Richard Lange - Dead Boys - Stories

Feeling reckless and lucky, I walked over to the casino. It was deserted except for a couple of snowbirds playing video poker. The bartender was a fat man with a handlebar mustache. When he asked me where I was from, I said, “tonight? Right here,” which got me a dirty look.

The blackjack and craps tables were dark, so I spent a few hours drinking and throwing money at the slots. What happened next has always been somewhat hazy — this was back in my hard liquor years. I hit a jackpot, fifty or sixty dollars, and tried to give it to the cocktail waitress. She wouldn’t take it, and that pissed me off. I got on the bartender’s bad side, too. My jokes went right over his head. “You must know where the whores are in this town,” I said, and he asked me to leave.

There was blood on my pillow when I came to in the morning. My lip was busted, my left eye swollen almost shut. I vomited all the way back to L.A., pulling over to the side of the road every twenty miles or so. What can I say but that I failed? I had a spark within me, but not enough fuel to break the bonds of gravity.

I WAKE UP at five a.m. and can’t get back to sleep. When it’s quiet like this, before the city revs up, you hear the strangest sounds. Roosters crowing, squirrels in the trees, distant trains. Nobody believes me, but it’s true. I roll over to put my arms around Judy. She shudders and pulls away, scooting to the edge of the bed.

The refrigerator is full of food. I’m not used to this. It takes me a while to notice the blood. The plastic the turkey is sealed in has a hole in it, and watery pink blood has leaked out and puddled on the bottom shelf. I take out all the beer and sodas and pickles and sour cream and clean everything off in the sink.

As the sun comes up on the morning of Christmas Eve day, I’m sitting at the kitchen table, eating the chocolate chip cookies we bought last night and drinking a glass of milk. Karl is asleep on the couch in the living room. I hear him breathing. I sense he doesn’t like me much. He thinks I’m weak and bizarre, and he’s right, but how do I make him understand that everyone here is weak and bizarre?

IT’S JUDY’S IDEA to drive to the beach. She suggests it after breakfast. Karl is washing the dishes, and I’m drying.

“We’ll go out there and laugh at the rest of the country,” she says. “Picture them shoveling snow.”

“That’d be something,” Karl replies.

Good. It’ll be good to get out of the apartment, all of us together. My wife is a genius. I rustle up a pair of shorts for Karl. We throw the snacks he and I bought into a bag, then some towels, a blanket, and we’re off.

What a day. The sky is a flawless blue, the sun a cheerful old friend. We take Judy’s car. She drives, Karl sits in back, and the radio plays all my favorite songs. I start up the license plate game. We alternate calling out the letters of the alphabet as we spot them on passing cars. Karl joins right in. “What am I?” he asks, and we switch to twenty questions.

The freeway dumps us out at the beach, which is almost empty at this time of the year. It’s a little colder than it was in Silver Lake, a little windier, but we tromp out and spread our blanket on the sand like it was the Fourth of July. Karl strips off his shirt, revealing a large tattoo on his chest. BROKEN-HEARTED, it reads, the letters arching over the face of a woman. “Momma,” he says before Judy or I have a chance to ask. “Prison shit.”

The waves are sluggish today, syrupy, breaking with only the greatest of effort. Propped on my elbows, I watch them struggle toward shore, while Judy, sitting beside me, flips through the pages of a magazine. I find that if I lie perfectly still, the sun eventually wins out over the breeze and provides a fragile warmth.

The high tide line is marked by a band of waterlogged debris, kelp mostly, driftwood, odd chunks of Styrofoam and plastic. Karl strolls along beside it, stirring up a cloud of flies every time he stops to poke around in the mess with a stick he found somewhere. In the distance, the pier stands black and skeletal against the sky, its burden of joyless fishermen and stoned teenagers placing entirely too much faith in the strength of its spindly pilings, or perhaps the possibility of collapse is all part of the fun.

“What are you thinking about?” Judy asks, her cold hand on my shoulder.

“Nothing.”

“Is your brother enjoying himself? Seems like it.”

“I’m doing my best.”

She reaches down to scratch her ankle. “That tree you guys got is something else.”

“I knew you’d like it.”

“We’re awful, aren’t we?”

The conversation has upset my delicate relationship with the sun. I sit up and hug myself for a quick fix of warmth. “We should have brought beer,” I say. “Or tequila. Tequila would have been great.”

Karl approaches the blanket, carrying something on the end of his stick.

“Check it out, a jellyfish,” he yells.

“That’s close enough. Those things can sting even when they’re dead,” I caution.

“Yeah, keep it away from here,” Judy chimes in.

Karl stops short, disappointed by our reaction. He examines the jellyfish up close once more, then drops it into a hole he kicks into the sand and buries it with his foot.

“I’m going swimming. Come on, bro,” he says.

Judy throws down her magazine. “I’m ready.”

“There’s shit in that water,” I scoff. “Big poisonous turds.”

They laugh at me before running down to the waves together. Judy advances slowly on stiffened legs and screams as the frigid water swirls around her calves, but Karl enters at a run and dives headfirst into the breakers. By the time she’s in up to her waist, he’s already bobbing in the swells, not touching bottom.

I turn away from them, from the sea, and lie on my stomach. In the parking lot two young lovers wrapped in one jacket lean against the hood of a car. The girl rests her head on the boy’s chest, and he strokes her hair. A thing like that isn’t supposed to make you angry, I know.

A CHRISTMAS STORY? I’ve got one. I was sixteen, thumbing my way out of trouble somewhere down in Louisiana, I believe, and this old boy picked me up on Christmas Eve. He asked was I hungry, and I was, so he told me there was a birthday cake in the backseat I was welcome to. He worked in a bakery, see, and got to take home the leftovers and mistakes. It was chocolate with white frosting and big blue flowers, and I dug right in with my fingers and ate it all up while the dude laughed and laughed. Afterward he sparked up a bomber, and I was like, well, here we are, man, here we are.

A few miles down the road he started in. “You like cock? You sure look like you would.” Ain’t nothing come for free, right? I don’t know what I was thinking. You gotta figure a guy must be packing if he’s talking like that, so plain to a stranger, and I’m not gonna lie but I was scared. I told him I had to piss, and he asked could he watch. “Sure,” I said. “Enjoy the show.” As soon as the car pulled over, I was out the door and up the hill into the woods as fast as I could get. I found a good hiding place and hunkered down where I could see him through the trees. He fired a few rounds from a little pistol up my way, then got back in his car and left.

After an hour or so I started walking. Didn’t even bother to stick my thumb out. It was so bitter cold and kind of sleety, and in the middle of the night with me looking such a mess, nobody was gonna stop. Up the road a ways I came upon a blanket I thought I could maybe use, but when I went to snatch it up, there was something wrapped inside it. A dog, I thought, or, I don’t know why, a monkey, but it was a baby, a little blue baby. It seemed dead till it started to cry. I can’t say I didn’t think about just moving on down the line, but it was a baby, man. A baby. On Christmas Eve.