Hot Plastic

by Peter Craig

  The following morning Jerry didn’t answer his phone. After Kevin beat on the door for ten minutes, he finally appeared, climbing into his jeans. The room was saturated with a musty, bear-den smell. He had removed the mirror from the wall, leaving only hooks and wires, and the tables were covered with glasses of auburn liquid. A pair of red satin panties inflated weakly over the air-conditioning vent. The woman was buried under pillows and blankets with just the bend of an elbow visible. Jerry explained in a gravelly voice that they hadn’t gotten much sleep, and he would give Kevin another twenty for the game room if he’d come back in a few hours. The twenty kept rolling up at the edges like an old scroll. Jerry sniffed it, tried to smooth it flat on a wall, and finally handed it to Kevin. “Just put this straight into the change machine. And we should all meet for lunch. We have a lot of important things to talk about.”

  Lunch plans changed into dinner plans, and at six-fifteen they met in the coffee shop that still served breakfast, where they drank tomato juice and listened to the distant clatter of slot machines. Jerry looked as gray as a vampire, while the woman was more yellowish, like an old newspaper. Kevin didn’t look directly at her, but with sly glances he tried to figure out why she’d raised the stakes so heavily: she was an attractive woman, closer to Jerry’s age, although he hated to think that any good-looking contemporary could spoil a functional payment plan. Years ago, she might have been very pretty, with her dimpled cheeks and wide mouth; but now there was a frizzing in her rusty hair and worried lines around bloodshot eyes. She looked like a long history of Saturday nights. Her voice was high and sweet, so deliriously cute that Kevin thought it sounded like a helium-induced party trick. Maybe Jerry liked her dedication to silliness. She never spoke in full sentences, but made animal and car noises and sweeping gestures. She rendered the feeling of sleeping all day by whisking her flat palm over her head with a whoosh; she indicated her mental state by twirling her finger around her ear and saying, “Cuckoo.” It would have been easy enough to assume she was insane; but it appeared more as if she had taken a vow never to be serious, replacing language with some placatory cheerfulness.

  Jerry said, “Now Douglas, I just want you to relax for a second, I don’t want anybody to panic here. I want us all to be friends. Last night was a wild night.”

  “Whoo-wee,” she said.

  “But Melody here is obviously one spectacular lady. I don’t want a whole lot of trouble about this, Douglas, because I’m the dad here. I can make my own decisions. I still can’t believe this little lady doubled down on thirteen and won—but I guess that’s what happens when it’s your night—and believe me, Doug, it was her night. She was coming up big. This is Lady Luck, right here. We finally met her. We came down here at three A.M. and played some more, and then—what was it, about dawn, baby?”

  She made a rooster sound.

  “The point is, Dougie, when you know, you know. Sometimes you got to just roll the dice. Go for it in life. So we went ahead and got crazy.”

  “I have no idea what you people are talking about.”

  “We got hitched. You’re looking at the new Mrs. Daniel Herman.”

  “She married your phony name?”

  “It’s not a phony name—cut it out. He’s kidding. He’ll try to do things like that—you got to be on him like a hawk.” He finished his drink with a last swig and slammed it down. “So how about a congratulations? I’m going to have another Bloody Mary. It’s my honeymoon, for God’s sake. Look at him, he’s speechless. What’s the matter, kid? You’ve never heard of a whirlwind romance?”

  Kevin put his hand across the table to shake hers, soaking his cuff in her tomato juice. She tried to wipe his wrist with a napkin, and she was shaking. Her hands looked spotted and old, as if they’d had a more difficult life than the rest of her. She excused herself and scurried off to get towels from the bathroom. Kevin watched her move in mincing footsteps, then he glanced back at his smirking father.

  “Dad—if you’re going to start running sweetheart cons, why couldn’t you find somebody with money?”

  “So you just assume I’m not serious about this?”

  “I thought those chapels weren’t allowed to marry drunks.”

  “No, you can’t get a tattoo if you’re drunk. Everything else is—you know—pay as you play.”

  “This is the lamest scam in history.”

  “Hey, look—we’ve been on the road a long time, kid. Maybe a little change of pace would be good. She’s here promoting some little business, and she’s got a condo back in L.A. Why not? We’ll settle down, have some home-cooked meals. Do the whole picket-fence thing. I’m not saying I’m going to stop working—but she doesn’t need to know a damn thing. And I tell you what, I think it would be pretty sweet to come home for once and have some fucking stability in our lives. Besides, she’s a lot of fun, Kev. So why don’t you just calm down and try to let your old man be happy. Okay, shut up now, she’s coming back.”

  Kevin sat quietly, thinking for the first time that Colette really had run off with everything, not just money or both of their unwieldy hearts, she’d stolen all the plans. They were off the map, out of gas, and stuck with a hitchhiker.

  EIGHTEEN

  Summer in the San Fernando Valley came like a hot pause in the weather, skies the color of a dirty window. Kevin and Jerry moved into Melody’s basement-floor condo in Reseda, where every afternoon, feet and knees would appear at the top of the entry steps, descend through slats of venetian blinds, and finally become whole people between ferns and wind chimes. Melody had enough friends to fill a bleacher. They swooped around the place with wedding gifts and bottles of wine. They all loved Jerry, who invented personalized lies for each of them: he had motorcycled across Africa, worked on the McGovern campaign, smuggled guns, lived in an ashram. He was a real find, a leathery wise man found in the desert, hosed off, put in decent clothes, and eased back into society. Melody seemed to have achieved great status among her girlfriends, as if she had domesticated a gorilla, somehow taught him to use a toilet and wash dishes. Kevin found it irritating to listen to her brag about Jerry on the phone as if he were an abandoned chair being reupholstered. She described his past life by humming space-age horror music, and her feelings for him as, “Uh! Oh my God. Fireworks.”

  Jerry seemed to have lost the will to get out of bed. He slept until two in the afternoon, watched cartoons while he ate cereal and drank beer, took a few “business” phone calls in the evening, then went out to do errands for an hour in just his shorts and sandals. In the evenings Jerry sometimes sat alone on the couch tuning an acoustic guitar that he never got around to playing. When Melody came home, she was always filled with tree-house enthusiasm, and they would retreat into the bedroom for hours, emerging sometimes through plumes of smoke, fidgeting, sniffling, talking in rapid voices, chewing on their lips and fingernails, stifling laughter that turned quickly into coughs.

  Melody owned a small company that manufactured party favors, and her ultimate dream was to expand nationwide, improving on all the little deficiencies and clichés she saw in the industry. The rooms were already crowded with knickknacks and Kevin sometimes felt like he and his father had become part of the collection. Gag cards, festoons of withering balloons in the kitchenette, little toy mice in miscellaneous uniforms. Jerry seemed to hate the piñatas even more than Kevin did, for they often lay decapitated in the closets and cupboards.

  But there was one very good thing about the apartment complex. Because of aggressive algae, the pool was drained in late July, becoming a skateboarding paradise. Kevin spent most of his time perfecting a backside ollie off the deep end wall. By August he could almost land a three-sixty kickflip, surviving brutal falls that brought cheers and respect from the other skateboard rats who’d found the empty watering hole. Despite his strange olive-colored suit pants and his mop of black hair, they respected Kevin’s insane disregard for his own safety. For the first time in his life, he began skating in a pack. Word spread qu
ickly that the new kid could pick locks off gates, opening a world of construction sites, dried viaducts, and the asphalt dales of elementary schools. Under highway overpasses they perched on the steep slopes and smoked buds off dented soda cans, and at night they hovered outside convenience stores while Kevin robbed pay phones and parking meters. They packed into Pintos and sagging El Caminos, cruising in circles and hollering at pedestrians; and Kevin learned to drive amid bursting smoke-filled laughter. In quiet moments the longing for his old life still seized him like an undertow, but he felt protected by the new clamor of his friends with their bottle rockets, skinned elbows, and bloodshot eyes; and he was certain that he had found his natural habitat in this broken sprawl of shopping plazas and concrete slabs.

  Often Melody would confront him late at night when he returned home, looking proud of her resolve, as if conquering a bad habit. She blocked doorways, clutching the drawstring of her pink terry-cloth robe. He would look at her chapped nostrils, her perpetually stuffed nose on a delicate face, and wonder how a woman so obviously jacked to the ceiling on something could criticize him for avoiding the condo. In a voice meant for puppies and small children, she told him that sixteen wasn’t an adult, and boys shouldn’t stay out so late. She urged Jerry to start a curfew, and she began a system of reward points and demerits. But her system was applied hysterically. Once she docked him a million points for coming home late, and eventually every infraction provoked such an inflated response that the points seemed like the currency of a collapsed nation. Soon he came home only on rare occasions, to drop off laundry and stare into the refrigerator.

  That fall his father enrolled Kevin in Taft High School as Douglas Herman, an average student from Bremerton, Washington, whose files had been destroyed in a fire. Jerry complained that this procedure was the toughest scam of his life, because the administrators hounded him for more records and new documents: immunization proof, exam scores, and transcripts. “These people are worse than the FBI,” said Jerry. “They need to know if you’ve ever pissed in the shower.” He needed to soothe Melody’s doubts, first over the vanished records, next over Kevin’s dreadful grades. Jerry needed to intercept calls from the school and testify in front of curious and concerned teachers. He was a first-rate apologist, holding the faculty at bay for an entire month. Finally on a Thursday evening in October, he needed to meet with “an ungodly quartet” of schoolmarms, consisting of the vice principal, guidance counselor, and Kevin’s two most officious teachers.

  Kevin waited in the car, then skated for a while in the parking lot. Coming from far across the quad, his father’s loose, drifting walk had been replaced by the concerted flat-footed strides of a man trying his hardest not to run. When Kevin saw his eyes—that thousand-yard stare—he rushed into the car and strapped on his seat belt. Jerry slid into the seat beside him and gripped the wheel.

  “Douglas?”

  “Don’t call me that.”

  “You’re not doing a very good job here.”

  The sky was the color of concrete, rapidly darkening, and they both stared ahead at a stucco planter of ivy and weeds.

  “Dad? Nobody has fucking consulted me about anything here. Okay? So I don’t know what angle I’m supposed to be playing with this whole school thing. I’ll tell you the cons I’ve been running, they’re nothing big. I broke into the storage room and I stole the teachers’ guides. Who cares? So there’s a few grade books missing. So what? What’s a vending machine here and there? Besides, I tried to order some stuff on some teachers’ credit cards and they were all maxed out completely. These people are losers, Dad. There’s no money in this entire place.”

  “I don’t know if they’ve got you on any of that. They’re just going on and on about your interests. Jesus, Kevin, you don’t ask these people about ATM networks. What do you think this place is—prison? You made fake bar codes for a science project? And what’s all this shit about algorithms? Your fucking math teacher probably can’t even do that shit. What are they?”

  “Oh yeah. Algorithms. That’s the launch code, Dad. The magic decoder ring. If I could just get to that and forget all this other crap, I could make my own credit card numbers out of thin air. Perfect—ready to use. It’s just a simple formula. Well, not simple—but you know. If I could get that down, we could get the fuck out of this situation.”

  “Kevin. You can’t even pull off being a high school moron because you got to take the school apart. Just bring your teacher an apple, shut up, and draw naked chicks in your notebook.”

  “Just don’t say we’re sticking around here, Dad. Right? You’ve got her accounts? You’ve got something going with Melody’s business?”

  “Kevin, I’m not ever going to be a completely normal dad. But listen.”

  “Don’t tell me we’re really living here. If there’s no scam, Dad, what is the point?”

  Jerry lowered his voice and said, “I’m making money, Kevin—I’ve got investments. But Melody is onboard with us. She’s a good little businesswoman and in the long run—”

  Kevin dropped his head against the dashboard and said, “Oh, fuck. Just shoot me, Dad.”

  The automatic sprinklers came on and splattered briefly across the windshield. Jerry waited for them to chatter all the way across the ivy before he responded. “Listen, Kev, I’m going to level with you here, because this is another one of those times when you might be missing the big picture. There’s only one reason to go to high school. Get yourself laid. Okay? That’s the only reason any man ever showed up for this crap in his entire life, and I dare any rocket scientist to prove me wrong.”

  Kevin nodded down at his feet, exhaling, and admitted, “Yeah, but the girls think I’m a little weird, Dad.” The water drummed across the glass.

  “You are weird. But that’s okay. Find yourself a weird girl. They’re everywhere, man, those cross-eyed chicks with big feet. But they’re animals, man, tigers. They’re the undiscovered country. Fucking terra incognita. If I could go back in time, I’d have some kind of goddamn harem of those girls. Think low self-esteem. Besides, they’re smart and resourceful and someday they’re going to look good enough to humiliate all the pregnant cheerleaders. They’ll get their teeth fixed and strut back into the reunion, a bunch of little Napoleons with big hair and shoulder pads. Just close your eyes and imagine what they’re going to look like—investments, baby. Stock options. And I guarantee you when you get some Betty’s shirt off in the dark, you won’t be asking about the prescription on her glasses.”

  Jerry started the car and ran the wipers, snagging a leaf of ivy. In a moment of quiet admiration, Kevin replied, “Okay. I’ll make you proud.”

  NINETEEN

  During midterms, Jerry’s model girl was supplanted by Kevin’s real and unavoidable attraction to a completely different type of young misfit. Shortly before the first exam, someone set a roll of toilet paper on fire in the girls’ bathroom, evacuating the entire school and delaying the test. Each class was required to stay together on the football field, and, by the far hash mark, in the loose gathering of colonial history, he saw a sophomore girl arriving late with a skateboard, combat fatigues, thin-braided strands of blue hair, and a look so guilty and mischievous that Kevin was simultaneously drawn to her and lonely for Colette.

  Her name was Denise, and she enjoyed throwing rocks through plate-glass windows, spray-painting the foundations of unfinished minimalls, hiding drugs in her vast collection of stuffed animals, headbanger music, whittling homemade bongs, and decrying the hypocrisy of her parents, a contractor and a child psychologist. She spit constantly, blew giant pink bubbles, slept at her desk, and usually ate alone. She was vulgar, antisocial, and Kevin was hooked. They skated late together around the drained pool or the abandoned elementary school. Kevin would take absurd risks to impress her, and later they would sit together on the ground, boards in their laps, and compare gouged elbows and knees. Past one o’clock one night in November, she draped her legs over his while they sat by the tetherball p
ole, shielded from the boulevard by the handball backstop. She shared a badly rolled joint with him and talked about her family, her “materialistic” mother and her father the philandering pig.

  “Yeah, my dad is philandering and materialistic too,” said Kevin, taking a drag. “But he’s up front about it, so …”

  “That’s all the difference, right there,” she said. “Like, be what you are. Don’t be all, like, fucking—you know, high and mighty and shit …”

  Kevin had no idea why, but she reminded him of Colette, without any of the qualities that made him feel like beating his head against a wall. Maybe she was a younger, more straightforward version of her, somehow stripped of the easy ability with words, a bit rougher around the edges, dressing in the same clothes every day and usually stoned. They had nothing in common physically, and Kevin was sometimes annoyed by Denise’s slouched and moping posture, the way she walked alongside him kicking broken glass and rocks. But there was something in the quiet moments like this, under the autumn stars and streetlights, that brought Colette back, like a ghost.

  “You know, you remind me of somebody I used to have this giant psychotic crush on,” said Kevin.

  “Bonus.”

  He sat there for a long time on the asphalt, lost in thought, staring at her face, determined to kiss her as soon as she looked up. She never did, and finally he asked, “Would you run away and call the cops if I tried to kiss you?”

  “God, you freak. Not even.” She stubbed out her cigarette. They leaned together, into a union of smoky breath and the sweet residue of Life Savers, and he felt the smooth underside of her lip, and when he sat up, the cold wind felt crisp on his tingling skin. The world seemed a dark and unpredictable landscape.