Charles Bock - Beautiful Children

If he made an immediate right turn and went down the short alleyway, the car would emerge on the other side of the pawn shop. But unlike hundreds and maybe thousands of times before this, he drove past the turn, did not so much as look in the direction of the shop.

Newell's chin rose. His head turned a degree or two, and he stayed with the sight above the entrance to a sports-themed casino. A huge bronze statue, posed like the centerpiece of an oversize trophy. A baseball player, front knee forward, arms extended, following through on his perfect home run swing.

“This one time, the mayor wanted to make more tourists come down here?” Kenny started unsteadily. “The cops got ordered to round up all the homeless people from Fremont Street. I don't know if you remember this. I guess the cops went through downtown and loaded all the bums onto police buses and gave them like a sack lunch. They dropped everyone off outside city limits. My aunt was thrilled. But the lady who runs the pawn shop? She got concerned. Turns out Loveless had already told her — word about the round-up was already out on the streets. When Loveless didn't show up to clean the windows for a week, the pawn shop lady complained.”

In accordance with the flow of traffic Kenny eased off the accelerator. Two or three traffic signals ahead, large sand dunes and round cement pillars supported a system of ramps for an elevated series of freeways.

“Well, the cops just laughed, like: What are you complaining about? But tell you what, when the Review-Journal did the big story, who was laughing then? Even that didn't matter though. Turns out, the cops still clear Fremont all the time, and the bums keep coming back anyway.”

Newell was finally looking at him.

“I'm not making sense,” Kenny admitted.

A yellow light. The Reliant stopped short. “What I'm saying — wait. Okay, here, when I was little…” He paused again, concentrating now, his bottom lip pinching over the top.

“Okay, like my dad. He used to tell me they purposefully built those freeways to surround the Strip and Fremont. If the race riots came, the army'd put tanks on top of the freeway. I guess they were supposed to fence off the black section of town from the casinos. My dad told me that this way, the tourists would be safe to gamble.”

A passing beat. Kenny added: “You can't really believe anything he says when he's drunk, though.”

“This is all I mean.” He paused once more. “My dad. He's like everyone else, you know? Like the police and the mayor and all the plans people make. Or, or — like driving around with the extinguisher. How people say stuff. Or when I… I mean.” Kenny grimaced. He took a long breath. “You do something. And maybe it feels right just then. Or you just do something to, you know, just to do it. Don't mean you want it to come out like it does. You can't know how it's gonna come out. You don't really think about it, you know?”

He glanced over, waiting for an answer.

6.4

Ponyboy always thought of it as a crutch, to be honest. A defense mechanism, only with more self-promotion. Cheri would harp on the redemptive powers of the imaginative act, saying Really, and I'm serious, and Fine, fuckhead, be condescending. A million times, Ponyboy had heard the lecture: how imagining the worst moments of her life being projected onto the silver screen was the very thing that allowed Cheri to survive those moments; how envisioning herself as a character in that movie created the distance that was so key to calming her. She'd go on about character arcs and emotional journeys until the friggin’ cows came home. Only, this one time, about a week after everything between them and Jabba went down, Cheri hadn't lectured Ponyboy. She'd merely looked at him with all this pity and sadness, and said she'd been thinking. “My character's getting to the point where she should be learning from her mistakes, you know? I think maybe I should be acting like that in real life, too.”

Didn't need to be Sherlock f'in Clouseau to decipher the undertone there. Didn't need to be some nautical engineer to understand rough waves were ahead. Although, even without the trouble in their relationship, even if the movie of Cheri's life hadn't included cryptic jibes, Pony-boy would have been distrustful of the whole device. Why? He couldn't say. Maybe it was as simple as someone getting turned off by qualities in other people that they can't stand in themselves. It could have been that Ponyboy shunned Cheri's movie fantasies as a reaction to his own inclination for drama. Maybe since Ponyboy's life already involved an act of flight, one that was particularly real and gritty and physical, he saw something plastic in the notion of mentally depositing himself in a theater's back row, using the dispassionate eye of a surgeon to consider the gamut of reactions at his disposal. It was too desperate. Too pathetic.

Except now he was in back of that ice cream truck and the girl with the shaved head kept looking at him and her eyes were deep and doelike and smudged black with kohl, so very resolute in her belief in him — almost as if she were willing Ponyboy to be worth her belief. And in her gaze, Ponyboy felt exposed. Her remark about people hurting people for no reason had nailed him in a particularly sensitive area, and while he could tell her comment hadn't been specifically pointed toward him; while he could see the girl didn't know what she was saying, was buzzing too hard to have a clue about the gravity of, well, anything, still, Ponyboy felt all sorts of intense and contrary emotions. Whether he should keep making moves on the girl with the shaved head? If he should try to keep her on the hook like he had promised Cheri? The thing about the tattoos sounded like the direct opposite of what the girl had said about unnecessary cruelty. But then again, her remark pretty much applied to every fucking single thing that Ponyboy had gotten Cheri involved with. Trying to juggle all these thoughts just about had Ponyboy's head exploding.

So then, a world premiere. The first-look sneak preview.

A gradual fade, an edit that properly conveyed the distance of Pony-boy's thoughts at the current moment, the viewer transported away from the darkening and blurry events in the ice cream truck, and toward a newly forming scene. The entrance of the Slinky Fox. Cheri Blossom emerging from the padded doors, Cheri moving at a hurried clip, having changed from her work clothes into her current fave outfit: satiny canary-yellow sweatpants with the word JUICY on the ass and a coordinated tank top. Her dominatrix boots had given way to flip-flops, which were making scratchy sounds, as they weren't built for fast walking. Cheri passed the bouncer and told him she was in a hurry and was sorry, she would settle up with him tomorrow, and as she kept on going, she cursed under her breath because leaving early had not excused her from tipping out everyone, and these finances were only furthering her doubts concerning the wisdom of what she was doing. In this scene, the strap of Cheri's gym bag was digging into her shoulder, and the bag was open, and some of her work supplies (a sports bra, a box of tampons with all their strings cut off, a backup pack of fake nails) were jostling. When something fell out, Cheri didn't notice.

Which was an opportunity.

In his imagined movie, Ponyboy's vision of the comic book guy took the form of a thirty-year-old five-hundred-pound virgin. It was a foregone conclusion that this tub of lard didn't have the cojones to venture within a pissing tit of Cheri, especially after Ponyboy had talked with him. Even if Comic Guy went and rented himself some courage, Cheri had to know better than to hook up with him, because that would be signing the guy's death certificate. Nonetheless, Ponyboy found himself concerned about the notion of his girlfriend listening to some jackass she'd met while stripping. Ponyboy assumed that three-dimensional tattoos were impossible, but with supercomputers and fiber optic lasers and all that shit, who knew. To Ponyboy it sounded like the Comic Guy had captured Cheri's ear with a plan that maybe was out there and sci-fi, but that also sounded cool and interesting, the type of shit Ponyboy might want on his body.