T. Boyle - Budding Prospects

Like Phil, Dwight was a touchstone. We’d gone to school together, double-dated, squeezed pimples side by side, we’d struck out, scored, experimented with tobacco, alcohol and drugs together, we’d postured, pronounced, chased the same women, earnestly discussed Nietzsche and Howlin’ Wolf late into the night. Dwight had been best man at my wedding; when his father died I flew in from the West Coast and sat up with him. We were children, adolescents, bewildered adults. Dwight had stayed in New York — he was living on East 59th Street now and working for a public relations firm — but we’d kept in touch. Unlike Phil, he was a straight arrow, steady — I could picture the baggy chinos, madras shirts and Hush Puppies he favored, and the look of pained concentration (as if he’d been forced to decipher Finnegans Wake while undergoing electroshock treatment) the contact lenses gave him. Dwight, I thought, alcohol tugging at my flesh, good old Dwight. At that moment I was visited with my second inspiration of the evening: I would call him, call him and listen to his soft stuttering laugh and the comforting rhythms of his speech.

I dialed like a man in a burning building. Come on, I thought, counting the clicks, and then the information operator was on the wire, quick and efficient, and I scribbled the number on my bar napkin and called collect.

“Hello?” Dwight’s voice sounded distant, weary. For an instant I thought I’d wakened him — but no, it was just after ten in New York.

The long-distance operator interceded with a deadpan impression of Desi Arnaz: “Colleck call for any wan from Fee-lix: will you ’cept the charge?”

“What?” A tapping came over the line, and I envisioned a repairman in Kansas hammering a downed wire back in place. “Yes, yes — put him on.”

“Dwight?”

“Felix?”

“How you doing?”

“Fine,” he said. “What’s up?”

I couldn’t tell him, couldn’t give him specifics anyway. “Oh, I don’t know. I’m a little depressed.” Just then Shirelle threw back her head and laughed like an abandoned old whore with a meter on every orifice. “Did I tell you I’m rooming with Phil?”

We talked for half an hour before I understood the reason I’d called. “Listen, Dwight,” I said finally, “you think you could read me something from one of your notebooks?”

Dwight was a compulsive record-keeper — no, he was pathological, half a step removed from the crazy who keeps his own feces in labeled fruit jars. Not only did he list every experience he’d ever had — everything from breaking up with his girlfriend, rupturing his spleen or being victimized by pickpockets in Madrid to buying a pair of shoelaces — he kept track of every meal he’d eaten, the clothes he wore, states, counties and municipalities visited and distances traveled, gifts given and received, feelings felt, gas, electricity and water consumed, the number of points he’d scored in an intramural basketball game in junior high, cab fares, tips, the books he’d read, movies he’d seen (including where and with whom), records, shoes and nose drops purchased, every bowel movement, hiccough, belch and whimper of his life. He could tell you how many streetlamps line FDR Drive and how many times he’d passed under them, give you a blow-by-blow account of a trip he’d made to visit his grandparents when he was thirteen, describe Radio City Music Hall in terms of the number and texture of the seats.

I could appreciate what he was trying to do — each of us to a greater or lesser degree has the same impulse, after all, the same need to impose order on our sloppy irrational lives in the face of an indifferent universe. I could appreciate it, and benefit from it as well. My past and Dwight’s intersected at any number of points: he’d recorded my history, too.

Within moments I could hear the rustle of turning pages, and then Dwight’s familiar nasal tones: “Know how many points you scored against Fox Lane on January 18, 1967?”

Nineteen sixty-seven. Amazing. I had a vision of myself — alive, free, untrammeled and untroubled, dribbling an inflated sphere up and down a polished wooden floor as if nothing else in the world mattered. “How many?” I breathed.

“Twelve.” A page turned. “You remember who else was on the team?”

I listed them, all of them, right down to the benchwarmers — the thyroid freaks with the pinheads and the muscular little guys who weren’t quite quick enough to make first-string guard.

Then he was reading: “June 10, 1969. Picked up Felix at eight p.m. in my father’s Charger, took fifteen point two gallons of gas at thirty-one cents a gallon for a total of four seventy-one, and then drove to Port Chester to pick up Sherrie Ryan and Ginger Beardsley. I was wearing my new maroon bellbottoms and …”

The voice went on, precise and evenly modulated, the voice of order and reason, the voice that proved my past and promised the future. I just listened, nodding, memory blooming like a field of clover. We must have talked for an hour and a half. I was working on my third beer and sixth egg when we finished, and feeling that God was in His heaven and all was right with the world. “Dwight,” I said, my voice a pant of gratitude, “thanks.” The receiver fell into its cradle with a click gentle as a kiss.

When I finally looked up, I saw that the Indians had gone — the light over the pool table had been extinguished and the rear of the bar faded into shadow. The two epicures at the bar were still there, though, and I saw that they’d been joined by a hefty young couple who brooded over a pair of highballs like inspectors from the Bureau of Alcohol and Firearms. Shirelle was nowhere to be seen.

Suddenly George Pete’s crony lifted his head and roared, “Soak them beans, for Christsake!” as if he were announcing a cavalry charge. The other old fellow seemed pretty far gone — he just waved his hand vaguely.

I was feeling better than I had for weeks. I’d made my decision (of course I was staying; I’d go to jail forever — welcome it — lock myself in at Attica with savage perverts or swim out to Devil’s Island, before I’d let down my friends and buddies), and it was as if I’d been set free, the fetters loosened, no more vulture come to feed on my liver. How could I even have thought of quitting? There was nothing more vital than the kind of friendship I had with Dwight, with Phil, with Gesh, and it was worth any sacrifice to sustain it. The alcohol spoke to me, my abraded nerves sank into their sheaths like sleeping tortoises. I felt light, holy, ecstatic: I could have gotten up and kissed everybody in the place.

What I would do, I decided, was have one more cognac to celebrate the rite of passage I’d endured, and then head on up the hill to the summer camp, get a good night’s sleep and go out in the morning to cultivate my garden, as resigned and sensible as Candide on the shores of Marmora. As if on cue, Shirelle reappeared, emerging from the door behind the bar with a case of no-name scotch, gin, vodka and rum. I smirked at her like some dapper character out of a forties movie and knocked over my empty beer glass. “Shirelle,” I said, my tongue somehow glued to the roof of my mouth, “one more Remy, please. With a soda back.” And then, as if this simple request needed amplification: “I’m celebrating.”

Shirelle’s eyes were veined with red, as if she’d just finished a hundred laps in an over-chlorinated pool. The bottle floated in her hand like a helium balloon, and on the first pass she missed the glass entirely, splashing bar, coaster, her left hand and my right with expensive imported booze. Then she connected, filled the water glass halfway, wordlessly snatched up my money and lurched over to join the fat-faced pair at the other end of the bar.