But too late… the Rifleman could see already that he would fail. Already the young men in their red pageboy costumes were trumpeting at the top of the staircase. Already spiders, lizards, and snails were creeping out of the ruined masonry. Somewhere bands were playing, women dancing in their fine robes, great stallions pawing the pebbles atop the stone walls. Already The Pilot, that career intruder, was standing haughtily next to his gigantic saddled alligator, whistling, and cheering Mark on to the top of his stairs, into The Pilot’s waiting arms.
And already The Rifleman knew his son would soon leave North Carolina, would never till the family lands, own the cancerous cow, or build the family mansion of many vistas on the primeval hardwood floor.
The Rifleman, formerly known as Lucas McCane, collapsed at the Swedish Memorial Hospital staircase, and wept bitterly over this failure of his imagination.
JUNGLE J.D.
You can keep on mockin’, but I can’t stop rockin’…
Tony couldn’t believe his luck. Here he had himself a bad girl. Joy, the baddest girl he’d ever known, and not only was she with him, but she was with him in a stolen Chevy making it ninety miles an hour cross-country on Route 66, and how’s that for some kind of rock ’n’ roll legendary-type road trip? Halfway between Las Vegas, New Mexico and Santa Fe now, give or take a few tumbleweeds. The sky wide open for dreams. It was like some kind of goddamned movie! The gang was going to shit, if he ever saw the gang again. Maybe he’d send them a picture postcard, with one of them hotdog stands shaped just like a coney on it, send it to Carson’s Drugstore so they all could read it. Cool, man.
“Long as nobody got hurt.” That’s what his grandma woulda told him. Long as nobody got hurt—like that was the answer for everything. And maybe it was. But sometimes the answers run out, Grandma, and people, well you know people do get hurt. And deep down, Tony knew he much preferred it be the other guy what got hurt.
Tony turned his head once again to moon over Joy, and he was so excited, and it felt like maybe his head went a little too far, and he liked the feeling, so then it was like his head was spinning around like a record, but unevenly, so that every song played had a roughness to it, his head playing some angry song like Link Wray’s “Rumble” over and over again. He could still see Joy through his dizziness: sitting all pretty in her yellow Capri pants and pink sweater, wearing his black leather jacket—his—even though he’d only had it about a week he didn’t mind—she just looked too cool sitting there with her pink-framed shades, puffing on another Kool and moving her butt slow with the rock of the car, making that crisp vinyl snapping sound in that rollin’ rhythm like they were maybe doing it on his grandma’s bedsprings.
Course they hadn’t done it yet, even though she was so damned hot she was too cool, in charge like, but they would do it, Tony knew, he could tell by the way she kept her tongue in his mouth longer than any bad girl ever had before.
Tony had been in love four times in his life for sure, but this time it was the best, the very best, the coolest, the wildest. Lots better than when he was in love with plain Jane Atkins, and her daddy had to drive them places, and she didn’t like it that he smoked, said it made him taste bad, not that there was that much tasting going on, what with her old man hanging around all the time. And miles better than the Thompson twins—when they slapped you, well, you knew you’d been slapped.
“Goddamn!” Tony shouted out the window, then howled just like Wolfman Jack, just like Lon Chaney having an orgasm. He turned to Joy to catch her cool reaction and she smiled this thin, cool smile at him and blew a smoke ring. Goddamn, he wished he could blow smoke rings like Joy.
And that was about the time it happened.
The its in Tony’s life were always different, and always big. The last it was when he decided to blast out of New Jersey and head west, taking Joy with him and using whatever transportation he could find, having it somewhere in the back of his head that they would make it to California somehow and the Beach.
It was old man Perkins’s car he took, who’d just happened to have put a new tune on the vehicle, and was sitting there at the time drinking a brew with just the happiest look on his face. Tony had had to knock that smile off him when Perkins tried to stop him from taking the car. That was too bad, really it was, because Tony much preferred nobody getting hurt. That was his one rule, which was saying a lot, given how Tony felt about rules. But even that rule was a preference, because above all else Tony wasn’t going to be stopped. It was only natural, the law of the jungle and everything. Ungawa! A man’s gotta do what a man’s gotta do. He wondered if he could wrap his mouth around Joy’s pink and slippery tongue and still maintain a steady ninety miles per. Hell, nothing ventured; nothing gained.
But right then Tony thought about his grandma, and that took a little bit of the fire out of him. Hell, she’d raised him and bailed him, and that had to count for something. Maybe at least she’d have a good funeral to attend someday, let her be the center of attention for once, everybody feeling sorry for this old lady who’d been saddled with this J.D. from hell when his own momma, her daughter, died on that sleazoid boyfriend’s motorcycle. Anybody could have been the daddy, and that meant no daddy at all, which was just fine with old Tone. Tony had left that sweet old grandmother of his all alone in their apartment. She was practically blind and she could hardly walk, so he knew it wasn’t a very nice thing to do. But what else could a fellow do? A guy just couldn’t be thinking about his grandmother all the time. It was like living with dead people.
Which he almost was, a couple of times, maybe three. He had a round scar the size of one of Joy’s smoke rings on his forehead from that last fight with the Seventh Street Slashers. He’d open his eyes sometimes while he and Joy were kissing and he’d catch her with her eyes open, staring at it. Bad girls kept their eyes open when they kissed—he’d concluded that a long time ago.
Tony kind of wondered sometimes if maybe that scar was one reason he and Joy hadn’t done it yet, her being grossed out or something, when he realized he was right in the middle of another big it because the goddamned car was rolling over and over and Joy had this funny look on her face—still cool—but her mouth was wide open but no sounds were coming out, just smoke ring after smoke ring.
It was then Tony realized what tune was playing on the radio. “Runaway,” by Del Shannon, one of his absolutest favorites, but he had a feeling he might miss the end of the song. Things were spinning pretty good now, and there were little green alien types, like huge frogs, clinging to the windshield even as the car turned over and over: little green men looking in on him and Joy.
Tony woke up hot and wet like he had his head stuck to Carson’s fry grill. Meat was popping and sizzling, smelly enough to make his mouth water.
He opened his eyes and salt sweat washed down from his forehead and everything went blurry. Then he remembered what had just happened and he tasted some of the stuff at the corners of his mouth expecting blood, but it was sweat like he thought, but a little heavier than he’d expected, almost like oil. He wiped the crap out of his eyes with the back of his hand.
Green surrounded him, bent down and hugged him, smothering him in tits and hair all green. He breathed it in and tried to lick it in and out of his mouth, unable to get enough. Then the green cleared a little and he could see more: the Chevy’s radiator steaming and hissing, lying on top of a dead hippo whose meat was roasting in the shape of that very same radiator. Roast hippo meat wasn’t a bad smell, but it was too early in the morning to be thinking about hippo burgers, so pretty soon his belly was spinning just like the car. Which there was no other sign of. But then he realized “Runaway” was still playing, although a much rougher version than he’d ever heard before, like they’d overlaid a new track with a lot of fuzz pedal in it. He looked up to find where the soundtrack for this dream was coming from: there was the radio, just the radio, all lit up but with no visible source of electrical power, sitting in the lower branches of a big palm tree. Now playing the opening to “Surf City.”