Dan Wakefield - Home Free

A scruffy-looking wild kid staring at Lou all night got fortified enough on wine and grass to float up to her and declare his undying love and she smiled and introduced Gene and said they could all be friends. He ended up on their couch the next morning, pledging his loyalty to both, saying his regard for Lou was unsullied by vile thoughts of sex.

Gene appreciated the purity.

The party was good for everyone. The bubble-gum girl who got Barnes his booze was a social work student and evidently his case appealed to her. Barnes not only had friends, now he had a lover.

The kid on the couch, known only as Thomas, like Fabian was just Fabian, arrived outside the window Monday morning blowing a horn that sounded like a sick moose. He was driving a converted milk truck painted red white and blue that said “Amalgamated Enterprises,” and below that, “Let’s Make a Deal.” Thomas said it was his “company truck,” his business being buying, selling, and trading such a wide variety of goods as furniture, record albums, dope, kitchenware, TVs, stereo components, and pills, mostly uppers and downers with a scattering of antibiotics and antihistamines thrown in. In his spare time he went to college, or rather colleges, sitting in on lecture courses at Northeastern, Harvard, BU, and MIT.

“You mean you’re not registered anywhere?” Lou said.

Thomas looked shocked.

“Then you have to pay!”

He expressed his pure devotion to Lou by tooting outside their window every M-W-F and driving her to Northeastern.

If Thomas wasn’t such an all-around scruffy-looking general fuckup, Gene might have been a little jealous.

What the hell, you couldn’t knock free transportation.

Gene didn’t feel left out or anything because Lou had the world of her work at Northeastern completely separate from him, shit, he had his own little world tending bar at The Crossroads.

Afternoons there were cool and dim, restful. Gene dug it most when the old guys got it on arguing about the baseball players of the past, it wasn’t really arguing it was just to say the names: Rizzuto and Marion, Musial and Bauer, Lemon and Ford. The names were like a litany and when they got it going Gene loved to listen, the litany lulled him, too, helped turn down his own mind.

The peace of the place was always shattered when Flash came in, topping everyone else’s stories, especially about sports or sex, telling again how he might have made it in the pros but at 6’2” he was too short for forward in the NBA. Telling again how in college he ran the 100 in 10.4, which was lightning in ’61 and had earned him the name Flash.

He usually came in around the happy hour but one day he showed a little after three, wearing instead of his usual splashy threads a grungy old sweatshirt and jeans. Instead of one of the frothy blended drinks he usually had he ordered a double dry martini straight up with an extra olive.

“This is a good time to drink,” Flash said. “Between lunch and the cocktail hour you have a kind of dip in there, that’s when you need a little something to pick you up.”

Like all good bartenders Gene agreed with the customer, and by the second drink Flash was pouring out his troubles to him. Or trouble. There was one biggie, which was that Flash owned—had owned—a travel agency, and the business had just gone bankrupt.

“That’s rough, man,” Gene said.

“Hell, ya can’t let that stuff get ya down,” Flash said. “When ya get off here? I’ll take you over to Dorchester, we’ll hit a couple spots I know, scare up some action.”

“Sorry, man,” Gene said, “I’m cookin tonight for me and my woman,” but when he saw Flash’s face fall he added, “You come, too. There’s plenty. Stew.”

“Oh, thanks, ole buddy, but no thanks, I’m on a diet. Strictly vitamins.”

“Pills?”

“Nah. In the booze. Plenty of vitamins in booze. You know, it’s made out of potatoes and grain and shit like that. They boil it down, so you’re actually gettin the essence.”

“That’s all? The vitamins in the booze?”

“And the olives. Fuckin olives can keep you goin for weeks. Shit. You take those wops up in those hills over there, they raise whole families on olives. Maybe a little spaghetti thrown in, but that’s no vitamins.”

“Tonight, you’re gettin some stew in you.”

“Well, hell—”

Flash was revived, not by the stew but the sight of Lou, which inspired him to “spruce up a bit” in their bathroom, taking a shower and applying every talcum, lotion, and ointment he could find to drown the stench of his moldy clothes.

Over stew he regaled them with tales of bankruptcy, making it seem the most glamorous trip in the world.

Flash had put all his hopes as well as capital in buying up a block of three thousand tickets to the Rolling Stones concert at Shea Stadium, and putting together a package tour that would hopefully lure every hip kid in New England.

“Sounds good,” Lou said. “How’d you blow it?”

“Details. I got bogged down in details. Like the box lunches for the bus ride. Christ, but I had that organized. Made a deal with a guy runs a super mar-kette in Revere for three-day-old Wonder bread. A pal in the North End promised sixty salamis in return for using my passport for a quick little business trip he had to make to Panama. Pickles? Beautiful. Chick I knew was doing PR for a local pickle company—but shit, there I go getting bogged down in details again.”

The detail Flash failed to notice until it was too late was that the Stones were also booked in Boston and Providence on the same concert tour where they played Shea Stadium. So not too many fans fought to pay extra to see them in New York when they could see them at home.

“Did any—uh—go on your tour?” Lou asked.

“Ninety-four,” Flash said, shaking his head. “Shit, they must have been some kind of misfits. I didn’t have the heart to go to the station and see em. Jesus. Ninety-four losers in one place.”

“What about you?” asked Lou.

“Me? Hell, I’m the comeback kid. I got friends. You got friends you can always bounce back. Look at Gene here takin his bankrupt buddy home for a hearty stew. Bankrolls you can always get. What counts in the long fuckin haul is friends .”

Gene guessed they had another one.

When he thought about it Gene was kind of proud about bringing Flash home, he figured it showed he wasn’t uptight anymore about Lou liking men who were just their friends. He saw she was just more comfortable with men, there wasn’t any sex angle to it, that’s just the way she was. The concept of “meeting with the Sisters” was catching on big in Boston, but to Lou the idea was as foreign as the old-fashioned custom of “getting together with the girls.” She wasn’t against it or anything, it just didn’t happen to be her scene. She tended to clam up around women, unless they were in the company of their own man.

A few days later Flash fell by The Crossroads, dressed to kill. He had just got some kind of temporary loan and was going out to find himself a date and celebrate.

“You hit the dating bars?” Gene asked.

Flash drew back, offended.

“Those meat racks?” he said. “Wouldn’t go near em.”

“Where then?”

“The source, man, the airport.”

“Bar?”

“Incoming flights. You wait till the passengers are off, go up to a stewardess coming out and say you expected a certain girl on this flight, you had a whole evening planned around her coming, and she didn’t show—well, hell, take it from there.”

“You just go up to any airline?”

“I personally prefer Delta and Allegheny. You get a more outgoing, positive type. But to each his own. Who knows? You might dig Eastern. Go out to Logan, give it a try.”