Having read the preceding selection, I’m initially at a loss to determine what message Arleen has intended to convey. Could she be trying to say that we should go out dancing more? Or that I have a drinking problem? Or that I’m dictatorial about what we watch on television? Or that I’m moody and sulk too much? Perhaps she’s suggesting that I kill someone to enhance my supernatural powers. Or maybe — just maybe — she’s trying to say that I need to get away from the rarified and glamorous world of my headquarters. Maybe Arleen, in all her psychotherapeutic wisdom, is trying to tell me to return to my roots, to re-stomp the rough-and-tumble stomping grounds of my youth.
So the next day, I went back to the old neighborhood to look up Rocco Trezza.
“Hey, man, where’s Trezz? You seen Trezz around?” I asked a guy who used to hang out with Rocco and me.
The guy dismissed the question with a wave of his hand.
“Trezza’s been bakin’ doughnuts,” he said disdainfully.
I hadn’t been back to the old neighborhood for some twenty years and obviously I was no longer fluent in the local patois. But I didn’t want to ask what “bakin’ doughnuts” meant and seem like some kind of hick, so I just shook my head and rolled my eyes and said, “Bakin’ doughnuts … oh man.” I bid the guy adieu and walked down the street, trying to figure out what he meant—“bakin’ doughnuts”? Maybe it meant he was doing nothing — cooking up a big zero every day. Maybe he was doing a lot of crack — blowing smoke rings through his mind. Or maybe he was pimping — maybe “doughnuts” stood for vaginas and “bake” meant control, exploit — taking the raw dough of young girls and parlaying it into lucrative pastry. Or maybe Rocco had hit it big — maybe “doughnuts” stood for the fat round digits in a seven-figure income. Then I thought maybe it meant that he was wasting his life away masturbating … maybe “doughnut” stood for the round configuration of fingers and thumb around the penis and “bakin’ ” was a literal reference to the heat caused by the friction of hand against dick or a figurative reference to the passion of autoeroticism.
I was so lost in thought as I rounded the corner of the street that I barreled right into a guy — didn’t even see him coming. As I helped him up off the ground, I suddenly recognized him and I was so stunned that I let go and he fell back on the sidewalk.
It was Rocco. Rocco Trezza. He was older. A bit heavier in the gut. His hair had thinned out. But he was unmistakably Trezz. Same inimitable style: the thigh-high jackboots, the black latex jockstrap, the Prussian spiked helmet strapped under the chin.
“Trezz, I can’t believe it … after all these years.”
Trezz hugged me. “How’s it goin’, man?” he asked.
“I’m good. I’m good. I got a hit book out, my wife got $35,000 because a ceiling fell on her head while she was watching the Academy Awards, and we got a dog named Carmella.”
“Carmella?”
“Yeah, Carmella … Trezz, it’s really good to see you, babe.”
“Likewise. I been reading about you.”
“Hey, Trezz, I want to ask you about something.”
“Ask.”
“Trezz, I hear you been …”
I hesitated for a moment, wondering whether I should pursue it or not.
“Trezz, I hear you been bakin’ doughnuts.”
Rocco stared at me and I could see the fury just boiling up within him.
“Bakin’ doughnuts? Bakin’ doughnuts? You heard I was fuckin’ bakin’ doughnuts?!!”
He wrestled me down and pinned me to the sidewalk. His breath hit my face in hot gusts.
“After all these years … after all we’ve been through … after every fuckin’ thing you and me have been through — you think that I would possibly fuckin’ end up bakin’ doughnuts?!! Huh?!!”
I threw him off me and we both looked at each other, sitting there on the sidewalk. I still had no idea what it meant—“bakin’ doughnuts.”
“Trezz,” I said, “I didn’t believe it … OK? I knew it was a fuckin’ lie.”
“It is a fuckin’ lie,” he said, helping me up.
I put my arm around him, and me and Trezz walked down the street. And it was just like the old days.
I’m sitting by my pool, which is encircled by the eight-foot, four-ton basaltic bluestone pillars from Stonehenge’s inner circle that I bought with a portion of my latest advance from Vintage Books, when Baby Lago brings me a fax that’s just come in. It’s from Stu Gallenkamp, V.P. Marketing, Columbia Records, re: the liner notes I’d written for George Michael’s “Listen Without Prejudice, Vol. 1.” It says:
Dear Mr. L., I just got off the phone with George. He loves the liner notes and in fact called them the most intense and, in a certain sense, the most significant liner notes he’d ever read. But he agrees with me on the advisability of deleting the following paragraph: “The teenage baby-sitters are slathering me with Ben-Gay. I’m eleven. I’ve got this erotic fascination with the girls’ armpits — it’s completely unfocused; I don’t know quite what I want to ‘do’ to or with their armpits, but I’m locked into their brunette stubble. The two girls shut my bedroom door, lock it, and turn out the lights. They take the warm pink wads of bubblegum from their mouths and affix them to special acupressure points on my body. They remove their tampons and smear menstrual blood on my eyelids. They shave their armpits and rinse their razors in a basin and we drink the hairy water and we chant — their Marlboros glowing in the crepuscular shadows. Then one of them — I think it was Felice — puts my face into her freshly shaven armpit, which smells slightly but deliciously of teenybopper b.o., and she says ‘count backwards from 100’ and the next thing I remember is waking up and it’s Rosh Hashanah, U.S.A., in the 1990s.”
At breakfast the next morning, Baby Lago informed me that we were out of turtle eggs and strawberries. I felt like driving her new Porsche 911 Turbo, so I offered to fetch the groceries myself, and she tossed me the keys and her flame-resistant driving gloves. I negotiated the concrete antiterrorist road barriers in first gear, the tachometer needle climbing toward the 6800-rpm redline. I brought the car to a complete stop where the headquarters access road meets the highway. I looked at myself in the rearview mirror … nice. And then I stomped on the gas, tore through the gearbox, and hit 60 mph in 4.8 seconds.
Approximately four miles west of Exit 16, outside of Wenton’s Mill, I began following a 1983 light-blue Chevy Impala, Tennessee plates, traveling west on Rte. 70. My initial observation was of a male Caucasian driver approximately 25–30 years of age and two passengers, a female Caucasian and a female Hispanic, both approximately 25–30 years of age. As I followed the vehicle, I observed its occupants engage in almost continuous sex. The male driver was being fellated by the female Caucasian, who was propped on hands and knees in the middle of the front seat. She, in turn, was enjoying vigorous cunnilingus courtesy of the female Hispanic who was supine in the passenger seat, her bare feet dangling out the window. Near Fannington, at the junction of Rte. 70 and the interstate, I observed a rearrangement within the moving vehicle: the female Hispanic climbed across the front seat and took over the wheel, the male Caucasian slid to the middle, and the female Caucasian repositioned to the passenger seat, and the sex resumed immediately. The male Caucasian lay on his side, sucking the female Hispanic driver’s nipples through her T-shirt and stimulating her clitoris with his hand, his legs scissored open, presenting his genitals to the seated female Caucasian, who initiated uninhibited fellatio. I observed three subsequent realignments within the moving vehicle with only momentary hiatuses in sexual activity. Approaching Exit 3, outside of Knoll, I decided to pull the vehicle over. I attached my flashing red light to the roof of my car, and the vehicle slowed, pulling onto the shoulder of the highway. I got out of my car, approached the Impala, and gestured to the driver — at the time it was the female Caucasian — to roll down her window. She did. The smell of sweat, semen, and vaginal mucus was overpowering. Half-eaten chicken wings and drumsticks, Juicy Fruit gum wrappers, crushed Marlboro packs, and empty beer cans were strewn all over the car. The occupants wore no trousers or underpants. Their pubic hair was full of potato chip crumbs.