“How’d you get lift-time? I thought you had to reserve that in advance.”
His eyes shifted away from mine. “No problem there,” he said, but there was deception in his voice. “I ran a couple of errands for Mr Darnell.”
I opened my mouth to ask what errands, and then I decided I didn’t want to hear. Probably the “couple of errands” boiled down to no more than running around the corner to Schirmer’s Luncheonette and bringing back coffee—and for the regulars or crating up various used auto parts for later sale, but I didn’t want to be involved in the Christine end of Arnie’s life, and that included how he was getting along (or not getting along) down at Darnell’s Garage.
And there was something else—a feeling of letting go. I either couldn’t define that feeling very well back then or didn’t want to. Now I guess I’d say it’s the way you feel when a friend of yours falls in love and marries a right high-riding, dyed-in-the-wool bitch. You don’t like the bitch and in ninety-nine cases out of a hundred the bitch doesn’t like you, so you just close the door on that room of your friendship. When the thing is done, you either let go of the subject… or you find your friend letting go of you, usually with the bitch’s enthusiastic approval.
“Let’s go to the movies,” Arnie said restlessly.
“What’s on?”
“Well, there’s one of those gross Kung-fu movies down at the State Twin, how does that sound? Heee-yah!” He pretended to administer a savage karate kick to Screaming Jay Hawkins, and Screaming Jay took off like a shot.
“Sounds pretty good. Bruce Lee?”
“Nah, some other guy.”
“What’s it called?”
“I don’t know. Fists of Danger. Flying Hands of Death. Or maybe it was Genitals of Fury, I don’t know. What do you say? We can come back and tell the gross parts to Ellie and make her puke.”
“All right,” I said. “If we can still get in for a buck each.”
“Yeah, we can until three.”
“Let’s go.”
We went. It turned out to be a Chuck Norris movie, not bad at all. And on Monday we went back to building the Interstate extension. I forgot about my dream. Gradually I realized that I wasn’t seeing as much of Arnie as I used to; again, it was the way you seem to fall out of touch with a guy who has just gotten married. Besides, my thing with the cheerleader began to heat up around then. My thing was heating up, all right—more than one night I brought her home from the submarine races at the drive-in with my balls throbbing so badly I could barely walk.
Arnie, meanwhile, was spending most of his evenings at Darnell’s.
9
BUDDY REPPERTON
And I know, no matter what the cost,
Oooooh, that dual exhaust
Makes my motor cry,
My baby’s got the Cadillac Walk.
Our last full week of work before school started was the week before Labor Day. When I pulled up to Arnie’s house to pick him up that morning, he came out with a great big blue-black shiner around one eye and an ugly scrape upside his face.
“What happened to you?”
“I don’t want to talk about it,” he said sullenly. “I had to talk to my parents about it until I thought I was gonna croak.” He tossed his lunch pail in the back and lapsed into a grim silence that lasted all the way to work. Some of the other guys ribbed him about his shiner, but Arnie just shrugged it off.
I didn’t say anything about it on the Way home, just played the radio and kept myself to myself. And I might not have heard the story at all if I hadn’t been waylaid by this greasy Irish wop named Gino just before we turned off Main Street.
Back then Gino was always waylaying me—he could reach right through a closed car window and do it. Gino’s Fine Italian Pizza is on the corner of Main and Basin Drive, and every time I saw that sign with the pizza going up in the air and all the i’s dotted with shamrocks (it flashed off and on at night, how funky can you get, am I right?), I’d feel the waylaying start again. And tonight my mother would be in class, which meant a pick-up supper at home. The prospect didn’t fill me with joy. Neither my dad nor I was much of a cook, and Ellie would burn water.
“Let’s get a pizza,” I said, pulling into Gino’s parking lot. “What do you say? A big greasy one that smells like armpits.”
“Jesus, Dennis, that’s gross!”
“Clean armpits,” I amended. “Come on.”
“Nah, I’m pretty low on cash,” Arnie said listlessly.
“I’ll buy. You can even have those horrible fucking anchovies on your half. What do you say?”
“Dennis, I really don’t—”
“And a Pepsi,” I said.
“Pepsi racks my complexion. You know that.”
“Yeah, I know. A great big Pepsi, Arnie.”
His grey eyes gleamed for the first time that day, “A great big Pepsi,” he echoed. “Think of that. You’re mean, Dennis. Really.”
“Two, if you want,” I said. It was mean, all right—like offering Hershey bars to the circus fat lady.
“Two,” he said, clutching my shoulder. “Two Pepsis, Dennis!” He began to flop around in the seat, clawing at his throat and screaming, “Two! Quick! Two! Quick!”
I was laughing so hard I almost drove into the cinderblock wall, and as we got out of the car, I thought, Why shouldn’t he have a couple of sodas? He sure must have been steering clear of them lately. The slight improvement in his complexion I’d noticed on that overcast Sunday two weeks ago was definite now. He still had plenty of bumps and craters, but not so many of them were—pardon me, but I must say it—oozing. He looked better in other ways too. A summer of road-ganging had left him deeply tanned and in better shape than he’d ever been in his life. So I thought he deserved his Pepsi. To the victor goes the spoils.
Gino’s is run by a wonderful Italian fellow named Pat Donahue. He has a sticker on his cash register which reads IRISH MAFIA, he serves green beer on St Patrick’s Day (on March 17th you can’t even get near Gino’s, and one of the cuts on the jukebox is Rosemary Clooney singing “When Irish Eyes Are Smiling), and affects a black derby hat, which he usually wears tipped far back on his head.
The juke is an old Wurtitzer bubbler, a holdover from the late forties, and all the records—not just Rosemary Clooney—are on the Prehistoric label. It may be the last jukebox in America where you can get three plays for a quarter. On the infrequent occasions when I smoke a little dope, it’s Gino’s I fantasize about—just walking in there and ordering three loaded pizzas, a quart of Pepsi, and six or seven of Pat Donahues home-made fudge brownies. Then I imagine just sitting down and scarfing everything up while a steady stream of Beach Boys and Rolling Stones hits pours out of that juke.
We went in, ordered up, and sat there watching the three pizza cooks fling the dough into the air and catch it. They were trading such pungent Italian witticisms as, “I seenya at the Shriners” dance last night, Howie, who was that skag your brother was wit?” “Oh, her? That was your sister.”
I mean, like, how Old World can you get?
People came in and went out, a lot of them kids from school. Before long I’d be seeing them in the halls again, and I felt a recurrence of that fierce nostalgia-in-advance and that sense of fright. In my head I could hear the home-room bell going off, but somehow its long bray sounded like an alarm: Here we go again, Dennis, last time, after this year you got to learn how to be a grown-up. I could hear locker doors crashing closed, could hear the steady ka-chonk, ka-chonk, ka-chonk, of linemen hitting the tackling dummies, could hear Marty Bellerman yelling exuberantly, “My ass and your face, Pedersen! Remember that! My ass and your face! It’s easier to tell the fuckin Bobbsey Twins apart!” The dry smell of chalk-dust in the classrooms in the Math Wing. The sound of the typewriters from the big secretarial classrooms on the second floor. Mr Meecham, the principal, giving the announcements at the end of the day in his dry, fussy voice. Lunch outdoors on the bleachers in good weather. A new crop of freshmen looking dorky and lost. And at the end of it all, you march down the aisle in this big purple bathrobe, and that’s it. High school’s over. You are released on an unsuspecting world.