Mark Dunn - American Decameron

“So what’s the rub, sir?”

“I don’t know. I just — Starkman, I think there’s some kind of lesson I need to be taking from all of this.”

“What? The fact that you can’t get it up with Jillian anymore, or the general shape of things when it comes to you and your otherwise galloping libido?”

“I don’t want to be that person anymore. That, that, you know—”

“Lothario? Skirt-chaser? Roué?”

“I’m tired of following the edicts of my, you know, dick .”

Starkman cocked his head and pulled his glasses down to regard me from over the frames. “My dear Mr. Benson, I do believe that you have finally grown to strapping, responsible manhood. This whole midi thing has been a wakeup call. You have reached the point of questioning why your pleasure center must be driven exclusively by the animal brain. I, of course, adore the animal brain and how it warms my cockulls — with or without the kulls — but man was given an outer brain too, which is supposed to emancipate him from his baser instincts. My friend Shermy and I, for example, we make passionate man-love, and then we play chess. Do you play chess? You should find a beautiful woman who does — someone who is independently minded, deliberately out of lockstep with the mandated de rigueur.”

“And might not be so ready to toss out all of her micro-minis?”

“Precisely.”

“Have you decided yet if you’re going to get that slice of pie?”

“I have, Tommy. Just now, as we were giving your vacuous swinger’s life a sense of purpose once more, I decided in the affirmative.”

As we were returning to the cafeteria line for our just desserts, I thanked my friend Starkman for his open ear, and for his wise counsel. And he told me in sotto-voce confidentiality that he wished I had been born homosexual. That would have settled matters quite tidily.

Starkman apparently has a thing for guys who look like the husband of Samantha Stephens.

Eileen stood in the doorway with her wicker beach basket in one hand and her beach towel in the other. Her chartreuse-colored, wide-brimmed beach hat, circa 1965, revealed only her nose and mouth, and it was a mouth that was turned down and petulant. “It’s an absolutely beautiful morning and you’re all sitting around here like the Dracula family waiting for the sun to go down.”

“Give me just a minute,” implored Julia, not taking her eyes from her book. “I want to get to the end of this chapter.” Julia was reading the popular horror-thriller, The Other , by actor-turned-author Thomas Tryon. Julia kept flipping to the back of the book to look at the jacket photo. He was the best-looking author she’d ever seen.

“Donna? Michael Junior?” Eileen pointed at the beach just outside the motel window. “Are you going to make your poor grandmother sit there by herself like some lonely old lady beach bum? Michael Senior, am I speaking to a wall?”

“A what?”

“A wall, Michael.”

“Of course not.” Eileen’s forty-three-year-old son was lying on the couch with his feet propped up on one of the two armrests. He was reading The New Centurions by policeman-turned-author Joseph Wambaugh.

“You’re as bad as the kids,” said Eileen. “You can’t read your book on the beach? Come keep your mother company.”

“Sure thing, Mom,” said Michael Senior, slapping the book shut and kipping up from the couch. In his most authoritative father-voice he said, “Everybody out to the beach. We came to Gulf Shores for the sun and the surf. Your grandmother’s right. We need to feel the grit of sand between our toes and the taste of salt water on our tongues.”

“Ugh!” pronounced sixteen-year-old Julia, as her fourteen-year-old sister Donna rolled her eyes with commensurate disgust. Donna had been reading The Exorcist by William Peter Blatty, who used to work for the U.S. Air Force’s Psychological Warfare Division after selling Electrolux vacuum cleaners and serving as ticket agent for United Airlines. Earlier in the morning Donna had, in the course of reading the horror novel, gasped — audibly — three times, but the sound had registered with no one but her grandmother, who had been sitting at the little table near the motel room’s corner kitchenette, reading absolutely nothing, although she had previously skimmed an article on the front page of the Mobile paper, the Press-Register , about the death of Louis Armstrong. “Satchmo is gone,” she had said softly and plaintively to herself, while recalling her honeymoon trip to New Orleans and all the Dixieland jazz she and her new husband had heard in the Quarter. “Lord, how I want to be in that number,” she mused aloud, absently conjuring up a line from “When the Saints Go Marching In”—a song that always reminded her of the now-silenced singer and trumpeter.

Eileen looked at her two granddaughters and at her twelve-year-old grandson, Michael Junior, who was reading The Lord of the Rings —specifically, the volume entitled The Two Towers. The Lord of the Rings was written by J.R.R. Tolkien, who had been, early in his life, employed by the publishers of the Oxford English Dictionary researching words that started with W.

“Up, up, book vermin,” said Michael Senior, heading off to the bedroom to change into his swimming trunks from his pajamas. “Your illiterate grandmother is feeling neglected.”

Eileen allowed her beaked upper lip to disappear altogether beneath the angry bulldog protrusion of its lower companion. “I really wish you wouldn’t talk about me that way in front of the children,” she called after her son. “I know it’s all in fun. But it’s disrespectful.”

Donna jumped up and shrieked. The shriek had nothing to do with what Eileen had just said.

“This is so gross!” she pronounced, tossing The Exorcist onto the armchair where she had been sitting, scrunched into a little ball of intense engrossment.

“Don’t you dare say a word!” cried her older sister Julia. “You’ll spoil it.”

“You already know what it’s about,” called Michael Junior from the other end of the room.

“But I don’t know if the priest will succeed in getting the devil out of the girl or not. We live in a literary era in which there is no longer the guarantee of a happy ending.”

“It’d be really cool if he couldn’t do it and then ol’ Beelzebub goes and possesses the soul of everybody in Washington — even President Nixon!” said Michael Junior, who had gotten very sunburned the day before reading on the hood of his family’s station wagon and was now covered with globules of white healing salve.

“Put down the books, kids. We’re all going to the beach,” said Michael Senior, “and we’re going to build sandcastles and play in the waves and pretend to be a totally ambulatory, nearly normal American family. We’re all being very rude to your grandmother. She came all the way down here to spend time with us and look how we’re treating her.”

“I’m sorry we’re being so rude, Grandma,” said Julia, who got up from her fold-out cot to put her arms around her grandmother’s waist.

“I’m not against reading.” Eileen returned the hug. “I just think you’re all missing out on the best part of being on vacation — getting out, doing things. Michael, honey, weren’t you going to drive Mike over to the fort?”

“Sure. If he wants to see it. You want to see Fort Morgan, champ?”

“That’d be neat.” The enthusiasm in the words was only marginally reflected in the manner of their delivery.

Michael Senior clapped his hands together. “Okay, and this afternoon, you kids are going over to the Hangout and play some Skee-Ball, and then we’ll have hamburgers at the Pink Pony Pub, and…”