by John Inman
They lay quietly, Boz’s lips still resting on the bridge of Dilly’s nose. When Dilly finally spoke, the words seemed to struggle to get out, but still it seemed like Dilly knew he had to say them. Not just for himself, but for Boz too.
“I used to worry about always being poor, Boz. But it’s a funny thing. When I’m with you, I don’t feel poor at all. I feel like the richest guy in the world.”
“When we’re together, we’re both rich, I think.” Boz let the words ease out, carefully exposing them to the light. Sharing them with the man in his arms. Like he had been aching to do for so long.
They both opened their eyes, and as if by silent understanding, they each pulled back just far enough to study the other’s face.
Boz struggled to find his voice amid a rise of emotion. He wasn’t quite sure why he was surprised by it, but he was. After all, that emotion had been waiting in the wings for a while now, waiting for a chance to spring free.
“I never want this to end, Dilly. I want a lifetime of mornings like this, and a separate lifetime of nights like last night and every other night we’ve been together. Time spent with you is a perfect experience, Dilly. No one has ever made me happier than you do.”
He watched as Dilly’s irises blurred behind a film of rising tears. When he squeezed them shut, one single tear leaked out to slide down the side of his nose. Boz leaned closer and kissed it away.
Around a hiccup, Dilly muttered, “You make me happy too, Boz. You’ve given me things I never thought I’d know, never thought I’d share with anyone. Things I never thought I deserved.”
“There’s nothing you don’t deserve, Dilly.”
With that, Boz gave a perfunctory little nod, as if he had been stating a stock quote or something. It was all too businesslike, he knew, but he didn’t want to get too gooshy and scare the guy away. He didn’t want to say more than he thought Dilly was ready to hear. My God, he had probably said too much already. He cleared his throat and tried to look a little less… eager. “Then I guess we should keep on doing what we’re doing. No changes necessary.”
Dilly let a grin twist his mouth. He looked a little relieved, Boz thought, as if he were glad they were ratcheting back the rhetoric. As if maybe, as Boz suspected, he truly wasn’t quite ready to make the final declarations this line of conversation would soon lead to if they didn’t watch themselves.
While a twinge of sadness grabbed Boz when he considered that thought, he still found contentment again when he felt Dilly’s strong, gentle fingers caressing his leg. Under Dilly’s touch, he seemed to always find contentment.
“Show me your glasses again,” Boz quietly ordered.
Rolling his eyes dramatically, Dilly reached his bare arm over Boz, attracting a kiss to his armpit that made him jump, and snatched up his new glasses off the nightstand by Boz’s head. He had purchased new frames the day before, after finally saving enough money.
Blushing slightly, but clearly pleased as well, he sat up in bed and posed for Boz, giving him the full profile, with his nose stuck in the air and his shiny new glasses parked regally on the front of his face. The frames were black, like the broken pair, but there was a different line to them, Boz thought. They looked classier and made Dilly look quite handsome and wise. Not that he didn’t already.
“Beautiful,” Boz sighed.
Even he knew he wasn’t talking about the glasses at all.
Chapter Twenty-Eight
PUFFER WATCHED Dilly from across the store. And as he tended to do in quieter moments, Puffer mused about life. Paul and Paula were blasting on the sound system, one of his favorite duets from the old days. The trouble with the new kids, with their iPods and streaming bullshit, was they had no sense of place with their music. No sense of being part of a generation. Hell, half the time they couldn’t even hold their music in their hands, since the music was nothing but air and ether and little digital thingamabobs. Plus the music nowadays was so jazzed up with echoing reverb and techno gimmickry, the humanity in the songs was buried assdeep in white noise, weirdass sound effects, and electronic babel.
Puffer liked the simpler days. Back when even the whispery scratches on a played-to-death vinyl platter sometimes enhanced the listening experience. That and reading the blurb on the back of the album sleeve a dozen times until you practically had it memorized. Or parking your sorry ass in front of the TV at four o’clock to watch American Bandstand, where sometimes your favorite singer would show up and poorly (and oftentimes comically) lip sync the words to his or her latest hit.
Puffer’s greatest goal in life, now that he had reached the age where most of his friends were dead, was to make Dilly appreciate rock and roll as much as he did. It was an uphill battle.
Dilly yelled out now from eight racks over. Since there were no customers in the store at the moment, the yelling didn’t matter much. “Who’s singing?”
Puffer was offended to the core by the question. “Paul and Paula, you fucking heathen! Listen to the words! Their names are in the lyrics. Who the hell did you think they were? Jerome and Louella?”
Dilly was unfazed by Puffer’s irascibility, so he ignored it like he usually did. “Oh. Well, I like them. They sound romantic together.”
Puffer beamed. At long last, Dilly was coming around. “They were!” he yelled back. “Hit the top ten more than once, they did. A really great duo!”
“Married, huh?”
“Yeah. When they sang this song, they were married.”
“You mean they’re not married now? Why? Are they dead?”
Puffer huffed in annoyance. “No, they’re not dead! They still sing together from time to time. Oldies get-togethers and retro concerts.”
“But they’re not married anymore?”
“Not to each other, no. They divorced thirty years ago.”
“So the song is all bullshit. They were just trying to sell records. They didn’t really love each other at all.”
Puffer shot up from behind aisle six as straight as a ramrod. He glared at Dilly from a distance of thirty feet. “Love is a hard thing to hold on to, Dilbert Allan Jones! Do you know how many times I’ve had my heart broken?” Dilly looked uncomfortable with this line of questioning.
“Uh, no.”
Puffer snorted in his own defense. “Well, neither do I! That’s how many!” He took the opportunity to waggle a wizened finger at Dilly, although even he had to admit it lost some of its immediacy when it was waggled from ten yards away. “You’re too young to know how hard love is, young man.” Heat rose to Puffer’s cheeks, and he tried to backtrack. “When I say hard, I don’t mean….”
It was Dilly’s cue to look uncomfortable again. “I know what you don’t mean. Sheesh.”
“Oh, well, okay, then. In that case I won’t spell it out.”
Puffer patted around in his shirt pocket, seeking a joint he was almost positive he had rolled not five minutes back and had yet to light up. Before he found it, the shop door banged open, and the bell hanging over it started tinkling madly, like someone had smacked it with a sledgehammer.
Oddly enough, one of Puffer’s big rules was he did not allow the smoking of tobacco products in the Retro Record Shoppe. The bigass hunk barging through the front door like a lemming flying off a cliff, had a cigarette stuck in the corner of his mouth, and ashes were flying from it everywhere.
“Hey, you! Go back outside with that cigarette! No smoking in here!”
The guy raised himself up to his full six five, or whatever he was, and took a sniff. “Smells like more than cigarettes are being smoked on these premises. Maybe I should call the cops.”
“Be my guest!” Puffer shot back. “There’s no law against a sick person smoking medical marijuana. I had me a doctor’s note to smoke all the grass I wanted even before they made it legal.” He shot Dilly a wink and gave his head a little shake while he mouthed the word, “Forged.”
The man brought his cigarette to his mouth, took a long draw on it, causing a rain of sp
arks to drift down in front of him. He blew a plume of smoke straight up into the smoke alarm screwed to the ceiling. The alarm didn’t make a sound because, as Puffer damn well knew, the batteries had been removed eons ago.
The creep with the cigarette seemed to expect nothing less. He cast a nasty leer in Puffer’s direction, then tuned Puffer out completely as he focused his attention on Dilly, who was standing speechless, taking everything in.
When those glaring eyes come to rest on him, Dilly froze like a statue.
Puffer watched Dilly’s eyes open wide with both shock and confusion when the guy stalked toward him on those longass legs of his. Even Puffer had to admit the guy was handsome as hell and built like an ox, but he was also clearly a dickwad of the first order.
“Stop!” Puffer bellowed. “Stay the hell away from my clerk!”
“Fuck you, old man,” the intruder shot back and kept on heading in Dilly’s direction.
Dilly, unsure what was happening, stood rooted next to a shelf filled with Creedence Clearwater, which hadn’t moved since Puffer acquired it at a garage sale more than three years ago. Puffer’s clientele didn’t like all this newfound stuff like Creedence Clearwater. They preferred the purity of Herman’s Hermits or Bill Haley and the Comets. Something they could sink their false teeth into.
But at the moment that was all beside the point.
Puffer watched in horror as the gorilla with the Marlboro still hanging off his bottom lip grabbed a fistful of Dilly’s shirt and hefted the kid straight up off the floor. Dilly remained speechless, eyes as big as saucers, as he flopped around on the end of the guy’s arm.
The gorilla gave him a shake. “Stay away from Boz, you little faggot. If I see you with him again, it’ll be more than your glasses that are broken. They’ll have to put you back together with Crazy Glue. Got it?”
Dilly was still hanging in midair by his shirtfront, arms flailing helplessly, but Puffer noticed he didn’t look shocked anymore. He looked mad.
Puffer stared on in wonder as Dilly spat the words, “I know who you are,” then nodded solemnly as if he had expected this confrontation sooner or later. All the while he was clearly trying his best to ignore the ridiculous situation he was in. What with the massive fist clamped at his chest, his shirt crumpled up around him like a straightjacket, and himself hanging two feet off the floor, dangling like a carp on the end of a cane pole.
Dilly gave another flop and said the words again. “I know who you are.”
“Good,” the gorilla said. “If you know who I am, you know you don’t want to fuck with me.”
Puffer was listening as hard as he could. This was getting good. Then it got even better.
“You can’t have him,” Dilly said. “I love him, and he loves me. We haven’t said the words yet, but it’s true nevertheless. He doesn’t want anything to do with you anymore. You’ve hurt him enough.”
The guy dragged Dilly so close that for a second Puffer thought he was going to kiss him. It didn’t take him long to realize that kissing was the last thing on the gorilla’s mind. He gave Dilly another shake, this one so brutal Puffer swore he could hear Dilly’s teeth clack together.
“I don’t care if you think you’re in love with him or not,” the creep snarled. “He’s mine. And if you know what’s good for you, you’ll stay the hell away from him. Do you understand?”
Dilly refused to answer. He got a stony look on his face as if he had said all he intended to say and that was the end of it. Puffer had to admire the kid for that. It took some balls.
Then he decided he should drag up some balls of his own. It was time to intervene.
“I told you to stay away from my clerk!” Puffer bellowed. He stormed across the shop in three seconds flat on his stork-like legs. By the time he got to where he was going, it dawned on him that he was just as tall as the guy holding Dilly in midair. Of course, the gorilla carried eighty pounds of muscle that Puffer didn’t have.
The gorilla proved it when he dropped Dilly like a hot potato and swung around without warning. His fat fist shot through the air and headed straight for Puffer’s nose. It connected with a crunching sound that made Dilly cringe and made Puffer slap his hands to his face and howl like a banshee.
Dilly clawed his way to his feet and pulled Puffer to safety. With a smirk, the gorilla watched them scramble out of the way.
Puffer stared through watering eyes while blood dripped off his chin, probably ruining the joint in his shirt pocket. The jerk who’d popped him in the nose stood there watching the two of them like he’d bought a ticket. Was it Puffer’s imagination, or did he look a little bemused that he had taken the confrontation as far as he had?
“Ath-hole,” Puffer lisped.
Any shame the guy might have felt for sucker-punching an old man damn near three times his age clearly evaporated on the spot. He ignored Puffer and refocused his anger on Dilly. His fists were still clenched tightly at his sides, as if he were just waiting for a chance to swing again.
“Stay away from Boz!” he bellowed, spit flying like he was crazy.
And before Puffer—or Dilly either—could tell him to go fuck himself, the guy stormed back through the front door and disappeared.
Puffer and Dilly blinked at each other, and strangely enough Puffer felt a smile creeping across his aching face.
“So you’re in love, are you?”
Since Puffer was still bleeding like a stuck pig, Dilly shook his head, rolled his eyes, and stalked off in search of the first aid kit. He was pretty sure there was one stashed under the coffee pot.
Chapter Twenty-Nine
“WE SHOULD call the cops,” Boz said, staring at Puffer’s nose, which was twice its normal size, as red as a strawberry, and had Kleenex spears trailing down from each nostril like icicles. Poor old Puffer looked a little like an emaciated walrus.
Two half circles of purple and green had blossomed under each of Puffer’s eyes, and the eyes were leaking tears. The tears were from the smoke drifting up from the doobie he was sucking on, since it couldn’t go up his nose like it usually did. They were sitting in Puffer’s office/lunchroom at the back of the shop, gathered around an old Formica dinette transported here from the ’50s, like the music in the racks out front. They were sipping scotch from mismatched coffee cups. The scotch, like the marijuana, was kept on hand for medicinal purposes. Or so Puffer explained.
Even with two black eyes and a busted nose, Puffer was full of shit.
“Nobody’th going to call the copth,” Puffer said, rearranging the Kleenex spears sticking out of his nose. “I don’t like copth.”
Dilly turned his gaze on Boz. “Your ex is an asshole. After he punched Puffer, he split. Ran out the front door like a coward. I think the swing he took at Puffer’s nose surprised him as much as it surprised Puffer.”
“Thmall contholathion,” Puffer rasped.
Boz stared at Puffer for a second before turning to Dilly. “What’d he say?”
Dilly translated. “He said, ‘Small consolation.’”
At that Dilly and Boz both grinned. So did Puffer, but with a little less alacrity.
All eyes turned to Puffer’s nose, even Puffer’s, who had to look straight down and cross both of his to see it.
Dilly reached out and stroked Puffer’s arm in a feeble attempt at comfort.
Puffer eyed Dilly, then tilted his head in Boz’s direction. “Tell Bothh what you told the ape who hit me.”
Boz turned inquisitive eyes on Dilly. “Why? What did you tell him?”
To Boz’s surprise, Dilly’s ears turned red.
“Nothing,” Dilly said, kicking Puffer under the table “I didn’t tell him anything.” He turned his anger on Boz. “Your ex is crazy, you know that? He should be chained to a wall somewhere and fed through a hole in the door.”
Boz shrank from Dilly’s anger. “I know. I’m sorry. He’s still jealous, I guess.”
“Well, duh,” Puffer sniffed, or tried to. His ability to sniff see
med to have been curtailed for the next few days. “You think?”
Boz looked even guiltier. “I never dreamed he would come after you guys like this.”
Dilly’s mouth worked, trying to bury a grin. “Well, he actually came after me. Puffer didn’t have enough brains to stay out of the line of fire.”
Surly, Puffer growled, “Thankth a lot, thhithead.”
Dilly translated before Boz could ask. “He said, ‘Thanks a lot, shithead.’”
Boz tried to mold his features into a look of consternation and concern. It wasn’t easy, having to stare at the two spears of rolled-up Kleenex poking down from Puffer’s misshaped honker and at the same time try to ignore the fact that Dilly was furious with him.
He reached out to give Puffer’s hand a commiserating pat. “I’m sorry this happened to you.”
Puffer’s eyes narrowed, but in a sneaky way, not mean. He turned to Dilly. “If you don’t tell him what you told the big ape, then I will.”
Dilly kicked Puffer under the table again, and this time Puffer kicked back. He trained his gaze on Boz, as if removing Dilly from the equation completely. “He told your friend you love each other, even though you hadn’t told each other yet. Ith thith true? Are you in love with my Dilly?”
Boz thought Dilly’s septuagenarian boss looked inordinately pleased with himself to have avoided so many esses. He sat there now, eyebrows high, nose as big as a baked potato, waiting for an answer to a question that was no way in hell any of his business. But Boz was pretty sure he was about to tell him anyway.
He shyly turned to Dilly, all the while trying to ignore a smile pulling at the corners of his mouth. “Did you really tell him that, baby?”