T. Boyle - Wild Child and Other Stories

Without thinking twice he pulled the slim tube of a reefer from the pack of Old Golds in his jacket pocket and lit up, right there in the can, and he wouldn’t have been the first to do it, God knew. He took a deep drag and let the smoke massage his lungs, and he felt the pall lift. Another drag, a glance up at the ceiling and a single roach there, making its feelers twitch. He blew smoke at it—“Get your kicks, Mr. Bug,” he said aloud, “because there’s precious few of them in this life”—and then, without realizing just when he’d slipped into it, he found he was humming a Cab Calloway tune, biggest joke in the world, “Reefer Man.”

She must have looked like the maternal type — maybe it was the dress, or more specifically, the way it showed off her breasts

— because Harvey prevailed upon her to go down the hall to the restroom and mother the star of the proceedings a little bit because the ticker was ticking and everybody, frankly, was starting to get a little hot under the collar, if she knew what he meant. “Like pissed off? Like royally?” Darlene took a moment, lowered her head and peeped over the sunglasses to let her eyes rove over the room. “Poor man,” she said in her sweetest little-girl-lost voice, “he seemed a bit confused — maybe he can’t find his zipper.” Everybody — she knew them all, except the strings — burst out in unison, and they should have recorded that. George Withers, the trombonist, laughed so hard he dropped his mouthpiece on the floor with a thud that sounded like a gunshot, and that got them all laughing even harder.

There was a dim clutter of refuse in the hallway — broken music stands, half a smashed guitar, a big waist-high ashtray lifted from the Waldorf with the hotel’s name etched in the chrome and a thousand extinguished butts spilling over onto the floor — and a lingering smell of stopped-up toilets. She nearly tripped over something, she didn’t stop to see what, and then she was outside the restroom and a new smell came to her: he was smoking reefer in there, the moron.

She’d dragged herself all the way out here in the cold to do a job, hoping for the best — hoping for a hit — and here he was, the great Johnny Bandon, the tea head, getting himself loaded in the can.

Suddenly she was angry. Before she knew what she was doing she was pounding on the door like a whole van full of narcs. “Johnny!”

she shouted. “Johnny, people are waiting.” She tried the doorknob.

“Open up, will you?”

Nothing. But she knew that smell. There was the sound of water running, then the toilet flushed. “Shit,” she hissed. “Damn you, open up. I don’t know about you, but I need this, you hear me? Huh?” She felt something rise in her, exactly like that geyser she’d seen in Life magazine, red-hot, white-hot. She rattled the knob.

There was the metallic click of the bolt sliding back and then he pulled open the door and told her in an even voice to keep her shirt on, only he was smiling at her, giving her the reckless grin of abandon that ten years ago had charmed half the women in the country. She was conscious of the fact that in her heels they were the same height and the crazy idea that he’d be the perfect dance partner flitted through her head as he stood there at the door and the marijuana fumes boiled round him. What he said next totally disarmed her, his voice pitched to the familiar key of seduction:

“What’s with the glasses? Somebody slug you, or what?”

The world leapt out at her when she slipped the sunglasses from her eyes, three shades brighter, though the hallway was still dim as a tomb. “It’s my eye,” she said, touching a finger to her cheekbone at the right orbit. “I woke up with it all bloodshot.”

From down the hall came the muted sound of the band working their way through the arrangement without them, a sweeping glide of strings, the corny cluck-cluck-knock of a glockenspiel and the tinkling of a triangle, and then the horns, bright and peppy, Christmas manufactured like a canned ham. “You’re nuts,” he said.

“Your eye’s no more bloodshot than mine is—”

She couldn’t help smiling. “Oh, yeah? Have you looked in the mirror?”

They were both laughing suddenly, and then he took her by the arm and pulled her into the restroom with him. “You want some of this?” he said.

There was something about the moment — the complicit look she gave him, the way she showed her teeth when she laughed, the sense he had of getting away with something, as if they were two kids ducking out of school to have a smoke under the lire escape — that just lit him up, just like that, like a firecracker. Neff could wait. They could all wait. He passed her the reefer and watched her eyes go wide with greed as she inhaled and held it in, green eyes, glassy and green as the bottom of a Chianti bottle. After a moment the smoke began to escape her nostrils in a sporadic way, as if there was something burning inside of her, and he thought first of the incinerator in the basement of the tenement he’d grown up in, and the smell of it, of cardboard and wet newspaper and everything scraped off a plate, cat litter, dead pets, fingernail parings, and then, as if that sponge had wiped his brain clean, of church. Of votary candles. Of incense. Jesus, he was high as a kite.

“What?” she said, expelling the smoke through her mouth.

“What’s that grin for?”

He let out a laugh — or no, a giggle. “I just had this image,” he said. “Very strange. Like you were on fire inside—”

Her eyes were on him, green and unblinking. She was smiling.

“Me? Little old me? On fire?”

“Listen,” he said, serious suddenly, and he was so far out there he couldn’t follow his own chain of thought, “did you go to church when you were a kid? I want to know. You’re Catholic, right?”

Her eyes went away from him then, up to where one very stewed roach clung to the ceiling, and they came back again. “Yeah,”

she said, ducking her head. “If you can believe it, I was in the choir.”

“You were? Wow. Me too. I mean, that was how I—”

She put a hand on his arm as if to emphasize the connection. “I know exactly what you mean — it’s probably how ninety percent of the singers out there got started. At least the ones I met, anyway.”

“Church.”

“Church, yeah.” She was grinning at him, and when she grinned her dimples showed and her face opened up for him till he had to back up a step for fear of falling right into it.

He wanted to banter with her, say something clever, charming, keep it going, but instead he said, “You ever go anymore?”

She shook her head. “Not me. Uh-uh. It’s been years.” Her lips were pursed now, the dimples gone. “You?”

“Nah,” he said. “All that was a long time ago. When I was a kid, you know?”

An achingly slow moment revealed itself in silence. She passed him the reefer, he took a drag, passed it back. “I guess we’re both about halfway to hell by now,” she said.

“Oh, I don’t know,” he said, and everything seemed to let go of him to make way for that rush of exhilaration he’d been feeling ever since she’d stepped into the can with him, “I’d say it’s more like three quarters,” and they were laughing all over again, in two-part harmony.

It was Harvey himself who finally came to fetch them and when Johnny opened the door on him and the smoke flowed out into the hallway she felt shamed — this wasn’t what she’d come for, this wasn’t professional or even sensible. Of course, Harvey had seen it all in his day, but still he gave her a sour look and it made her feel like some runaway or delinquent caught in the act. For a moment she flashed on the one time she’d been arrested — in a hotel room in Kansas City, after a night when she’d felt the music right down in her cells, when she’d felt unbeatable — but she stopped right there amidst the clutter and shook out her hair to compose herself. Harvey was white-faced.