Dan Wakefield - Home Free

After eating they’d make their way back to the superhighway, set the car in one of the slots headed west and as soon as it was dark Barnes started to look for potential motels, his taste there running to modern and efficient with TV in the room and preferably a nice dark bar on the premises though sometimes they’d just buy a fifth at a package store and drink in the room from the water glasses, watching TV or talking. When Gene joined the trip he had twenty-some-odd bucks in his pocket and wanted to put the little bit in the kitty for all the expenses and pay off what he owed Barnes later, he could keep a record, but Barnes said that would spoil the trip, take their minds off enjoying things, and since for Chrissake he was going out to L.A. to get paid $12,500 for rewriting a script of his mystery that the first guy they hired gave up on halfway through he could sure as hell foot the bill for Gene coming along. He couldn’t have gone alone anyway, couldn’t drive all that way by himself and if it weren’t for Gene he’d have picked up some fuckin hitchhiker and with his luck it would have been some hippie slayer on the way to the Coast. The thought of Barnes driving by himself to L.A. and what might happen to him in fact made Gene feel not so guilty about the free ride, he accepted Barnes’s assurance the small additional expense of having his companionship would be part of the “Business Expense” of his venture into Hollywood.

“Stick with me, kid,” Barnes told him. “Once I get set up out there, I’ll make you a star. Or anyway, maybe if they ever do the damn movie I could get you in as an extra.”

Gene laughed.

“An extra. Shit, I’d be playing myself.”

“Cheer up now, buddy. You’re on your way to lotus land.”

“That’s one thing I haven’t tried. Lotus.”

“I got you out of there just in time, I think. Maine. That whole setup.”

Gene had told him about it, all about the thing with Stella the Divorcée. Somehow it was easier to talk about personal shit in a moving car. You didn’t feel called upon to look the other guy straight in the eye. In fact you shouldn’t. If you’re the one driving you’re supposed to keep your eyes on the road, and if you’re the one sitting next to him you’re not supposed to distract him from taking his eyes off the road. So, sitting there with both people looking straight ahead, it was easier to say a lot. For both of them. Once when they were tooling through Illinois on some superjob of a highway Gene had the nerve to ask Barnes about something nagging at him for a long time. Not that it made much difference anymore, he just wanted to know.

“Can I ask you something, Barnes?”

“Sure.”

“Did you ever fuck her?”

“Who?”

“Lou.”

Barnes sort of shifted his body a little more forward over the steering wheel.

“No,” he said.

“Ever try?”

“Yes.”

“Didn’t make it?”

“No.”

“She wouldn’t?” Gene asked, surprised at how hopeful he sounded, felt.

“No. I’m sorry. On all counts. She would, but I couldn’t.”

“Why not, you suppose?”

Barnes took his right hand off the wheel for a moment and scratched his ear.

“Cause you’re my friend, I guess.”

“But that didn’t stop you from trying.”

“I know. The only thing I can figure is, my prick has more of a conscience than my goddam brain.”

“Wow. The prick with a conscience.”

“That’s me, I guess.”

“Don’t sweat it, man.”

“All the same, I’m sorry.”

“Forget it. All that’s gone.”

Neither one said anything for the next few miles and Gene turned the radio on. Got a kind of staticky call-in show from Chicago.

At a small-town diner Gene bought a postcard to send to Stella. On the part for the message he put, “Sorry had to go. You were the greatest.” He signed it “Love, Gene.” She never called him Gene but he didn’t want to put anything she did call him on a postcard. The other side was a color photograph of the Mississippi River. It was green. Gene put a stamp on and slipped it in a mailbox, squeezing his eyes shut, thinking to her in his head, Be well. Don’t hurt too bad . The metal flap of the box clanged back. Shut.

Barnes said he’d like to stop off in Iowa City and see some old friends from his time at The Writers Workshop thing he had gone to there.

“Will they still be there?” Gene asked.

“Oh, yeh. Some will. Some always stay.”

“How come?”

“It’s that kind of place. You know how there’s jocks who hang around their old colleges after they’re through, just get some kind of job and stay on? Well, it’s that way in Iowa City except instead of jocks it’s poets. I can see it, too. It’s an easy place to live. And there’s always a party.”

“Maybe we’ll find one,” Gene said.

Barnes laughed. He said the only way they would not find a party in Iowa City would be to lie on the floor of the car, roll up the windows, and lock the doors.

“No use to go to that trouble,” Gene said.

They found a party all right, but the trouble was they got there late. Not in the day—it was just around five in the afternoon—but in the week. The party had started Thursday night and now it was Sunday. That’s why things were kind of a mess and the spirit had sort of gone out of it all. Parties often lasted three or four days, during which time a lot of people went back home to sack out or shower with someone they’d met at the party to do it in company with and then came back, bringing new supplies of booze and beer to replenish the stock but now the hard-core returnees were thinning out. One girl mentioned that tomorrow was Monday and she wanted to try to get back into going to classes.

“Monday, my ragged ass,” said Gordo. “ Classes . Shit. Not like in the old days, huh, Barnes? Youth is gettin soft now. Don’t drink as much either. Too much sittin around puffin the goddam weed. Lowers capacity, stomachs can’t hold it. We’re breedin a race in which the human stomach will someday be able to hold no more than a cocktail. Alcohol will pass from the scene, markin the fuckin downfall of civilization.”

Gordo then took a slug from the half-gallon jug of gin that he held cocked on his right shoulder, drinking from it like you do from a cider bottle. With his free hand he rubbed his huge belly, approvingly, as if its size were proof of its admirable capacity for alcohol. Gordo had a thick black wiry beard and beady little eyes that seemed to have no white part to them. Just little brown beads. When he got his M.A. in writing he stopped writing, opened a combination greeting card and joke shop with dirty magazines in the back, and settled down in Iowa City. If you could call it that. At the age of thirty-four he was on his fifth wife.

This one was Melba, a roly-poly girl who Gene figured couldn’t be much past twenty. She had red hair, pink cheeks, and big green eyes which she focused on Gordo with obvious adoration, awaiting his commands. She never had long to wait.

“Scare up some booze for these gennelmen,” he told her, and she scurried around among the bottles that were everywhere, trying to find some that hadn’t been emptied. Evidently the jug of gin was Gordo’s private stock. Melba came up with an assortment of bottles from about a quarter to a half full and placed them before Barnes and Gene. They were supposed to pick one. Barnes selected a Seagrams VO, Gene took a Southern Comfort, just for the hell of it. He’d never had the stuff, but if Janis Joplin dug it, it must be somethin else.

It was. Somethin else.

Everyone swigged from the bottle, like Gordo did. All the glasses were broken or dirty and there wasn’t any need to wash any yet since Gordo didn’t use one.