T. Boyle: Budding Prospects

I’ve always been a quitter. I quit the Boy Scouts, the glee club, the marching band. Gave up my paper route, turned my back on the church, stuffed the basketball team. I dropped out of college, sidestepped the army with a 4-F on the grounds of mental instability, went back to school, made a go of it, entered a Ph.D. program in nineteenth-century British literature, sat in the front row, took notes assiduously, bought a pair of horn-rims, and quit on the eve of my comprehensive exams. I got married, separated, divorced. Quit smoking, quit jogging, quit eating red meat. I quit jobs: digging graves, pumping gas, selling insurance, showing pornographic films in an art theater in Boston. When I was nineteen I made frantic love to a pinch-faced, sack-bosomed girl I’d known from high school. She got pregnant. I quit town. About the only thing I didn’t give up on was the summer camp.

Let me tell you about it.

Two years ago I was living alone. I woke alone, flossed my teeth alone, worked at odd jobs, ate take-out burritos, read the newspaper and undressed for bed alone. The universe had temporarily pulled in its boundaries, and I was learning to adjust to them. I was thirty-one. I sat at the lunch counter with men of fifty-one, sixty-one, eighty-one, slurped tomato-rice soup and watched the waitress. Sometimes I had dinner with friends, shot pool, went to the aquarium, danced to a pulsing Latino beat in close, atramental clubs; sometimes I felt like a bearded ascetic contemplating the stones of the desert.

On this particular night — it was in late February — I stayed in. I was reading, absorbed in an assault on K2 by a team of Japanese mountaineers, my lungs constricting in the thin burning air, the deadly sting of wind-lashed ice in my face, when the record— Le Sacre du Printemps —caught in the groove with a gnashing squeal as if a stageful of naiads, dryads and spandex satyrs had simultaneously gone lame. I looked up from my book. Rain knocked at the windows like a smirking voyeur, small sounds reverberated through the house — the clank of the refrigerator closing down, the sigh of the heat starting up — the fire crackled ominously round a nail in a charred two-by-four. At that instant, as if on cue, the front buzzer sounded. It was after twelve. I gave the tube a rueful glance — zombies in white-face drifted across the screen, masticating bratwurstlike strings of human intestine — put down my book, cinched the terrycloth robe round my waist, and ambled to the head of the stairs. Insistent, the buzzer blatted again.

My apartment was a walkup on Fair Oaks, three blocks west of the Mission. The house was a Victorian, painted in six colors. I had four rooms, a deck, a hallway and a view. Before the intercom went dead, the signal had become so weak and static-jammed I wouldn’t have recognized my mother’s voice — or Screamin’ Jay Hawkins doing “I Put a Spell on You,” for that matter. I stood at the head of the stairway and pressed the door release, more curious than apprehensive, and watched three shadows dodge in out of the wet.

There was a flash of lightning, horns and violins shrieked and reshrieked the same tortured Slavic measure like a tocsin, they were coming up the stairs, thump-thump-thump. For one nasty moment I stepped back, cursing myself for so blindly buzzing them in — gray forms, strangers, junkies, Mexican confidence men — when I saw, with relief, that it was Vogelsang. “Felix,” he said.

“Hey,” I responded.

He had a girl in tow, her hair clipped short as an East German swimmer’s and bleached white. Behind her, three steps down, a guy in his late twenties, wearing rubbers and a yellow rain slicker that gave off a weird phosphorescent glow in the dull light of the hallway. All three of them looked as if they’d jumped off the Bay Bridge four or five times: noses dripping, hair plastered, water dribbling from collars and shoes. Vogelsang was grinning his deranged grin. “It’s been a while,” he said, clapping my shoulder.

It had been two months. Vogelsang lived in splendid isolation in the hills above Bolinas, making money nefariously, practicing various perversions, collecting power tools, wood carvings, barbers’ poles and cases of dry red wine from esoteric little vineyards like Goat’s Crouch and Sangre de Cristo. He also collected antique motorcycles, copper saucepans, espresso machines the size of church organs, sexless mannequins from the fifties (which he painted, lacquered and arranged round the house in lewd, arresting poses), bone-handled knives, Tahitian gill nets and a series of cramped somber oil paintings devoted to religious themes like the decapitation of John the Baptist or the algolagnic ecstasies of the flagellants. Every few weeks he would descend on San Francisco to prowl junk shops, cruise North Beach and attend sumptuous mate-swapping parties in Berkeley. Norman Mailer would have loved him.

At this juncture, he maneuvered the girl forward. I noticed that she was wearing a delicate silver ring through the flange of her right nostril, and that her toenails were painted black. “This is Aorta,” Vogelsang said. I labeled her instantly: sorority girl cum punk. She was probably from Pacific Heights and her real name was something like Jennifer Harris or Heather Mashberg. She gave me a hard look and held out her hand. Her hand was as wet and cold as something fished out of a pond. I ducked my head at her and sucked back the corners of my mouth.

“And this,” Vogelsang was saying, gesturing toward the slickered figure three steps down, “is Boyd Dowst, a friend of mine from Santa Rosa.”

The rain slicker seemed to erupt in response, and a big bony hand lunged over the top of the rail to grasp mine. I was staring into the face of a Yankee farmer, angular, big-eared, eyes the color of power-line insulators: “Now living in Sausalito,” he said, clawing at his dripping hair with his free hand. The other hand, the friendly one, was still pumping at mine as if he expected my fingertips to squirt milk or something.

I was barefoot, my bathrobe was dirty, the skipping record ripped at my nerves like a two-man saw. I invited them in.

Vogelsang strode into the living room, unzipped his sodden jacket and draped it across the back of a wooden chair, characteristically brisk and nervous in the way of a feral cat attuned to the faintest movements, the tiniest scratchings. He smelled of rain and something else too, something musky and primal. It was a minute before I realized what it was: he reeked of sex. When he’d arranged the jacket to his satisfaction, he turned to enlighten me on this and other matters, pausing only to produce a plastic vial of breath neutralizer and squeeze off two quick shots before launching into a monologue describing his recent acquisitions, touching on improvements to his property in Bolinas and the progress of his investments in the commodities market, and giving a lubricious play-by-play account of the urbane orgy he and the girl had attended earlier in the evening. He spoke, as he always did, with a peculiar mechanical diction, each word distinct and unslurred, as if he were a linguistics professor moderating a panel discussion on the future of the language.