Hob Broun - Odditorium

“How about a late supper with the boat people?”

“I’m not really in the mood for exotic food,” Tildy said.

“We’ll see. Maybe they’ve got a steak and lobster combo.”

It was warm inside the restaurant, steamy. Thai Airlines posters were tacked over sloppily pasted red wallpaper, blinking Christmas tree lights outlined the rec-room-sized bar, and on each Weldwood table was a cruet holding plastic roses. Except for a golden age couple dressed for a sales award banquet, puttering uncomfortably with the remnants of their meal, Christo and Tildy were the only customers in the place. A slender boy escorted them to a table with great ceremony and a wrinkly, don’t-shoot-me smile, laid out menus, withdrew pad and pencil from his designer jeans.

“You choose by number, write down here.” The smile was ferocious now, a rictus.

A chunky old woman, probably the kid’s grandmother, materialized at Christo’s elbow. Her stylized movements and buoyant manner suggested a veteran of service familiar with the ways of white people: Those were grand days in ’56 and ’57 at the Club Charenton near Saigon. We knew where we stood.

When she spoke, light did strange things on the metal bridge-work at the front of her mouth. “Good evening. You would like perhaps a cocktail?”

“A martini for me.”

“There are no more olives. So sorry.”

“That’s okay. Something for you?”

“Just tea,” Tildy said.

As they were studying the menus, Tildy murmuring that she’d be happiest with a bowl of plain rice, the other couple passed by on their way to the cash register. The missus loitered near their table, assuming the instant comradeship of compatriots stuck in some dreadful foreign backwater.

“Whatever you do, don’t order anything with pork. It tasted flat rancid to me.”

Christo nodded thoughtfully, twirled the pencil like a baton.

“No shit. Let me tell you something, lady. These people know what rat meat tastes like. They know that if you stand near a column of napalm smoke it’ll suck the air right out of your lungs. So do I. I’ve seen it happen. In your position I’d be damn grateful there wasn’t any strychnine in the food.”

She giggled, touched her lips, then felt the icicles of Christo’s glare upon her and beat it out to the car.

“You were really over there?” Tildy said, and a nasal voice from the middle recesses of her brain yelled: Sucker!

“Sure, sure. I was a real mudeater. Last of the doomsday grunts. I’d go days without sleep, get myself all smacked up and volunteer for night patrol, go for the big thrills. Maybe a little hand-to-hand combat, unzip some gook and lick the blood off my bayonet.”

“Sshhh.”

“Don’t be dense then. You know induction day was it for me. Ran around the halls dropping my shorts and spreading for anything in a uniform. Man, I had my 1-Y all signed, sealed and delivered inside two hours. It was a lot easier in those early days. Another year or two and they’d seen all kinds of dodges. You had to be a little more creative. Little brother of a guy I used to do street vending with went down with his pet St. Bernard, Rollo. Rollo used to drool all over himself after they spiked his Gravy Train with LSD. But the kid’s all smiles, very enthused, ready to ship out to the zone as soon as possible so he can start blowing Commies away. We’ve got to stop them before they reach Santa Barbara, all that. Just one thing, though. He’s got to take his dog along. ‘Can’t go anywhere without my dog, sir.’ Plants a kiss on those slimy chops. ‘Me and Rollo, we’re closer than brothers. Maybe you could teach him to sniff out landmines?’”

“Did they go for it?”

“Oh, yeah. The shrink was real impressed. Too bad it didn’t end there.”

“What happened?”

“It started to come down on him that summer. In buckets. His father died in a hotel fire. His girlfriend went out for ice cream one night and never came back. The band he was with threw him over for another bass player right before they signed a record contract. And somebody ran over his dog. So what the fuck, he went and enlisted in the marine corps. Got both his legs blown off in Cambodia.”

LANE ENDS 1000 FEET

This segment of the north-south artery was a memorial to our most recently murdered Chief of State. The rest area in which Christo and Tildy were parked had been named after the Hon. Elihu S. Robbinet, evidently a worthy Maryland jurisprude of days gone by. Such was immortality in the age of the disposable raincoat and the celebrity golf tournament; in a nation that communicated increasingly via T-shirt and bumper strip.

Christo dozed sporadically, a watch cap pulled down over his eyes, while Tildy chattered on inside the clammy, hermetic little isolation box the Fiat had become.

“… like the way you stuck it right into that woman back at the restaurant,” she was saying. “That’s what I’m talking about. I admire that kind of conviction because I don’t have it. There’s a lot of meanness in me but I don’t use it, and that makes me feel so harassed. I’d like to be a real bullet-nippled bitch but I always fall short. All I can get to are the gestures. Maybe it has something to do with the choices I made a long time ago.”

“Timing.” Christo scratched his nose, rested his cheek on the steering wheel. “S’all in the timing.”

“For God’s sake, it’s not strategy I’m talking about.”

“It’s all strategy. And that’s all.”

“Then why can’t I carry it off? Why do I feel like a whore sometimes?”

“Don’t bother yourself over nothing. Let’s climb in the back seat and get friendly.”

“Uh-uh. Crank this thing up and move. I want to get to New York and show you just how much of a bitch I can be.”

“Right on, kid. Right on.”

UNION CITY, NEW JERSEY

HOME OF THE AMERICAN EMBROIDERY INDUSTRY

Christo leaned on the horn. “Poor, itchy New Jersey, the sick love-slave of New York. And how she loves the pain.”

The joy ride was over now. Ten minutes away from the target and Christo was antsy, constantly checking his mirrors, jaw muscles pulsing as he clenched his teeth. There was a taste of brackish water in his mouth, against his hot cheeks the sensation of emery paper. Tildy frittered up and down the AM band; nothing but news and commercials.

“Enough.” He slapped her hand away.

They spilled onto the bending, descending ramp to the Lincoln Tunnel and there, beyond the wharves and the viscous gray river, was that notorious skyline depicted on a thousand beer trays, decals, pennants; intaglioed on coffee mugs, woven into beach towels and sweaters. It was the image pilgrims took to bed with them at night: I have been there, to the sizzling core of the Machine. Today, through a thick and striated haze, it seemed to be melting away for good.

“Tally ho,” said Tildy.

They had just enough to cover the toll.

Midtown, midafternoon. All manner of faultlessly turned out honeys bombing up and down the pavement; a career-girl carousel. Fueled by Lo-Cal lunches consumed at their desks, they emerged from their warrens carrying briefcases crammed with reports and market research printouts, considered their profiles in shop windows, hailed cabs imperiously, letting the wind whip their layered coifs since, after all, today’s woman doesn’t live by her looks.

Tildy wondered how she could possibly compete.

“There it is,” Christo said. “Hot enough for you?”

Five blocks south of Times Square he curbed the Fiat next to a pay phone, dug around for a dime. But the phone was inoperative: receiver clipped off, coin box disemboweled, and all over everything the felt marker glyphs of pubescent soul writers—

and