Richard Lange - Dead Boys - Stories

She was younger than me. Barely legal. Eight years’ difference doesn’t sound like much, but you’d be surprised. I don’t remember ever being as silly as she sometimes was. She got drunk and puked in my car after I warned and warned her. She wrote letters to rock stars and got depressed when they didn’t respond. Her parents thought I was great. Looking back, they were probably happy to have someone take her off their hands. We dated for three months and twenty-two days.

DOWN AT THE bar, Marty passes around a bottle of pills he found on the floor at Arby’s. The prescription label has been peeled off, and he’s hoping someone might know what they are. Jennifer says antibiotics, but her boyfriend, Bob the snob, smells one and thinks Valium. I drop a tablet on my tongue and wash it down with beer. They all swear I’m crazy.

Someone’s seen a movie that gets us on the subject of time travel. I can tell you this: My dream is not to go back and lay a bunch of money on the Derby or the Super Bowl. I also wouldn’t save Lincoln or Kennedy or Martin Luther King. Invisibility interests me more, but nobody wants to talk about that. “Figures, you skeev,” is how they put it. This place is a pigsty.

Some Fridays women come in, two or three together. Usually they’re too old for me. I don’t go for the druggies, either. They giggle and flirt and sing along to the jukebox and get all the wet fart regulars squirming on their stools. Marty’s the worst. I once saw him spend half his paycheck on a couple of grannies who bugged their eyes at each other and laughed up their sleeves every time he turned his back on them. I’m so lucky I have Lana to keep that part of my brain busy.

The place is dead tonight, though. The end of the line. Marty follows me out to my car, parked in front of the pet store. While we’re standing there talking about nothing, every animal in the place starts screeching at once, like they all have knives at their throats. It gets louder and louder, but Marty won’t shut up. “I mean, the damn world does its thing,” he hollers over the din.

At Denny’s, where I stop to eat, I get this idea stuck in my head that I can see through everyone’s clothes.

“THE POLICE WERE here looking for you,” my mom says first thing when I walk in the door.

“You don’t know the half of it,” I reply.

“Leave that girl’s family alone. They’re serious.”

She sets her wineglass on the kitchen table and goes back to cracking walnuts. Shells fly all over the place. It’s like she doesn’t even care where they end up. This makes me angry right off the bat, because I’m reminded of how utterly incapable she is of putting two and fucking two together.

Dad is in the living room. There’s something on TV. He raises his fingers in a wave but doesn’t say anything. I walk over and look at the family portrait from Christmas 1995 hanging on the wall. My brother before he became an accountant, my sister before she became a housewife, and me. I know what I was thinking back then, and it didn’t have anything to do with this.

When the commercials start, my dad sits up. He’s wearing a neck brace as a precaution after some kind of operation on his back.

“Come here where I can see you,” he says. “I can’t turn around.”

I join him on the couch. He pats me on the shoulder. They’ve redecorated twice since I moved. I’d have to scratch through two layers of paint to get to a color I remember. The latest thing is the vertical blinds on the sliding glass door that cast prisony shadows across the carpet.

“I quit smoking,” I tell my dad.

“That’s fantastic. I’m proud of you.”

Three weeks ago I was sitting at the bar, turning a pack of cigarettes over in my hands, and all of a sudden the surgeon general’s warning leaped out at me like I was seeing it for the first time: SMOKING CAUSES LUNG CANCER, HEART DISEASE, EMPHYSEMA, AND MAY COMPLICATE PREGNANCY. What an idiot I’d been. What a victim. I went right into the bathroom and crumbled the rest of the cigarettes in the pack into the toilet and flushed them down. For once I was absolutely sure I’d done the right thing, and it felt great.

My mom comes in and hands my dad and me beers. She needs to know what kind of pizza I want, because she’s calling Domino’s. Then we have to be quiet. Dad’s program is back on, a documentary on the secrets of ancient Egypt. When he thinks I’m caught up in it, I feel him staring at me. During the next commercials I ask, “Has Lana called here for me? Any hang-ups maybe?” and a tear races down his cheek.

I USED TO cut school and smoke weed with the older brother of the cop who cuffs me for the ride to the station. He and his partner show up at the end of my shift. I think about making a run for it, but James tells me to be cool and get it over with. He went through the same thing with his ex. To this day he’s not allowed to speak to her except via her attorney.

The world looks different from the backseat of the cruiser. Everything suddenly assumes a new preciousness. If I get out of this, I promise myself, I’m going to buy a camera and start taking pictures. I also want to spend some time at the beach. It’s twenty minutes away, and I haven’t been there in years. Up front they’re talking about a hooker they busted in front of an elementary school. She was so messed up, she was propositioning fifth-graders. We stop at a red light, and there are palm trees wherever I turn, and big white clouds that inch toward the horizon. Click — I snap a mental photo — click click .

The room they put me in has no windows. The drawers of the big metal desk are empty. I walk the perimeter looking for pinholes that might conceal lenses or microphones. A suit comes in and tells me to sit down. Detective something or other. “I know your dad,” he says.

It’s his duty to inform me that this is the last straw. If I violate the restraining order again, Lana’s parents are insisting that I do time. I get the feeling there have been conversations about me going on behind my back. Nothing makes me more uncomfortable.

“I’m going to be blunt with you,” the detective says. “If you’re having mental trouble, we can get you help. Don’t be ashamed to admit that you’re in over your head.”

“I’m fine,” I reply.

“Your dad says this is about a girl who dumped you.”

“Not dumped exactly. She moved away.”

The detective brings the end of his tie up and brushes it against his nose, then suddenly drops it when he realizes what he’s doing. I can just barely hear someone singing “Happy Birthday” over the station’s PA system.

“I’ve been dumped; we’ve all been dumped,” the detective continues. “It’s fucked, but you’ll get past it. Just tough it out. Not all that John Wayne stuff is bogus. He had balls, you know.”

“Ha ha,” I laugh. “Oh, yes, he did.” I’m thinking of the monkey, not the man.

“Everything else okay?”

I tell him about the helicopters, but he says he can’t do anything about that.

When they cut me loose I feel better in a strange way. Something like forgetting. There’s one of those coffee machines in the hall, the kind where the paper cup drops down and the coffee dribbles in. I stand next to it and buy coffee for everyone who passes, good guys and bad. “Hey, thanks,” they say, and, “You the man!” After a while I run out of money, though, and I have to walk all the way back to the newsstand to pick up my car.

JAMES GETS A nosebleed out of nowhere. He stands in the street so he doesn’t drip on the magazines. One of the old lady customers says he must be low on iron. He leans his head back and pinches the bridge of his nose, and after a while that stops it. His blood turns black in the gutter as it dries.