FIVE
I’m already late for school, but I need to stop at my next-door-neighbor Walt’s[11] so that I can give him his present.
Today, I knock once and let myself into Walt’s house because he has to walk slowly with one of those gray-piped four-footed walkers that has dirty tennis balls attached to protect his hardwood floors. It’s difficult for him to get around, especially with bad lungs, so he just gave me a key and said, “Come in whenever you feel like it. And come often!”
He’s been smoking since he was twelve, and I’ve been helping him buy his Pall Mall Reds on the Internet to save money. The first time, I found this phenomenal deaclass="underline" two hundred cigarettes for nineteen dollars, and he proclaimed me a hero right then and there. He doesn’t even have a computer in his home, let alone the Internet. So it was like I performed a miracle, getting cigarettes that cheap delivered to his doorstep, because he was paying a hell of a lot more at the local convenience store. I’ve been bringing over my laptop—our Internet signal reaches his living room—and we’ve been searching for the best deals every week. He’s always trying to give me half of what he saves, but I never take his money.[12]
It’s funny because he’s rich,[13] but always keen on finding a bargain. Maybe that’s why he’s rich. I don’t know.
A “helper” comes and takes care of him most days, but not until nine thirty AM, so it’s always just Walt and me before school.
“Walt?” I say as I walk through the smoky hallway, under the crystal chandelier, toward the smoky living room where he usually sleeps surrounded by overflowing ashtrays and empty bottles. “Walt?”
I find him in his La-Z-Boy, smoking a Pall Mall Red, eyes bloodshot from drinking scotch last night.
His robe isn’t shut, so I can see his naked, hairless chest. It’s the pinkish-red sunset color of conch-shell innards.
He looks at me with his best black-and-white movie-star face[14] and says, “You despise me, don’t you?”
It’s a line from Casablanca, which we’ve watched together a million times.
Standing next to his chair with my backpack between my feet, I answer with Rick’s follow-up line in the film, saying, “If I gave you any thought I probably would.”
Then I follow it with a line from The Big Sleep, saying, “My, my, my. Such a lot of guns around town and so few brains,” which feels pretty cool and authentic considering I have the Nazi P-38 in my backpack.
Walt counters with a line from Key Largo, saying, “You were right. When your head says one thing and your whole life says another, your head always loses.”
I smile even bigger because whenever we trade Bogart-related quotes, our conversations seem to make a weird sort of sense that is unpredictable and almost poetic.
I go with a Bogart quote I looked up on the Internet, “There never seems to be any trouble brewing around a bar until a woman puts that high heel over the brass rail. Don’t ask me why, but somehow women at bars seem to create trouble among men.”
He goes back to the Casablanca well and says, “Where were you last night?”
So I finish the quote, playing Rick and say, “That’s so long ago, I don’t remember.”
He says, “Will I see you tonight?”
It sort of freaks me out, because no one will ever see me again after today, so the question seems weighty. I remind myself that he couldn’t possibly know my plan; he’s just playing the dumb Bogart game we always play. He’s clueless.
I become Rick again and finish the quote: “I never make plans that far ahead.”
Walt smiles, blows smoke at the ceiling, and says, “Louis, I think this is the beginning of a beautiful friendship.”
I sit down on his couch and end the game the way we always do by saying, “Here’s looking at you, kid.”
“Why aren’t you in school learning?” Walt says as the flame from his Zippo lights up his face and another cigarette sparks to life. But he doesn’t really care. I skip school all the time just to watch old Bogart films with him. He loves it when I skip school.
He starts coughing and you can hear the terrible tobacco phlegm rattling.
A two-pack-a-day sixty-year-habit smoker’s cough.
Foul.
I just stare at Walt for a long time, waiting for him to wipe his hand on his robe and catch his breath.
I wish he were healthier, but it’s hard to imagine him without a cigarette in his hand. Like I bet even in his high school yearbook pictures he was smoking. That’s just who he is. Like Bogart too.
Man, I’m going to miss Walt so much. Watching old smoky Bogart movies with him is one of the few things I’ll truly miss. It was always the highlight of my week.
Walt says, “You okay, Leonard? You don’t look well.”
I shake off the weirdness, wipe my eyes with my sleeve, and say, “Yeah, I’m fine.”
He says, “You got all your hair tucked up into that fedora along with the tops of your ears?”[15]
I nod.
I don’t want to tell him I cut off all my hair, for some reason, maybe because Walt’s one of my best friends—he really cares about me, I swear to god—and he’d know something was wrong if he saw my fucked-up haircut. He’d get upset, and I want to exit on a good note—I want this to be a happy good-bye, something he can remember and actually feel good about after I’m gone.
“Bought you a present,” I say, and then pull the turtle-looking wrap job from the top of my backpack.
He says, “It’s not my birthday, you know.”
I hope he guesses that it’s mine—or that he might figure it out, deduce it, so I wait a second as he fingers the present and tries to mentally guess what the hell it might be.
He looks so happy to get a present.
I kind of promise myself that I won’t kill Asher Beal, nor will I off myself, if only Walt just says “happy birthday” to me one time, as silly and trivial as that seems.
He doesn’t, and that makes me sad, even though I probably never even told him when my birthday was and I know he would definitely say “happy birthday” if I had.
But I really want him to say “happy birthday” to me without any prompting, and when he doesn’t, I get to feeling hollow as a dry-docked boat or something.
“Why do I get pink paper? Do you think I’m a faggot?” he says, and then starts laughing really hard and coughing again.
I say, “It’s the twenty-first century. Don’t be such a homophobe,” but I’m not really mad at him.
Walt’s so old that you can’t hold his bigotry against him, because for almost all his life it was okay for him to say “faggot” among friends, and then suddenly it wasn’t.
He also says things like nigger and kike and Polack and chink and light in the loafers and sand nigger and slant and spade and spook and camel jockey and smokes and porch monkey and just about a trillion other awful slurs.
I hate bigotry, but I also love Walt.
It’s like Herr Silverman teaches us about the Nazis. Maybe Walt was just unlucky being born at a time when everyone was prejudiced against homosexuals and minorities, and that’s just the way it was for his generation. I don’t know.
I’m starting to get sad about all that, so I change the subject by pointing at his present and saying, “Well, aren’t you going to open it?”
He nods once like a little kid and then tears into the pink paper with his yellow shaky fingers. Halfway in he says, “I think I know what this is!”
When he has the Bogart hat unwrapped, he says, “Hot digitty dog!” all corny and nestles the hat down on his white hair.
It’s a perfect fit, just like I knew it would be, because I measured his head once when he was passed out, drunk.
11
I met Walt during a blizzard, just after we moved into the new house. I remember Linda asking me to shovel the driveway, even though it was still snowing, because she had to go out to meet another fake designer or some bulimic model or whomever. I think she was trying to “cure” me by assigning manly tasks because of what happened with Asher and me, even though she refused to believe me when I tried to tell her what happened because she’s a selfish, oblivious bitch. And on that snow day, shoveling was an impossible task, because just as soon as I got one shovel width done, new snow had already covered the cleared driveway once more. It took me hours, and I was exhausted by the time Linda said, “Good enough.” I was just about to go inside when she asked me to make sure our neighbor was okay. “He’s an old man. Ask him if he needs his driveway shoveled or anything else,” Linda said, which was strange because she’s not usually considerate—or even aware—of anyone but herself. Again, I think she was trying to “cure” me without addressing what happened. When I didn’t move, Linda said, “Go, Leo. Be a good neighbor. We want to make the right sort of impression. Especially after all that’s happened.” So I walked through a few feet of snow as Linda pulled out of the driveway. I had planned on just going inside our new home once she had driven away, but she idled in the street, watching me through the falling snow. Just as soon as I rang the doorbell, she drove away. When no one answered I thought I was in luck, but then I heard yelling inside and what sounded like gunshots. It shook me right out of the quiet winter scene I was in and got my heart going even more than it already was. I waited for a second, thinking I might be hearing things, but then I heard more gunshots, so I pulled out my cell phone and called the police. Three cop cars arrived a few minutes later with their sirens blaring and their lights flashing. They had this bullhorn and they used it to tell me to step away from the house. So I did. One of the cops went up to the door with his gun drawn and knocked really hard. No one answered. So he trudged through the snow toward the back of the house. He looked in all the windows. A minute or so later, the front door opened and an old man stood there leaning on a walker. “What the hell is going on?” he said. “Sir, there was a report of gunshots. Are you okay?” the police officer said. “I’m just watching a Bogart movie, for Christ’s sake.” The cops looked at me like they were pissed and then we all went inside to sort out the facts. Once the cops were satisfied that it was all just a misunderstanding, they left. “What were you even doing at my front door?” the old man said to me. “My mom wanted to know if you needed your driveway shoveled. That’s how this all started. I’m sorry I called the police. But the gunshots sounded real.” The old man smiled proudly and said, “That’s my new surround-sound system. They’re redoing the sound on most of the old films, and I can’t hear so good, so I turn it up. You ever watch good old Humphrey Bogart in action?” “No,” I said. He opened his eyes so wide and said, “Jesus Christ, you have no idea what you’re missing! Get your uneducated ass in my living room and we’ll start with
12
Maybe you think I’m an asshole, making smoking more affordable for an old man with shot lungs? I’m not a big fan of smoking, for the record, even though I’m about to commit suicide. Irony? But Walt pretty much has old-time movies, cigarettes, scotch, and me. Cigarettes are 25 percent of his life. So I don’t judge him for smoking. Why should he want to extend his life longer? He started before they even knew it was bad for you, so maybe his addiction isn’t really his fault anyway. Maybe if I were born eighty-some years ago, I’d be addicted to cigarettes too.
13
Seventy-inch flat-screen TV; Oriental rugs; garage-kept brand-new Mercedes-Benz, which he never even drives; professionally landscaped yard; in-ground sprinkler system; original Norman Rockwell painting in the hallway—you get the picture.
14
If you took away all his wrinkles and rogue white hair, he’d look like a seasoned George Clooney.
15
He’s talking about my Bogart hat, which is too big and even covers my eyebrows. It’s kind of ridiculous.