Arnie stumbled away blindly. He would have walked right into a stack of old bald tyres if I hadn’t grabbed his arm and steered him away. Darnell went back the other way to the poker table. When he got there he said something to the others in his wheezy voice. They all roared with laughter.
“I’m all right, Dennis,” Arnie said, as if I had asked him. His teeth were locked together and his chest was heaving in quick, shallow breaths. “I’m all right, let go of me, I’m all right, I’m okay.”
I let go of his arm. We walked across to the door and Darnell hollered at us, “And you ain’t going to bring your hoodlum friends in here, or you’re out!”
One of the others chimed, “And leave your dope at home!”
Arnie cringed. He was my friend, but I hated him when he cringed that way.
We escaped into the cool darkness. The door rattled down behind us. And that’s how we got Christine to Darnell’s Garage. Some great time, huh?
6
OUTSIDE
I got me a car and I got me some gas,
Told everybody they could Kiss my ass…
We got into my car and I drove out of the yard. Somehow it had gotten around to past nine o’clock. How the time flies when you’re having fun. A half-moon stood out in the sky. That and the orange lights in the acres of parking lot at the Monroeville Mall took care of any wishing stars there might have been.
We drove the first two or three blocks in utter I silence, and then Arnie suddenly burst into a fury of weeping. I had thought he might cry, but the force of this frightened me. I pulled over immediately.
“Arnie—”
I gave up right there. He was going to do it until it was done. The tears and the sobs came in a shrill, bitter flood, and they came without restraint—Arnie had used up his quota of restraint for the day. At first it seemed to be nothing but reaction; I felt the same sort of thing myself, only mine had gone to my head, making it ache like a rotted tooth, and to my stomach, which was sickly clenched up.
So, yeah, at first I thought it was nothing but a reaction sort of thing, a spontaneous release, and maybe at first it was. But after a minute or two, I realised it was a lot more than that; it went a lot deeper than that. And I began to get words out of the sounds he was making: just a few at first, then strings of them.
“I’ll get them!” he shouted thickly through the sobs. “I’ll “get those fucking sons of bitches I’ll get them Dennis. I’ll make them sorry I’ll make those fuckers eat it… EAT IT… EAT IT!”
“Stop it,” I said, scared. “Arnie, quit it.”
But he wouldn’t quit it. He began to slam his fists down on the padded dashboard of my Duster, hard enough to make marks.
“I’ll get them you see if I don’t!”
In the dim glow of the moon and a nearby streetlight, his face looked ravaged and haglike. He was like a stranger to me then. He was off walking in whatever cold places of the universe a fun-loving God reserves for people like him. I didn’t know him. I didn’t want to know him. I could only sit there helplessly and hope that the Arnie I did know would come back. After a while, he did.
The hysterical words disappeared into sobs again. The hate was gone and he was only crying. It was a deep, bawling, bewildered sound.
I sat there behind the wheel of my car, not sure what I should do, wishing I was someplace else, anyplace else, trying on shoes at Thom McAn’s, filling out a credit application in a discount store, standing in front of a pay toilet stall with diarrhoea and no dime. Anyplace, man. It didn’t have to be Monte Carlo. Mostly I sat there wishing I was older. Wishing we were both older.
But that was a copout job. I knew what to do. Reluctantly, not wanting to, I slid across the seat and put my arms around him and held him. I could feel his face, hot and fevered, mashed against my chest. We sat that way for maybe five minutes, and then I drove him to his house and dropped him off. After that I went home myself. Neither of us talked about it later, me holding him like that. No one came along the sidewalk and saw us parked at the kerb. I suppose if someone had, we would have looked like a couple of queers, I sat there and held him and loved him the best I could and wondered how come it had to be that I was Arnie Cunningham’s only friend, because right then, believe me, I didn’t want to be his friend.
Yet, somehow—I realized it then, if only dimly—maybe Christine was going to be his friend now, too. I wasn’t sure if I liked that either, although we had been through the same shit-factory on her behalf that long crazy day.
When we rolled up to the kerb in front of his house I said, “You going to be all right, man?”
He managed a smile. “Yeah, I’ll be okay.” He looked at me sadly. “You know, you ought to find some other favourite charity. Heart Fund. Cancer Society. Something.”
“Ahh, get out of here.”
“You know what I mean.”
“If you mean you’re a wet end, you’re not telling me anything I didn’t know.”
The front porch light came on, and both Michael and Regina came flying out, probably to see if it was us or the State Police come to inform them that their only chick and child had been run over on the highway.
“Arnold?” Regina called shrilly.
“Bug out, Dennis,” Arnie said, grinning a little more honestly now. “This shit you don’t need.” He got out of the car and said dutifully, “Hi, Mom. Hi, Dad.”
“Where have you been?” Michael asked. “You had your mother badly frightened, young man!”
Arnie was right. I could do without the reunion scene. I glanced back in the rearview mirror just briefly and saw him standing there, looking solitary and vulnerable—and then the two of them enfolded him and began shepherding him back to the $60,000 nest, no doubt turning the full force of all their latest parenting trips on him—Parent Effectiveness Training, est, who knows what else. They were so perfectly rational about it, that was the thing. They had played such a large part in what he was, and they were just too motherfucking (and fatherfucking) rational to see it.
I turned the radio on to FM-104, where the Block Party Weekend was continuing, and got Bob Seger and the Silver Bullet Band singing “Still the Same”. The serendipity was just a little too hideously perfect, and I dialled away to the Phillies game.
The Phillies were losing. That was all right. That was par for the course.
7
BAD DREAMS
I’m a roadrunner, honey,
And you can’t catch me.
Yes, I’m a roadrunner, honey,
And you can’t keep up with me.
Come on over here and race,
Baby, baby, you’ll see.
Move over, honey! Stand back!
I’m gonna put some dirt in your eye!
When I got home, my dad and my sister were sitting in the kitchen eating brown-sugar sandwiches. I started feeling hungry right away and realised I’d never gotten any supper.
“Where you been, Boss?” Elaine asked, hardly looking up from her 16 or Creem or Tiger Beat or whatever it was. She had been calling me Boss ever since I discovered Bruce Springsteen the year before and became a fanatic. It was supposed to get under my skin.
At fourteen Elaine was beginning to leave her childhood behind and to turn into the full-fledged American beauty that she eventually became—tall, dark-haired, and blue-eyed. But in that late summer of 1978 she was the total teenaged crowd animal. She had begun with Donny and Marie at nine, then had gotten all moony for John Travolta at eleven (I made the mistake of calling him John Revolta one day and she scratched me so badly that I almost needed a stitch in my cheek—I supposed I deserved it, sort of). At twelve she was gone for Shaun. Then it was Andy Gibb. Just lately she had developed more ominous tastes: heavymetal rockers like Deep Purple and a new group, Styx.