Richard Lange - Dead Boys - Stories

Grady promised she’d be packed and ready to roll by the time we arrived with the truck, but it’s been an hour already and the boxes are still empty, and now Dee Dee has collapsed on the living room floor, crying because she can’t decide where to stick what. My advice would be to drag it all out to the sidewalk and burn it. The dirty stuffed animals, the torn paperbacks. The thrift-store ball gowns and ancient punk rock records. All of it. Because there’s something morbid about hauling around so many mementos of your worthless past. Something morbid and resigned.

“Why won’t you help?” Dee Dee wails, and Grady leaves me sitting alone on the couch to kneel beside her. He lights her cigarette, cracks a few jokes, and pretty soon she’s laughing. I could join in when they begin filling boxes, I guess, but I don’t. I don’t feel like it. The hot wind that’s been blowing off the desert for days rattles the screen in the window frame and snatches up a blackened match from the coffee table. I stick my finger into the hole in my beer can and wonder how hard I would have to twist it to cut myself to the bone.

DON’T GET ME wrong. I used to do pretty well with the ladies. I don’t know what it was, but for a while there I had it. The way some retarded people can play piano or memorize baseball stats, I could pick up girls. Black, white, brown. Twins once, at the same time; a mother and daughter separately. A veterinarian with too many dogs, a welfare queen who used her government check to buy me quaaludes, a former Sea World mermaid, a blind girl. A beautiful blind girl.

I spent years jumping from woman to woman. It was fun and all, but you get caught up in a grind like that, and you fall behind in other areas. That’s why I was glad when it ended, when the magic finally faded. Suddenly everyone saw right through me, and I couldn’t have been happier. Really.

Being alone took some getting used to, of course. I had my booze and pills and whatnot, but some nights I just wanted to die. I kept telling myself there had to be more to life than breaking hearts. I pressed on. I let the years pass. And now I’m doing fine.

MORE PEOPLE WERE supposed to be here to help Dee Dee move. Grady said it was going to be like a party. We’d have a couple beers, everyone would carry down a box or a piece of furniture, we’d follow the truck to the new place, unload, and have a few more beers. It didn’t work out that way, though. Grady and I are the only suckers who showed, and Dee Dee’s idea of a festive spread is a bag of stale Doritos and a warm six-pack of Bud.

Grady does his best to keep me entertained as he and I wrangle the futon and kitchen table down the narrow stairway. He just got back from Vegas, where he hit a royal on video poker. A thousand and change. He goes through every hand the machine dealt him leading up to the jackpot, and I don’t have the heart to tell him that other people’s gambling stories bore the shit out of me. He’s going to use the money to get Dee Dee some new head shots — she’s taking acting classes again — and he wants to buy another gun.

We break for cigarettes after carrying down what seems like a hundred milk crates full of junk. Grady stretches out on the U-Haul’s ramp, I sit on the curb. There’s a hot spot on my left foot from my new steel-toes. I unlace the boot and pull it off and roll down my sock to see how close I am to blistering.

“Think she’s got any Band-Aids?” I ask.

“Somewhere, man, I’m sure,” Grady replies. He reaches into one of the boxes and pulls out a grinning ceramic monkey on a surfboard. “This won’t help?”

The battered ice-cream truck parked down the street is playing “It’s a Small World.” A bunch of Mexican kids have gathered at its door. They hop up and down and spin in circles and kung fu their buddies. One little girl stands apart from the rest, waving a dollar bill over her head. I don’t have any children. Nobody I know has any children. And nobody wants any. I squash an ant with my thumb. Then another. Then another.

Grady flicks away his half-smoked cigarette. “As of now, I’m quitting these,” he announces.

The wind picks up. It’s like a sick old man breathing in my face. I lie down and watch the shaggy crowns of the palm trees toss back and forth high overhead. The dry fronds crack and rustle and hiss.

“She wants me to torch her car,” Grady says. He’s running his hands over his crewcut, a nervous habit he’s picked up lately.

“What do you mean?” I ask.

“Like for the insurance. You take it out somewhere and set it on fire, so she can collect.”

“I know you’re not that stupid.”

He shoots me a fuck-you look. “I said she wants me to, that’s all.”

Grady loans me money. He steals CDs for me from the record store where he works. When I got my DUI, he bitched at the cops until they cuffed him and put him in the backseat of the cruiser, too, because he didn’t want me to go to jail by myself. You can see why I worry about him.

WHILE HE AND Dee Dee are carrying down more boxes, I’m left alone in her bedroom. I pick up one of her pillows and press it to my nose, then move to the dresser, where I finger her hairbrush, her makeup sponges, her lipstick.

The top drawer of the dresser is full of panties arrayed like the lustrous black and blue and red pelts of small exotic creatures. I slide my hand across them, then wriggle my fist deep into their silky depths and stand there buried to the forearm, listening to the wind slam a tree against the side of the building. My car insurance is due and I’m completely broke again. A mother lode of G-strings, and this is where my mind goes. My, how things have changed. Grady and Dee Dee come tromping up the stairs, and I grab a box of comic books to take to the truck.

THE BLIND GIRL’s name was Mercedes. She was a Filipina who attended the Braille Institute, which was down the street from where I lived at the time. It was a funny neighborhood. The traffic signals chirped like birds to alert the students when to cross, and there was a small factory a few blocks away, Blind-Made Products, where many of them worked. In the morning they gathered in the doughnut shop, some in dark glasses, the bolder ones with their dead eyes bared. I loved to watch them prepare their coffee. Their hands seemed to have an intelligence all their own as they tore open sugar packets and tapped about in search of cream.

I met Mercedes at the liquor store. She’d asked for gummi bears, but the Korean clerk kept leading her to the chewing gum display.

“No,” she said after running her fingers over the racks for the third time. “Gummi bears .”

I stepped in and took her arm, steering her to what she wanted, and we ended up spending the rest of the day together. She lived with her parents out in Palms somewhere and rode the bus east every morning to the institute. At first we rendezvoused in the doughnut shop when her classes were over and walked together to my place, but after two weeks she’d memorized the route, so I’d wait in the apartment, listening for the zipping sound her cane made against the sidewalk as she worked her way up the block.

She was one of those who preferred to wear dark glasses, and even when she took them off, she kept her eyes closed. We’d smoke dope and listen to music, and when we fucked, those incredible hands of hers would roam my body like soft, warm spiders. She liked to talk about religion — silly shit. Once she told me that she believed God was blind.

She was the most beautiful girl I’d ever been with, but since she couldn’t see me, I wasn’t sure if it counted.

GRADY’S GOING TO drive the U-Haul to Dee Dee’s new place, and he asks me to ride over with her in her Malibu. It’s been sputtering at stoplights lately — the fuel pump, he suspects — and he’d feel better if she had someone with her in case it conks out. When I seem a bit hesitant, he gives me twenty dollars to pick up a twelve-pack on the way and tells me I can keep the change.