386

Crystal

Chuck and Crystal were lying in Chuck’s bed, or “rack,” as he liked to call it. “Guess I’ll hit the rack,” he would say to his orange and white cat circa nine o’clock every evening.

Crystal was fast asleep. She had rolled onto her left side, and her left hand was fetchingly draped over her right shoulder. Chuck studied the barely perceptible freckles on Crystal’s back and the graceful contours of Crystal’s fingers and thought that he’d never seen a more exquisitely feminine hand. And he had not noticed until then that her nails cleverly matched the onyx ring on her middle finger. The onyx was square with rounded corners, in a silver or white-gold setting, and had a small diamond inset at about five o’clock. And Crystal’s nails, glossy black, each had a tiny white dot at five o’clock, too.

“Snot,” thought Chuck. “I owe all this to snot.”

Barely over the emotional mayhem of the first episode, which had happened when she was in grade-school, Crystal had experienced another devastating snot-bubble just as she was being introduced to Chuck at Starbucks. It wasn’t a blind date, per se, but it had been orchestrated by Queenie in full-on yenta fashion. Chuck and Crystal were perfect for each other, Queenie thought, and her only regret was that it had not dawned on her sooner.

Crystal had rushed out of Starbucks like the proverbial bat out of hell, clasping her nose with both hands and slamming against the corner of a table with her hip, mid-flight. Chuck would be kissing the resultant boo-boo a few hours later during a languorous session of letting Daddy make it better—which didn’t do much for the woman whose triple-shot Americano got sloshed all over her designer jeans.

Chuck had caught up with Crystal as she was fumbling with the handle of her Camry and had taken her in his arms and said all of the soothingly right things and had even wiped a tiny snot-dot from her upper lip with his thumb.

Now the two of them were ensconced in his bed, the venue for most of his musings, and Chuck was musing about the yin-yang quality of nasal secretions, and the happy promise of helping Crystal get over the yin part, all over again, however long it might take.

# # #

535

Crystal

Chuck was still pondering a man’s painted toes when Queenie walked in.

“What is up, Chuck,” she said, pulling out the wooden chair directly across from him. The chair made fingernails-on-chalkboard sounds as it scraped along the floor’s heavily textured tiles. Queenie plopped down and lifted the chair while skooching closer to the table. “Damn, man! That’s some kinda ‘noxious noise, ain’t it? Sorta ruins the whole mellow vibe, dontcha think? All these chairs screeching?”

Chuck grinned and nodded and said, “Can I get one of your trademark chai lattes for you, Helen?” He was the only person in her acquaintance authorized to use her given name, because Queenie somehow found her given name magnificent whenever Chuck said it.

“Well, ain’t you the fuckin’ gentleman, gentle man. That’s the best offer I’ve had all year. Only, get this, Charles, I’ve moved on in life: I’m doin’ dark-chocolate raspberry mochas these days—if the offer’s still good.”

“That sounded so tempting I got me one, too,” Chuck was saying six minutes later.

“Nectar of the goddamn gods,” Queenie said, “and don’t go scrapin’ that chair.”

Chuck gingerly completed the process of sitting back down, swept his half-drained iced tea a few inches to the left, and took a generous swig of his inaugural dark-chocolate raspberry mocha. “Wow! That’s really fantastic.”

“You damn right, Mr. Farley,” Queenie said. “A seriously bangin’ beverage.”

Chuck sat sipping and savoring for thirty or forty seconds before pointing to an empty table. “Just before you came in, a man, a woman, and a young boy were sitting right there. I couldn’t hear everything they were saying, but they were talking cordially and laughing and so on, and after a while I realized that the man evidently was returning the boy to the mother after an overnight stay, and I thought how sad that was, you know, that they were divorced and all, because they made what seemed to be a really sweet family.”

Queenie flashed Chuck the cut-to-the-chase face he’d seen a thousand times. “Yeah, life’s a bitch, baby. So what else is new?”

Chuck chuckled and replied, “Well, what else is new is that when their little party broke up and they were saying their good-byes I noticed that the man was wearing sandals and that his toe nails were painted a vibrant pink—with sparkles.”

“No lie?” Queenie said. “Pardon the pun, but that sure paints a whole ‘nother picture.”

Chuck watched Queenie’s attention shift suddenly to the door. “Hey! Over here!” she shouted. Nearly everyone in the café looked toward Queenie and then toward the young woman for whom Queenie’s flailing waving clearly was intended.

Crystal waved back and beamed and threaded her way to their table.

“Chuck,” Queenie began, as Chuck was rising from his chair, “this here’s Crystal, the young woman I told you about. Crystal, this here’s Chuck Farley.”

“You didn’t tell me Crystal was drop-dead gorgeous, Helen,” Chuck said, directing a lavish smile Crystal’s way. “Glad to meet you, Crystal.”

“Same here,” Crystal said, blushing to beat the band—until, like a chameleon or a cuttlefish or a peacock flounder, she went from beet-red to bone-white as a snot bubble erupted from her nose.

# # #

481

Chuck

As a child of eight or nine, Chuck began fantasizing about being the only person left on Earth. He didn’t think loneliness would be a problem, because he was awfully good at not having friends. Nor did he think he’d miss anyone in particular—least of all his mom, because he did not believe she truly loved him.

Chuck relished the idea of unrestricted access to anything and everything, especially to all the toys he’d coveted that were beyond his family’s means, and all the candies, cakes, donuts, and ice-cream sundaes he did not get to eat on account of Mean Old Mister Tooth Decay. In other words, it wasn’t omnipotence per se that rang Chuck’s chimes within his childish world of make-believe. It was license. And shortly after the onset of puberty, he discovered that the license his reveries found most appealing had become decidedly licentious; which is to say Chuck had evolved from being the only person left on Earth into being the only male person left on Earth, and ooo-la-la, la-laaa.

But not to worry. Chuck rarely ventured beyond First Base in flexing licentious license with the women of his dreams—not even after reaching manhood. In fact, another kind of fantasy had taken root in Chuck’s brain by then and was demanding more than equal time.

In this other more compelling, albeit ultimately distressing, fantasy, Chuck imagined reliving a week or two of his childhood with the discerning mind of an adult at play in his brain pan. He imagined scrutinizing everything and anything—especially the grownups who’d populated his world back then, and extra-especially his mother. 

Did she really not love him? Had he been misreading the signs?

In looking back on those times from the vantage point of his twenties and thirties Chuck never found convincing evidence that his mother’s routine professions of maternal affection had been anything more than spun sugar. He saw himself as the bitterly inconvenient truth of her existence—the avatar of her thwarted ambitions.

And so Chuck found himself fantasizing about again being eight or nine but with his adult powers of observation and evaluation fully operational. He imagined playing under the dining-room table while his mother and her best friend, Mrs. McCann, shared secrets over coffee in the living room; he imagined catching, this time, all the words that had flown over his head. And he imagined studying his mother’s features more closely and peering deeper into her eyes to locate true tenderness when she greeted him after school.

But the distressing part for Chuck was, he knew he hadn’t missed or misinterpreted anything as a child of eight or nine, or six or seven, or four or five. Because love is like a vibrating string that induces vibration in a string close by, and the strings in Chuck’s heart had never known inductive motion.

# # #

886

Hope

“Who is it?” David bellows into the intercom. He stresses the who instead of the is, making the statement more like a warning or a scolding than an inquiry—an oral BEWARE OF DOG sign in all caps with triple exclamation points.

“It’s Vincent,” Vincent responds coolly, attempting to deflect this unanticipated animosity with contrapuntal amiability. “I’m here about the fountain pens?”

Vincent waits in the rain for what seems like forever, and is about to press 4A again when David ends his signature pregnant pause with something unintelligible and buzzes Vincent in.

The vestibule smells like a mixture of damp dog and cooked cabbage, and the stairway’s right there, as impatient and in-your-face as the bellicose voice on the intercom. Vincent hears a salvo of deadbolts unlatching in the vertical distance and starts taking the steps two at a time. It’s like him to meet every challenge with a headlong rush, but in this instance it’s more like getting the blood flowing to offset the chill. By the fourth floor he’s winded and trudging, and has to lean over the railing with his forehead on his forearm while his heart-rate reluctantly stabilizes.

David’s left the door ajar, but Vincent knocks just the same. Lightly. The door swings a few more degrees and Vincent can see David slouching on the sofa, staring at the TV with his open pie-hole verging on drool.

Vincent steps in and stands there, waiting for David to acknowledge his presence or at least exhibit one or more signs of life. He’s like Silas Marner in full-on catatonia, Vincent thinks, David’s Kim Jong-il sweatshirt notwithstanding.

“It’s lucky for you I’m no ‘Dunstan Cass,’” Vincent jests in a bid to break David’s trance. “Otherwise, I’d’ve grabbed your sack of gold and been long gone by now.”

David languorously turns his pallid, doughy face in Vincent’s direction and begins boring a hole through Vincent’s forehead with his eyes. He lets ten or fifteen seconds elapse before uttering, “Huh?”

It comes as no surprise to Vincent that yet another obscure literary allusion—in this case to George Eliot’s Silas Marner: The Weaver of Raveloe, in which magnum plot twists occur during the eponymous protagonist’s random cataleptic seizures—has shot wide of the mark. It’s not the first time, it won’t be the last, and Vincent has long since stopped giving a shit. And so, with neither amplification nor apology, he begins recapping his reason for being there.

“Okay ... well ... I’m the one Marjorie from the resale shop called you about—about your late mother’s fountain pens. You told her I could come by any time as long as I brought plenty of cash, and ... well ... here I am.” Vincent downplays the cash stipulation by chuckling as he says this, but David’s deadpan expression does not change. Nor do David’s eyes stray from Vincent’s forehead, which Vincent endures without discomfiture, having been forewarned of the young man’s idiosyncratic forehead-gazing by Marjorie when he was purchasing Hope’s dishcloths.

At length, which is to say absurd length, David lowers his eyes and says, “You’re the guy who bought Hope’s dishcloths, yeah?”

“Right. Yes. That’s me,” Vincent replies, nodding.

“Why?”

“Why? Oh ... well ... I do some photography and I found them at the resale shop and I thought they might make a charming still-life arrangement.”

“Charming?” David repeats, finding Vincent’s forehead again. “Yeah, I guess Hope had a knack for ‘charming.’ You could even say ‘charming’ was Hope’s métier.”

Vincent isn’t sure if David is being sarcastic with this reference. Moreover, he wonders if it’s a subtle payback in kind for his errant invocation of a George Eliot novel. He hasn’t heard or seen the word “métier” since Jack Nicholson, as sardonic gumshoe Jake Gittes, used it in the 1974 motion picture Chinatown. He dismisses this conclusion out of hand, however, as giving a douchebag too much credit. “Métier,” he says, smiling crisply. “Haven’t heard that word since Jack Nicholson used it in Chinatown.”

“Bingo,” David answers. He counts to twelve in his head, rises, and says, “Okay, let’s do this.”

Vincent follows David into the kitchen, where David motions for him to take a seat at the table—at the table, Vincent realizes: the round, chrome-trimmed, 1950s-era Formica table where poor Hope had keeled over into a plate of chicken-fried steak.

The table has what’s called a boomerang pattern, featuring overlapping stylized boomerang outlines in light, medium, dark, and bluish gray tones against a soft gray background. Stimulated by the acuteness of this detail, Vincent’s imagination goes hyperactive and his skin into gooseflesh-mode as he envisions Hope slumping there so pitiably. An undignified, unworthy way for someone so sweet and gentle to leave this world he thinks, and the thought pierces his heart like a poison dart.

Because, Vincent just knows Hope had to have been sweet and gentle; because only a sweet and gentle soul could have knit exquisite dishcloth after exquisite dishcloth. And pondering her breathtaking handiwork and undeserved tragicomic demise has imbued Hope in Vincent’s mind with an almost unbearable poignancy. He has become as obsessed with her as Dana Andrews was with the presumably murdered Gene Tierney in the quintessential film noir Laura. Only in this film there’s no hope of Hope coming back from the dead to find true love.

# # #

731

Queenie

“No, I’m dead serious, man,” Barry insists. “Sell me what you’re wearing.”

“You need to seriously go fuck yourself, man,” the man answers, shoving Barry aside with sufficient force to make him stumble backwards and collide with a bike rack.

“I need your damn clothes!” Barry bellows at the man’s rapidly receding, FUBU-clad figure.

Barry hasn’t exactly fallen to the ground, but almost. He’s awkwardly commingling with the bike rack and has to wrench himself upright. In doing so, he snags his pants on a sharp burr protruding from a protuberant galvanized bolt.

“Shit!” he exclaims on discovering the resulting rip in his brand new Gap 1969 Limited Edition Premium Jeans (rigid rinse, with selvage trim on the coin pocket). They and his brand new Gap (PRODUCT) RED™ cotton T—in soft black with the word “HAMME(RED)” raggedly silk-screened to simulate a cracked and faded, dozens-of-washings look—had been purposely selected from an official Gap window manikin to impress Queenie, the object of Barry’s ardor, with (a) Barry’s Zeitgeist-synchronized sense of style and (b) Barry’s deeply ingrained social awareness.

If the jeans by themselves don’t get the job done, Barry had reasoned, then surely the fact that half the profits from his T-shirt had gone or would eventually be going to a global fund to fight AIDS, will.

In other words, mission accomplished.

Or so Barry had believed while brandishing cash at the Gap. He’d even embellished the ad hoc ensemble with a military-inspired wool jacket featuring four extra-generous flap pockets, shoulder epaulettes with button closures, strapped cuffs, and a concealed nylon hood.

It was all over but the waiting, Barry was certain—meaning, the waiting outside the bodega where Queenie had been shopping the day she saved his sorry ass (as Queenie had put it) when his Harley had fallen on top of him, and she had lifted it from his sprawling person with the apparent ease of a mommy freeing a traumatized two-year-old from a toppled trike.

Four days he had waited. Four days! And then, on the fifth day, there she comes, glowing and gliding towards him like an ethereal form, moving as if in slow-motion through a throng of faceless pedestrians paralyzed in their tracks by her grandeur.

The world becomes a blur for Barry as Queenie floats past him and into the store. He stands there shivering in the sweltering heat, waiting for her to emerge, his heart marking the minutes at two beats per second.

Barry hears her before he sees her. Hears her calling, “Yeah, man, the same to you!” And as she slides back into the sunlight, he hears himself speaking to Queenie, saying, “Hey—remember me?”

“No,” Queenie answers with a tone that’s equal parts indifference and impatience.

Barry gulps like some kind of over-the-top buffoon in some cartoonish melodrama. Like Jack Larson as “Jimmy Olsen,” for instance, in any 1950s episode of Adventures of Superman.

“I’m the guy you pulled the motorcycle off of,” he says, pointing. “Up the street? Over there?”

Queenie’s amber eyes give Barry a thorough going over, then light up with recognition. “Jesus Christ, it’s the Marlboro Man! Who you tryin’ to be now, Jack—that ‘Bono’ dude? And why you wearin’ that fuckin’ coat in this fuckin’ heat, man?”

Barry realizes he’s sweating buckets, but carries on as though he weren’t, as though he were indeed channeling Bonovian cool. “Listen,” he says, “I just have to ask you again—”

“Ask me what?”

“If you’ll go to Starbucks with me. When I asked you the last time, your exact words, as I recall them, were ‘No fuckin’ way.’”

Barry smiles at Queenie after saying this. Smiles like they’re sharing a joke or reminiscing about some distant contretemps whose memory they’ll shortly be washing away with raspberry mocha.

Queenie smiles back at Barry and keeps smiling at Barry while delivering her reply. “I’ll put it a little differently this time,” she says, giving his bulky pockets and pointless epaulettes a final, bemused inspection. “How about, ‘No fuckin’ way—José.’”

She leaves Barry standing there, slack-jawed, in a puddle of perspiration. All seems lost as he watches her walking off, swinging her bag of groceries in sublime unison with her strides.

But then Barry sees Queenie checking out a FUBU man who’s passing her on the sidewalk and coming his way, and decides all’s not lost after all.

# # #

209

Little Barry

Big Barry, to all intents and purposes, has disappeared and Little Barry wants his daddy back. Gone without a trace are Big Barry’s pirate trappings and sundry cowpoke furnishings, and with them his peerless “Big Barry” persona.

Worse still, like a self-inflicted mortal blow Big Barry has upped and sold his Harley Davidson—the thundering, fire-belching, ass-kicking “hog” against which Jimmy’s father’s lily-livered, chicken-legged Vespa motor scooter had exuded about as much machismo as an antique treadle sewing machine.

“Where’s the hog, Daddy?” Little Barry had demanded with a quivering, panic-singed voice, his horrified eyes all but sucked from their sockets by the black hole where the motorcycle had formerly held sway like a gunmetal god in Big Barry’s garage. “Where’s the hog?—”

“Sold it,” Big Barry had answered, just like that. And just like that Little Barry’s universe had collapsed to pinhead proportions.

And so, when Big Barry brings Little Barry home a little earlier than usual on Saturday afternoon, Little Barry does not emulate Big Barry’s erstwhile cocksure saunter on making his way from the curb to the porch. He runs as fast as he can, desperate to escape the stranger in his father’s car, determined to reach the haven of his bedroom before the first sob.

# # #

315

Chuck

Chuck flips the switch that puts his Kindle to sleep, then the one that shuts off the blue-white diode of his reading lamp, which he wears on his head. It is a headlight in the literal sense, complete with an adjustable elastic band, and much more convenient and effective than any clip-on reading lamp he’s ever owned. He removes that and sets it and the Kindle on the nightstand and checks that the alarm’s turned on on his digital alarm clock.

The room’s dark now, and the ceiling fan’s gently thrumming. But even under conditions so conducive, Chuck’s mind, as usual, won’t allow nodding off. It starts working, as usual, on something, and the something in this case is how wonderful is the book he’s reading—a novel from 1915 called The Good Soldier, by Ford Madox Ford—and how much lonelier the fact of that makes him feel.

Chuck always feels lonely. But being unable to share with anyone the sumptuous perfection of Ford’s prose or the novel’s masterfully woven story-line or the powerful insights and delightful wit the book contains aggravates his isolation to the throbbing point. Chuck simply does not know anyone who would give a rat’s ass about The Good Soldier or about Ford Madox Ford.

Or about Chuck himself, come to think of it. Which Chuck does, of course, come to think of.

Why am I here? he winds up wondering, inevitably. It is his inevitable meta-theme. He means nothing to everyone, something to no one, increasingly less to himself. He thinks about all the photo albums his image must be in—an anonymous background element in thousands of keepsake snapshots snapped by untold strangers at parks, fairs, zoos, monuments, historic and scenic points of interest, and by marginal acquaintances at social gatherings whose fringes he routinely helps populate.

“Background fodder,” Chuck mumbles, rolling onto his side. “My raison d’être.”

# # #