virgin. It was a foregone conclusion that this tub of lard didn't have the cojones to venture within a pissing tit of Cheri, especially after Ponyboy had talked with him. Even if Comic Guy went and rented himself some courage, Cheri had to know better than to hook up with him, because that would be signing the guy's death certificate. Nonetheless, Ponyboy found himself concerned about the notion of his girlfriend listening to some jackass she'd met while stripping. Ponyboy assumed that three-dimensional tattoos were impossible, but with supercomputers and fiber optic lasers and all that shit, who knew. To Ponyboy it sounded like the Comic Guy had captured Cheri's ear with a plan that maybe was out there and sci-fi, but that also sounded cool and interesting, the type of shit Ponyboy might want on his body.
So the jackoff's plan might actually happen, while on the other hand, Ponyboy never failed to have plans blow up in his grille.
In the movie of Ponyboy's life, the comic book guy may have been obese, slovenly, and physically inferior to Ponyboy, but he was superior to Ponyboy in every other way. And he was outside the Slinky Fox, picking up whatever had fallen out of Cheri's workout bag. He was catching up with Cheri, handing her that stupid thing.
And here, in a trick borrowed from ye olden days of filmmaking, Vaseline would get dabbed around the camera lens. Blurring would occur, the scene slowly dissolving.
No longer Ponyboy's movie of Cheri's life, but now a flashback.
Fringed and overstuffed pillows abounding. The teasing sounds of laughter like the best kind of music.
Cheri had done laundry, and was wearing one of Ponyboy's freshly clean concert T's as a bed shirt, its faded cloth hanging comfortably to the middle of her thighs. She was lying on her canopy bed and her legs were jutting out from beyond the end of the shirt, appearing as smooth and golden as anything that had ever existed.
In the flashback, Cheri knew how good she looked, and she was a little frisky, and laughed, playfully slapping Ponyboy's shoulder, telling him to be serious.
He held up three videotapes. The green tape was directed by a former box cover starlet—Ponyboy said it was from a series that catered to a couple's sensual needs. “Might be good for syncopation or, you know, whatever.”
She said she had not gone seven straight days without sex since, shit . . .
The yellow one, Ponyboy continued, was f
rom a “best of” series—maybe there were moves he and Cheri could steal.
And the thought of Ponyboy being Mr. Abstinence was even more absurd, Cheri said. No way he was going to make it through a week without some of her home cooking, she said.
She thrust her boobs underneath his nose. Look at these. Her voice went intentionally high, played for comic effect: Tell me Papi no like.
“As for the red . . . Well, forget about that one.”
“Pony.”
“If we wait, we'll get more into it. We'll have all these techniques and pent-up energy.”
Ponyboy had note cards. He already had some thoughts about stuff she should remember for the camera.
“Gee, Professor Hard-on, I didn't know there was going to be a test. Too bad it's not going to be a hands-on exam.”
She razzed and teased and Ponyboy jammed the yellow tape into the VCR and halfway through scene one, abstinence be damned. That easily, the week that was supposed to be devoted to preparation turned into a continuous bout of on-the-job training. Brute and primal at moments, their sex leapt beyond the parameters of simple physicality, combusting into something ludicrous and funny, like the time they went into Cheri's walk-in closet and tried to use the metal clothes rack to replicate something on a trapeze, and Ponyboy kept checking to see what was happening on the television, and finally Cheri was laughing so hard she lost her grip on the bar and the two of them went crashing down. Just as easily their sex would turn tender and wonderful—they'd be covered with sweat and tired and at the same time wired like General Electric, screwing like maniacs, and shabazz, for no real reason, she would stare into Ponyboy's eyes, and he would stare back, and then they were together in their own private universe. And if Cheri never quite understood why it was so important that she be the one to remember all the technical jazz (You have to remember, Ponyboy'd say, getting weird), if every few hours or so, Ponyboy called and updated her on how the contracts were progressing (All systems full ahead ), or reported nothing but his own excitement (I love you so much, baby), the weird thing was, not for a fraction of a millisecond did she actually believe it was going to take place. In six days, in four days, in three hours, she'd be copulating in front of a room full of people, and the preparations and the progression and, yes, the event to which all this was leading, the whole caboodle seemed unreal to her. Sure, duh, Cheri understood that a camera was going to tape her getting nailed, that these images were going to be reproduced and mass-produced, that lonely men would be in their lonely little homes jacking off to a taped clip of her. She understood that if her mom and grandma and kindergarten teacher knew about her stripping career, they would have declared her damned, so, boy howdy, would she be going to hell for this. It was sleazy. Was slutty. While doing her daily routine of stomach crunches, Cheri would be taking care to keep her legs elevated and together, and she'd momentarily think about just how slutty it was, and she'd lose count of reps. And yet Cheri would recover and continue with her crunches, getting back to the business at hand. Because, in the parlance of her boyfriend, when the grease left the grill and the burger hit the bun, only one part of this little scheme impacted her immediate and daily life, only one part of it felt real. This was corny, Cheri admitted it was. As much as she wanted to shout her news down onto the valley, what she wanted to scream was too cheesy for words; she could never have possibly explained it.
The one thing about this scheme that felt real to Cheri, the single thing she could literally roll around in her mouth as if it were a marble, was her belief in her man. Sure he didn't brush his teeth more than once every four days, and when he did, he scrubbed so hard that white drool ended up on the bathroom walls, in his hair, and, yes, once or twice, on his ass. How you brushed your teeth and got toothpaste on your ass, Cheri never could figure, but her man did it. And okay it was true, he used her purse as his personal ATM. And whenever she took him to the movies, he crunched food through all the previews. And one time when the preview came on for the animated movie about a horse that could never be tamed, at the part where the sunset was glowing and the little girl was hugging her horsie around its neck, and the cute animated child said, Spirit, you'll always be in my heart, admittedly, Ponyboy had cupped his hands around his mouth and screamed BOOOOO. Her boyfriend was indeed The Smelly Musclebound Asshole Who Heckled Little Girls and Their Cartoon Horsies. The man she loved had spent a full, uninterrupted month trying to embed cordless phones into vibrators, to this day insisting that, done correctly, Hands On Phone Sex was a surefire gold mine. Ponyboy was constantly dumping his shit all over the floor, peeing on the toilet seat, blasting the abomination he called music at a volume that caused the neighbor's plants to wither and go brown. He was preternaturally absent whenever it came time to pay his share of the utilities, prepare a meal, or wash one goddamn dish, although if Jasmine, Rain, or any of Cheri's other friends from work were over, wasn't it something how Ponyboy just happened to be hanging out? Too many times Cheri had caught him staring at Jasmine's big round caboose, and whenever she called him on it, he got angry—What, how'm I not going to look at that? —like it was her fault for catching him. Cheri would bet her tits that Pony-boy had cheated on her, at least three specific women she could think of, and she had suspicions about more. This was off the top of her head. Without even getting into the breast implant thing, her boyfriend's desire to have her do hard-core porn notwithstanding, it wasn't real hard to see the scales of justice tilting heavily on one side. In the hard cold light of truth Cheri definitely could see the verdict, she could ask herself, just what the hell she was doing with Ponyboy.
But what was funny was how easily the light of truth could change, how the correct verdict wasn't necessarily the obvious one. Some boyfriends, you came to them with your problem and they said, What have you done now. Some said, Don't worry, it will be all right. Legend had it, there were boyfriends who responded: What can I do to help? But with Ponyboy, you shared your problem and, right off the bat, he laughed. Then he said your problem wasn't even a problem, you should hear what's happening to his friend, this guy who had a f’in BATTERY shoved through his nose. Ponyboy would get to talking, and while he talked, he'd raid your fridge, because he'd been smoking your dope all night, he had the munchies, and so now, while he was playing down your troubles and topping them, he also was spitting chunks of your food all over, going on and on about the guy with a battery in his nose, and maybe you hadn't been listening correctly, because somehow the story had morphed, it had turned into something involving Ponyboy being camped out in this drainage pipe, Ponyboy trying to sleep while just down the way from him, this fucking space alien was boning some chick. A story about rain coming down and tons of water flowing through the drainage pipe and the space alien didn't have a penis, it had like these big long tentacles, so boning maybe wasn't the right word, and it's raining so bad that Ponyboy couldn't stay in the pipe, but at the same time, he's got to stay in there, cuz how many times do you get to see a space alien bang some chick? And Cheri, in her kitchen, listening to this, Cheri would find the scales of justice tipping even further, because none of her problems were being solved. In fact, thinking about it, she had all her old problems, plus her fridge was empty, and her stash was gone, and now, in addition to being filthy and obnoxious, in addition to lying, mooching, and philandering, in addition to being an opportunist and an egomaniac and just a fucking dick, there was the very real and disturbing possibility that Ponyboy was a full-on, batteries included, no assembly required, MORON.
An insatiable lightness took her. A gust of uneasy delight. She sat and laughed and finally could not take it anymore. “Stop shitting me. Was there really an alien?”
Ponyboy gave her this constipated look. “Haven't you been listening? I'm not talking about an alien here. I'm fucking talking about SURVIVAL.”
And well, how was she supposed to keep a straight face? It was like watching your dog shit on some lady's lawn right when that woman's coming out of her house. It was like walking d
own the street and seeing a little kitten, so happy and perfect and cute that it was all you could do not to kick that little fucker. It was the moment when you saw something that you knew was fucked up and wrong, but still could not help yourself; when you could not control your actions and were going on autopilot, and maybe later you would feel bad about it and pledge to be a better person, but right now, oh well. The wrongness was the endearing part. Wrongness was the bond. The turn-on. And yeah, Ponyboy may have very well been a filthy obnoxious lying mooching philandering opportunist. Probably he was a moron to boot. But he was Cheri's moron. Whatever problems the two of them had in an empty kitchen, they had together. Whatever bullshit they had to face, they would survive together. And so what if Cheri could not sit still for ten seconds, think about the idea of a video camera capturing her naked body, and feel anything except a desire to run for the hills. So the hell what. Because the idea of getting filmed with her man, the thought of all those lonely people cueing up the videotape and watching her and Ponyboy—well, that was a lemur of a whole other stripe.
So Cheri watched his pornos and even studied his stupid-ass note cards. She got more turned on and the sex between them got filthier, and she shouted the nastiest names she could think of, the ones that hurt him worse than anything. Cheri told him, You don't deserve this pussy, you piece of shit, you fucking cocksucker, and she felt more powerful, more excited, closer to him than ever before. Their plan moved forward and Cheri followed his leads, and when the big day had arrived, she'd been full of nervous energy, and it was as if the two of them were embarking on a weekend trip up to Mount Charleston, something they'd always talked about.
Ponyboy drove. Let Cheri listen to whatever music she wanted—a first for him. He kept to himself, quiet, watching the road. They bypassed the route to the Strip, which surprised Cheri. “I guess I figured we'd be booked into a room at the Palms,” she said. “Somewhere classy.”