Эд Горман - Fools Rush In

But all this was in another part of the galaxy. Whoever that moron had been who’d lived that way sure wasn’t me anymore. I just gave it all up and went back to being a pretty serious young man.

Kenny hadn’t.

So they tromped up the stairs and I grabbed a pair of Levi’s cutoffs and slammed a six-pack of Schlitz down on the coffee table and readied myself for the siege.

Coming through the door, Noreen said, “Man, do I have to take a dump!”

Kenny howled. “Isn’t she something?”

“‘Something.’ I think you hit it, Kenny. You know what time it is?”

“Aw, hell. Relax.”

He helped himself to one of the beers on the coffee table and said, leaning forward, “You know what she did, man?”

I was afraid to ask.

“She wrote a song for you.” He put a finger to his lips and went sssh. “But act surprised when she tells you.”

Could this be real? Maybe this was one of those real tricky nightmares that went on for a long time.

I hate the prig side of me. The unkind, snotty thoughts. But Noreen brought them out in me. It wasn’t just her singing. She always wore short skirts and no underwear and when she sprawled on my couch it was impossible not to look. She just helped herself to whatever she wanted from fridge or cupboard. And a couple of nights she asked if she could sleep on my couch because she was pissed at Kenny. And she didn’t bathe very often. She said she had read an article in some health magazine — one can only imagine what kind of magazine that was — that if you bathed or showered more than once a week you caused a “frisson on your epidermis.” And as she always said when she was finishing up, “A lot of scientists are signing on to that, McCain. This isn’t just, you know, bullshit or anything.” I was pretty sure that most of these “scientists” had probably been educated on the lost continent of Atlantis.

And one more thing — as I heard her exploding from the bathroom door — she never washed her hands after attending to her toilet needs.

“You asshole,” she said, “I heard you telling him I wrote a song about him.” She whacked him pretty hard across the back of the head. He giggled.

She jumped on the couch, managing to snag her acoustic guitar in the process, and landed with enough force to make one end of the couch jump a quarter inch. What’s remarkable about this is that she weighed only about a hundred pounds. She was five-two, junkie-thin, with scraggly black hair down to her ass and a face that was pretty in a sort of psycho way. Not even Norman Bates could have claimed eyes as crazy as her baby-blues.

Whenever I saw Noreen and Kenny together, I wondered how Kenny could have given up his former longtime girlfriend Cindy Baines, a sweet, smart, pretty nurse who loved Kenny in a way that was moving to see. But Cindy hadn’t wanted the abortion he browbeat her into having. And after that things weren’t right. She spent several long evenings at my house telling me how much she loved him but also how much she felt sad about the abortion. She still wanted to marry Kenny, but she wanted him to understand how the abortion had devastated her. Ultimately everything came to a sad end and Cindy moved to Omaha.

As for Kenny...

As she strummed her guitar in preparation for the song she’d written for me, she said, “Did Kenny tell you I’m in regression therapy now?”

“No, he didn’t mention that. I guess I’m not sure what that is.”

“You know, like they take you back to past lives.”

“This shit is so cool,” Kenny said. “I’m gonna try it for myself.”

“I was an Egyptian princess.”

“Isn’t that cool?” Kenny said, chugging beer. “She’s an Egyptian princess.”

This was bringing back all those insane nights in my degenerate period. Everybody was so drunk or so stoned on bad marijuana that everything that was said made a kind of sense. Did he just say he kept a dolphin under his bed? Did she just say that she was a telepath? Did he just say that he’d once fought Rocky Marciano and beat the crap out of him? Sure, why not, everybody was so stupid on booze and grass, anything that was said was perfectly fine. Down the rabbit hole.

So why not an Egyptian princess?

Every time I was around Noreen I realized, despite feeling like an outsider, how middle-class I really was.

“So go on, Noreen. Play him the song you wrote about him.”

I prepared my face to contort itself into an expression of seeming pleasure that would extend from the first to the last note she played. What choice did I have? I had to like it, didn’t I?

“You know the song ‘John Henry,’ Sam?” Noreen said.

“‘John Henry was a steel-drivin’ man’? Sure.”

“Well, that’s what this is pretty much except it’s ‘Sam McCain was a law-abidin’ man till they pushed him too far.’”

That was another thing about Noreen’s songs. They were never Noreen’s songs. She purloined the music from famous songs and just rewrote the lyrics, most of which were so radical politically they made me feel positively GOP.

“The deal is, see, in this song,” Kenny, ever helpful, said, “you bring this innocent man to court but the corrupt jury that’s bought off by the robber barons, they find this guy guilty. And so you track every one of the jurors down and shoot ’em.”

“Great,” I said. “A mass murderer.”

“See, you screwed it up again, Kenny,” Noreen said. “The last one he doesn’t shoot, he stabs.”

“Oh, sorry, babe.” To me: “The last one you stab.”

“Got it. The last one I stab.”

I don’t know about you folks but I believe in miracles. Big miracles and sort of smaller, everyday miracles alike. I mention this because right then the phone rang.

“Don’t answer that,” Kenny said.

“Why the hell not?”

“Because she’s psyched to sing you your song.”

The phone continuing to ring.

“He’s right, Sam. I’m ready now.” Starting to strum again. Ready. Psyched.

I picked up the phone.

“Am I calling too late?” Jane Sykes said.

“No. Not at all.”

Kenny was pantomiming “hang up” with his hand slamming down an invisible phone. Noreen was rolling her eyes at me and looking generally disgusted with humankind, especially those who served on juries.

“Have you heard what happened tonight?”

And I saw how I could get rid of them.

“Hold on a minute. I didn’t realize this was going to be official business,” I said to Jane and set the phone down. I stood up and said, “I’m sorry but you’ll have to leave. This is something I have to deal with alone.”

“Can’t you take the phone into the crapper?” Noreen said. “We couldn’t hear it then.”

“Much as I enjoy sitting in the crapper, the phone cord doesn’t reach that far, Noreen.”

I grabbed the phone and said to Jane, “Just one more minute.” I put the receiver down and said, “C’mon now, you guys, you gotta leave.”

“Well, this is really bullshit,” Noreen said.

“She was really psyched.”

“I write a whole goddamn song for him and he kicks me out,” Noreen said to herself.

But Kenny, finally understanding how pissed I was, grabbed her hand and started dragging her toward the back door.

“I write a song just for him and—”

I missed the rest because the door had slammed on her. Kenny was still on the inside of the door: “This is pretty rude, man.”

“Is it as rude as waking somebody up on a work night to play some lousy song?”

“Lousy? You haven’t even heard it yet.”

Kenny and I have had a love-hate relationship since grade school. We were definitely in hate mode now.

“’Night, Kenny,” I said, pushing the door open and giving him a little shove into the night.