Homeboy

by Seth Morgan

  A light shone in the gray eye, igniting its pearly whorls of age, recalling to Joe the worn chip at the bottom of his enamel washbasin at the Monserrat School. Winter mornings when the water left standing overnight froze, the flaw’s chaotic Godlike symmetry stared up at him through his own reflection.

  “Same as you could tell a person everything about dope cept how to leave it alone,” Earl meekly reproached. “You know about them Joneses, yeah. Yours made you do things you wouldnt do otherwise. Of all people, yeah, you should be able to forgive …”

  Joe punched Earl the same way he used to break his own reflection in the washbasin; high on the cheekbone, a sound like chopping gristly meat. Earl fell sideways, curling into a fetal position, covering his head with his arms. Rushing to escape the cell and its old man smells, Joe heard him sob, gargling his own blood.

  LAWYERS ARE PEOPLE, TOO

  Horace had climbed from parking valet to maitre d’ at Rossi’s Famous Seafood Restaurant in less than a year. He credited this quick ascent to his drama training. Horace performed every job as a role and transformed each into a minor classic. Horace was a dedicated thespian of the all-life’s-a-stage school.

  But today, assailed by outrageous fortune, he was having trouble finding his marks. Adolph Menjou, his model for the role of maitre d’, would never have taken such an undignified part. Unless it was opposite the Marx Brothers.

  The morning started off viciously when the FDA called to announce that their produce had been mistakenly delivered from fields quarantined for the Mediterranean fruit fly, and Rossi’s had to use frozen and canned vegetables. It became dreadful when a hot young starlet came in to brunch with her agent and their waiter suffered a vertigo attack and splashed hot coffee down her canyonesque cleavage. The sleazeball agent screamed for twenty minutes how Rossi’s would be sued until it bled fish oil for poaching her knockers, defacing public property.

  Now—and it wasn’t yet noon—Horace saw all the signs of the day shaping into a majorleague disaster. He’d just gotten off the phone from taking luncheon reservations from that horrid valet of Baby Jewels Moses who twisted Horace’s arm until he cried the week before. For just winking! He gulped two more Libriums with his Perrier and slapped his silly hand to keep from biting its nails.

  The problem wasn’t with the valet, however, but his fat master. Mr. Rossi himself instructed Horace to discourage reservations from Mr. Moses. He was a convicted criminal now, it was in all the papers, the infamia of the movies. Rossi’s had enough problems dissociating itself from the public’s Italian gangster fantasies without catering to certified hoodlums. And Baby Jewels Moses couldn’t exactly be hidden at a back table. But Horace didn’t know how to discourage that valet when he called. Just his voice turned Horace’s insides to zabaglione.

  Horace was practicing deep breathing at his maitre d’ podium, trying to remember the words to the “Hail Mary,” when a purple whiff of lavender slithered up his nostrils and he heard a sibilant doll’s voice: “We have reservations, I believe.”

  Horace’s lips were somersaulting over unintelligible responses when suddenly Signor Rossi appeared at his elbow. “But of course, Mr. Moses,” he said, bowing from the waist. Spitefully Horace noted his boss’s fawning tone when Mr. Moses appeared in person.

  Like a mountain seen from a circling airplane, Mr. Moses rotated to face the plump restaurateur. “Well, have us conducted to our table.” Behind him the valet smirked at Horace, giving him butterflies. The third member of their party, a haggard man with harrowed eyes, was busy trying to straighten his suit so it didn’t look like something he’d worn to sleep on a park bench.

  “Of course, of course … Horace!” Mr. Rossi snapped his fingers loud as firecrackers.

  Mewling Italianate sounds of abasement in keeping with the establishment’s ethnicity, Horace led the mismatched trio to the best table in the house. When they were seated, he carefully set a tasseled menu before each on his salad plate. Whether it was the valet’s scent of danger or simply that yummy Lagerfeld cologne, Horace almost swooned on top of him. He caught himself in the nick of time and swanned off, leaving them to their conversation. Like every maitre d’ in San Francisco, Horace knew of the Fat Man’s hatred for intrusive waiters.

  “We’re going to the wall on this one, Sidney,” Baby Jewels simped dangerously. “I had to borrow against my finest gems to make this appeal bond …”

  “I’m dropping out, Jules,” Sidney said.

  “What’re you talking about, Sidney?—”

  They were interrupted by the waiter bringing herring in sour cream for Baby Jewels, soup for Quick, and decaf for Sidney. The hard little eyes hammered into the Fat Man’s huge slick head bored into Sidney’s.

  “I’ve considered my position,” Sidney continued, “and wish to withdraw from the case. I can recommend competent alternate counsel.”

  “Alternate, shmalternate … I want you on this appeal, Sidney. Now what is it you’re talking about, withdrawing? …”

  Turning his cup of decaf in its saucer and studying the light shivering on its surface, Sidney Dreaks explained in a dry, tense voice his inability to reconcile his conscience with the heinous allegations made in court by state’s witness Sunny Deelight.

  When he spoke, Baby Jewels’s voice had taken on that sinister wheedling tone that squirmed Sidney’s skin. “Sidney, how long have we been together? Ten, twelve years? Tch, we barmitzvahed your nephew Harry in my very first club, the Blackhawk, down on O’Farrell. And now, what is he? The vicepresident of operations at one of Silicon Valley’s biggest microchip producers. We’re talking about a long time, Sidney. And in all those years, I never told you a lie. I may not have told you everything, but I never said a lie … And now you want to take the word of a shiksa, a prosecution witness and a certified meshuga, against mine … I’m hurt, Sidney. That’s all I can say, I’m hurt …” Baby Jewels got to work doing some hurting himself, punishing the heaping plate of barbecued crab that appeared before him.

  Sidney wasn’t eating. He ordered another cup of decaf to go with his fresh Salem. Sitting halfway around the round table between them, Quick Cicero was working thoughtfully on a hot sausage hero. Every couple of bites, he’d turn chewing deliberately and regard Sidney with flat eyes the attorney was certain were fondling his soft neck for a garrote.

  “Jules, I just cant countenance what that girl …”

  The Fat Man’s fist banged the table, jingling cutlery and crystal. “I’m telling you, Sidney. She’s a stone meshuga. Got a psych jacket thicker than your wrist. If your investigators I’m paying for were doing their job, they’d have had her hospital records for you in court.”

  Sidney sat up. He had guessed Sunny Deelight wasn’t exactly superglued, but this was the first he’d heard of any history of mental illness.

  “Why didnt you say something?”

  Baby Jewels set down his knife and fork and leaned his enormity across the table. “I never thought it was necessary,” he said with the cool sarcasm one might use to instruct a master plumber on how to flush a toilet. “I didnt believe we had to further discredit and humiliate an acknowledged addict and convicted prostitute and thief. Not for the purposes of the court. I should have known my own lawyer was a different story! …” Baby Jewels snapped his fingers next to his bulletshaped cranium. “Where was that hospital, Quick? In her home town, wha—”

  “Sioux Falls.” Quick’s eyes measured Sidney for a car trunk.

  “So you’re telling me you havent produced these socalled snuff movies? …” Sidney asked sharply to regain some initiative.

  “Tch! It’s a sad day I have to answer such a question to my best friend. Of course not, Sidney. There’s a little roughhousing in some of the loops, but it’s acting … How many people you see killed on your TV every night? Do you call it snuff TV? Of course not. That’s why it’s … called … acting, Sidney … I cant believe I go
t to explain this. Can you believe I got to explain it, Quick?”

  “I cant believe it, Mr. Moses.”

  “Sidney, you know the judge signed the warrant just today and they’re down at the Menlo Park film lab ransacking my entire film inventory. And you know what they’ll find? Of course you do. The same innocent stuff that used to be on my store racks. Fuck and suck and come for the birdie. Will that satisfy you? Because I need you on this one, Sidney. This is all the marbles.”

  Sidney shifted in his chair and lit another Salem. He spotted two waitresses at the kitchen doors talking behind their hands and pointing surreptitiously in their direction. He had been so long painted with the same notorious brush as his client he almost relished the association.

  “All right, Jules …”

  “No, no …” Baby Jewels waved his hand, twinkling a fistful of tawdry lights. “All right isnt quite good enough, Sidney. You got to be a little sorry.”

  “So I’m sorry already.” Sidney actually smiled contritely. “The emotion in court, the heat of the moment … you understand.”

  “Tch, Sidney. You’re supposed to have freon for blood.”

  “Lawyers are people, too, Jules.” Sidney grinned weakly.

  Baby Jules laughed, a flaccid hissing like a leaky air mattress. “I like that. You like that, Quick?”

  “I like that, Mr. Moses. I think Sidney here’s a real wit.” His eyes now sized Sidney for the fiftygallon drum to dump in the bay.

  “Sidney, this morning I received by messenger confirmation that our case has been calendared for a certain appellate judge referred to us by someone who owes us a … favor. But where are my manners? First a little celebration of our renewed friendship! Quick, tell that dingbat maitre d’ to shlep over the sweet nosh wagon …”

  Meanwhile, back on the truck ranch, it wasn’t like Rings was hanging around because she had to; she got bocoo chances to book. Every day some whiteline Romeo offered the Gypsy Queen of Aces High luxury transport to Memphis to lay a wreath at the King’s grave, St. Looie for an earful of the blues, Alaska for a midnight suntan. Working Aces High was like tricking a travel agent—Rings could write her own ticket.

  Thing was, she’d changed: her heart had too many stitches, she no longer fell in love at the drop of her drawers. And Rings wasn’t one to take up a trucker falsely on his offer. “Commitment” was a word she’d picked up reading Cosmo in the truck ranch gift shop. That it was the same word used to put kooks on the funny farm Rings found no coincidence, because that’s fur shur where she’d be headed if she fell in love again.

  So she’d jellyroll the truckers, treat them to brief bursts of heaven, but whenever one wanted a piece of heart to go along with the piece of ass, she’d squall: “Gag me with yer custom chrome stacks! Gypsy’s my name and casual’s my game …” Then softening, running her nails with a zzzz noise up Levi’s buttonflies, “Course you could always gag me with Mr. Happy there. For a double sawski, like.”

  That was before she met Randolph Scott, But Not the Actor.

  It happened one rainy afternoon in the cafe. Rings was dancing with herself by the jukebox flaming in the corner when she lamped this prime side of USDA beef at the counter slumped on his forearms, sipping Java and looking longsuffering and noble in way that reminded her of Alonzo, the golden retriever Rings rescued from the pound when she was six. Alonzo slept with her and carried her books home from school and everything until Daddy zotzed the pooch for pooping on the new Galaxy plush pile in the rec room. Drilled him in the head with a .22 just for heaving a little Havana! And here, twenty years later, the dog’s deadringer shows up at the truck ranch. Total reincarnation, like.

  A hurricane blew up in her heart; she started seeping south of the border. Rings had always gone for the strong silent types, though none had gone for her. She picked a stool like casually once removed from his and tried to sit daintily without swinging her leg aboard like mounting a potbellied trucker; ordered herself a coffee, cream and sugar please, and picked up a copy of the Laramie Roundup lying on the counter just to show she knew another use for newspapers other than lining cat boxes.

  The headline frizzed her hair; she nearly sprayed the paper with major coffee—MOSES AND THE BLUE RUSHES, CALL GIRL FINGERS FAT MAN. Gag me with the Sunday edition, she cried to herself reading on. She knew Sunny Deelight, a real dialtone. But she had the heart to call out the Pimp Blimp and here Rings was hiding beneath skies that weren’t cloudy all day—letting down the Sisterhood of the Towel, girl. Shame grumbled in her tummy, building gas. She wouldn’t be happy until she went back and did the right thing …

  “Sumptin troublin you, lil darlin?” The voice down the counter filled her ear with honey.

  “Like, radically,” sobbed Rings, though truth be told, just the sound of his voice, like oil on rough water, stilled all thought of the trouble in San Francisco. She turned on her stool, wiping woedrops from her cheeks, swinging her fringetop Tony Lamas littlegirlwise.

  But Mister Strong and Silent was staring straight ahead again as if they’d never spoken. She tracked the eyes the color of his profusion of turquoise jewelry and saw he was studying the plastic jetblender splashing grape drink. She cleared her throat. “The way it shoots up,” Rings sighed, “reminds me totally of the fountain at Caesar’s Palace.”

  The stranger looked at her with interest. “It reminds me,” he said, “of an oil strike.”

  “Rad,” she said absently, estimating how perfectly her clit would fit in the cleft of his chin should she sit on his face. “Like, you seen many oil strikes?”

  He grinned. “Every time Saint Pete stands up and salutes.”

  “Huh?” Not another savior trying to haul her to the cross.

  “Cmere, lil darlin,” he invited with a turquoise wink. Rings scootched to the stool next to his. Gag me with a gear shift, he was pulling out his weenie! He wants me to buff ole Pete’s pink helmet right here in the cafe. “No, no,” he laughed gently, dashing her hopes. “You’ve heard of divining sticks for finding water, huh? Well, this here’s my Divine Rod for finding fossil fuels. I prospect with him. Every time I walk over an underground reservoir of oil or natural gas …” He sprang his forefinger rigid.

  Rings poohpoohed, “Next you’ll tell me you got a bridge for sale.” Though she did closely scrutinize the subject, which seemed to blush, making her drip now like a sponge.

  He zipped up. “I advertise Saint Pete in Christ Today. See, he gushes for the Lord. Why, he’s collectin royalties from a dozen wells already, and I only just discovered his powers last year.”

  “Powers I’d like to see,” Rings said, which she fur shur would, as in a major gusher, only not right here in the Aces High Cafe where she was afraid her tummy gas might trigger it. “What’s your name, anyway?”

  “Randolph Scott, but not the actor.”

  “That’s … distinctive.”

  “My mama thought so …” Randolph Scott, But Not the Actor reached out and covered her hand with his. “I got a load of aluminum siding in the lot. Once I drop it off in Council Bluffs I’m headed south to Louisiana where Pete’s already contracted to prospect a field. Ought to yield enough black gold to retire to a life of plenty …” He looked away, with long fingers shyly milking his muzzle, and Rings saw in his turquoise eyes tall pumping shadows against southern skies. “And I need a woman to share it,” he said with the tiniest little choke.

  That like cinched it. Later she would blame it on a combination of his resemblance to Alonzo and the truck ranch’s diesel fumes eating the last of her smart cells. But like all she could think in the raingray Wyoming cafe was, What could better grease love’s skids than Louisiana sweet crude? It seemed like her first chance at a slice of an American pie that wasn’t as stale and tasteless as those racked behind the counter of the Aces High Cafe.

  A new sun rose in Rings’s belly, and with it a fresh wind dispersing her g
as, blowing it out one ear with all memory of love’s past labors loused while sucking in the other Blanche DuBois deliriums of nightblooming jasmine and oil depletion allowances.

  “Let’s beat cheeks to dreamy dreamland,” she cried, grabbing his hand, hustling him out to the lot raucous with idling diesels, singing pollywollydoodle all the way.

  LIKE A TURKEY THROUGH THE CORN

  Saturday night movies in the Gym were the social climax of the week. Everyone put on the Big Dog. The hucklebuckin hambones Afropicked and jerrycurled their cornrows and donned their baddest boneroos; the vatos and street bravos wrapped their cleanest bandannas around Dippity-Doed razorcuts and spitshined their Santa Rosa hightops till they glowed like lamps; the whiteboys splashed on fifi water and groomed their mustaches with toothbrushes and wrapped bandannas around their upper thighs, ceremonial tourniquets. The Q Wing punks and B CAT queens greased on party paint and shimmied into tightass state blues, tying the shirts over babyoiled bellies, then draped themselves from the shoulders of their latest Mainline fantasies. Saturday night at the movies was where all the new couples made their debut; it was the time to see and be seen, for posin’ to be chosen; a time to qualify to signify.

  As they did in the Chowhall and other places where they gathered en masse, the convicts segregated themselves in the Gym. Racial mixing was acceptable in the course of informal activities such as job assignments and Yard recreation, but taboo for formal occasions such as the Stroll or Saturday night movies. Whites sat in the southern bleacher block; blacks in the upper half of the northern block, Latinos in the lower half. The handicapped off the Hospital Wing sat along the lower benches on both sides or parked their wheelchairs on the apron of the basketball court between the bleachers and the far wall where the screen hung.

  Tonight Joe found a seat beside Carmen Memoranda and another old queen named Fraulein. Fraulein worked in Procurement with Carmen. She learned her arithmetic as an accountant tallying pussy in Nevada whorehouses. Between these two aging queens, thousands of taxpayer dollars were diverted each month to streetside accounts under fictitious names. Lola also tutored convicts studying for their GED’s and helped others with tax problems. And there were those who had stranger uses for Lola’s aptitude with figures.