Saïd Sayrafiezadeh - New American Stories

Del bought a box of soap from a little vending machine that charged exorbitant prices and poured most of it into the washer, then walked over to the bulletin board. Every Laundromat has one, a place on the wall where people can peddle their junk or swap their kids. There was a notice for a big tent revival over on the hopeless side of town, a crudely written flyer promising a better life, something that Del had craved for a long time. In one corner a cartoon Jesus floated on a pink cloud above the earth, in the other a bloody fiend sat in a prison cell snacking on a plate of skulls labeled like homemade preserves: JUNKIE, WINO, HOMO, WHORE, ATHEIST. It was designed to scare the fuck out of the type of people who wash their clothes in a public place. But more than anything, the poster dredged up memories for Del, reminded him of the time he and Randy wasted an entire year attending the Shady Glen Church of Christ in Christian Union just to win a prize, a little red Bible that fell apart the first hot day. They were eight years old.

—

Several years after they dropped out of Sunday school, Randy and Del enrolled in a mail order Charles Atlas course. This was back in the days when a kid could still change the course of his life by filling out one of the order forms found in the back of a comic book, a long time ago, years before the Fish Stick Girl was even born. A new envelope filled with exercises arrived in the mail every week, but Del couldn’t get into it, all that work just so you could tear a phone book in half. Instead, he shoplifted a paperback from Gray’s Drugstore in Meade called Reds. Del wasn’t much of a reader, but he needed something to kill time until Randy gave up on building a different body.

Del would never forget Reds. He probably read it a dozen times that summer. It had the same powerful effect on him as the public service announcement on the radio about the guy who ripped his arm open with a can opener so he could blow dope in the bloody hole with a plastic straw. In the book, a clean-cut hero named Cole picks up these two runaway girls who shoot sleeping pills in his dad’s new Lincoln. For Del, it was like flipping on a light switch, and by the time the crazy bitches dropped acid and torched the hippie’s crash pad, he knew exactly how he wanted to live his life.

“Man, you gotta read this,” Del said, waving his copy of Reds under Randy’s nose. They were listening to a Hendrix album while Randy stood in front of the open window and worked out in the nude. Charles Atlas was big on sunshine and fresh air, which probably would have been fine if you lived on the moon, but in their county, the smog from the paper mill made everything smell like rotten eggs. Randy had already scratched the shit out of “Purple Haze,” and Jimi kept repeating “…while I kiss the sky…while I kiss the sky.” Glancing out the window over Randy’s shoulder, Del saw a dirty brown cloud drifting by, high over Knockemstiff, the holler where they lived.

Randy glanced at the cover of the book, the picture of the four-eyed boy and the two wasted chicks standing by a highway sign with their thumbs in their pockets. He snorted in disgust, then took a big gulp from the jelly glass of raw eggs he kept by the bed. He was up to a dozen a day. Sweat was dripping off the end of his dick. His stomach resembled a car grill. “I could break that sonofabitch like a pencil,” he said, flexing his biceps.

“Shoot, this guy gets more pussy than you ever dreamed of,” Del said. “He don’t need no muscles either.”

“Bullshit. Girls love muscles. What about the guy who gets sand kicked in his face down at the beach?” Randy asked.

“You don’t even like to swim,” Del pointed out. “Look, girls don’t care how many push-ups you can do. They just want to get high and wear flowers in their hair. Maybe steal a car.”

“Yeah, then we end up in jail like your brothers.”

“Hey, I begged them to read this before they broke into that gas station,” Del said.

“What the hell are you talking about?” Randy yelled. He’d already started another set of leg lifts. Del reached over and cranked up “I Don’t Live Today” past the little piece of tape that Randy’s brother, Albert, had stuck on the volume control. The speakers started making a funny noise, like someone was pounding the piss out of them with one of the dumbbells lying on the floor.

“I say we go to Florida and find these girls,” Del said, holding the cover up to Randy’s red, pimply face. “It’s like hippie heaven down there.”

“Damn, Delbert, that little one looks like somebody’s sister,” Randy grunted, just before the speakers blew.

—

The Fish Stick Girl took off her army jacket and loosened the belt on her shiny jeans, then got down on the floor in the Laundromat amid the fuzz balls and cigarette butts and started doing stretches. Del figured that somewhere along the way, probably the night he hogged all of her Haldol, he’d confessed that he got a kick out of watching other people work out. It wasn’t a kinky sex thing, but more like the pleasure a person gets out of seeing their best friend lose a job or some rich bastard go down in a plane crash. He wondered what other secrets he might have revealed. Del watched his pants slosh around in the window and tried to ignore the sexy sighs the Fish Stick Girl emitted with each slow movement. Though she’d been cursed with certain defects, she could bend into shapes that most people associate only with circus freaks and world-class contortionists. It was, he knew, just another part of her plan to make him a slave.

—

On the bus going to Florida, Del read Randy the juiciest passages in Reds over and over, but always avoided the ending. By the time they hit Atlanta, Randy had even memorized the entire chapter about the Spanish fly orgy in the abandoned beach house. He became convinced that the psychotic Dorcie would be waiting for him when they pulled into the station at St. Petersburg. After his cousin nodded off, Del slipped back to the restroom and tore out the last few pages of the novel. He didn’t have the heart to tell Randy that Dorcie, his little needle queen, had jumped off a bridge and drowned when the cops started closing in.

—

“I’m hungry, man,” Randy said, the morning they hit the Florida state line. There were rows of orange trees along the highway. Everything smelled like air freshener.

“Look, those oranges are big as basketballs.”

“No, I mean I’m losing muscle fast,” Randy said. “I got to find some eggs.” It was true — Randy was starting to look like a rubber doll that had stepped on a nail. He was deflating before Del’s eyes.

“We’ll buy a dozen as soon as we get some money.”

“How we do that?” Randy asked, his voice cracking. “Does it say in that book how we do that?”

“Don’t worry,” Del said. “This guy tells you everything.”

—

Three days later in St. Petersburg, they met a hotdog vendor named Leo. He was dumping new meat into a stainless-steel steamer. The smell of snouts and eyeballs wafting from the stand had been driving Del and Randy crazy ever since they’d started sleeping under the pier. “Come by my place this evening, you,” Leo said, handing the boys a couple of dogs along with an address scrawled on a matchbook. “Go ahead, eat up, you,” he said, winking at Randy.

“Hey, Del,” Randy said later, “you think that guy’s funny?” Dried mustard was plastered on his chin.

“Who cares? I can’t go home, that’s all I know. My mom will kill me.”

“How much you figure people will pay for something like that?” Randy said.

—

Leo came to the door wearing a flowered bathrobe and a pair of old tennis shoes with the toes cut out of them. His swollen feet looked like a pair of sea urchins. He lived in a sad motel room, with black tar footprints on the dirty carpet, somebody else’s sand in the tub. It was the kind of place that Del would always gravitate toward later on, the kind of dump where something always happens that nobody wants to admit happened.