“Did you hear the news, man?”
“No.”
Their eyes explored my face thoroughly. “Bonnie and Jebets are getting married.”
I laughed. I remember thinking how wonderful the sun was shining through the water spots on the window, how exquisite it was to be free.
I think they thought I was hurt and putting on an act.
IN THE MIDSUMMER OF 1973, MISSION BEACH WAS A NARROW, four-mile-long strip of hodgepodge cottages between the Pacific Ocean and Mission Bay. The foggy, rusting little beach community contained two small grocery stores, two liquor stores, a rental shop, a rickety old amusement park, a long, busy cement boardwalk with a three-foot seawall, an Italian sub shop called Toby’s, a couple of bars that changed hands every few months, and the usual lonesome hot-dog stand.
Dewy lived on the bayside on Redondo Court in a tiny, rough, brown bungalow filled with bamboo furniture and unread Time magazines. The interior walls were a smooth gray Edvard Munchian driftwood theme. Off to the right was a kitchen so small you had to use a short-handled spatula to turn your eggs. The seaweed-colored shag carpet offered up the aroma of wet dog, beach, and Dewy’s particularly pungent feet. Dewy had sold the dog. He should’ve sold his feet. I would’ve liked to have had the dog. The place was still infested with fleas. They leaped like little pogo-stick artists, PWINK! PWINK! across the floor.
I ended up staying with Dewy for more than a year. We rarely saw each other. He worked days, I worked nights. He was gone much of the time, visiting his girl, doing church projects, or absorbing fatherly advice from Al, his craps-and-racetrack-loving mafioso boss at Caruso’s, the downtown restaurant where he was the day manager. Tall and bearded with an athlete’s build, Dewy looked twenty-five, but he was eighteen going on fifteen, the age at which his family had fallen apart, father say onara, mother gone to sauce. My parents had rescued him. He lived with us until he finished high school. Dewy wanted the world to know he was grown up so he showed it manly things: hard work, big new trucks, Chinese food to go, not paying his parking tickets, and handguns. On my second night staying with him, he proudly produced his new .357 magnum, a chrome, walnut, and iron contraption he kept wrapped in tissue paper in a box under his bed. “It’s a beauty, isn’t it?”
“Yeah, gorgeous.”
“It’ll blow a door off its hinges,” he muttered reverently. “And take a guy’s leg clean off. He’ll bleed to death before the ambulance gets there.”
“Gracious sakes,” I said.
He shoved it at me. “Here, take it.”
“No, really.”
“Take it. I want you to have it.”
I accepted it awkwardly, turning it over in my hands. It was as cold and heavy as a corpse. I disliked guns. I handed it back. “Put it away.”
“Look,” he said, breaking the chamber open. He emptied the rounds, then inserted them again. “See? It’s just a tool. Evolution, man. You’ve got to adapt. You take this one. I’ve already got a .38 in the car.”
“What would I do with it?”
“Carry it, man. Guy up on the boardwalk got robbed two days ago.”
“Thanks anyway.”
“I mean, if somebody breaks in or something or tries to rob you, what are you going to do?”
“Blow their leg off and watch them bleed to death before the ambulance gets there?”
“You don’t need to shoot anyone,” he said. “Just show it.”
“Right,” I said, “and then shoot myself in the foot.”
“OK,” he said, putting it away with a sigh. “It’s there if you change your mind. Just remember to put it back in the box when you’re done with it...”
For many days, like a good little Pandora, I left that box alone, but one night, out of idleness and a Hawaii Five-O rerun I’d already seen seven times, I dragged the six-shooter out. It was beautiful, in a way, gleaming and obscene, a lamp unto fear. I turned it over in my hands, my index fingers enclosing the trigger like a baby’s legs reflexively encircling its mother’s waist. It took me a while to figure out how to break open the chamber. I slid the bullets in and out. The barrel was short, about four inches’ worth. I held the weapon along my hip and whipped it straight up and made some convincing gunshot sounds with my mouth. I sighted a picture on the wall. Then I sighted the lamp, pretending it was Jebets, which gave me more satisfaction than I expected. That night I carried the gun with me down the beach. I was as swollen as a tick with power. I was as intoxicated as a man with two penises. I waited for some guys just out of prison to fool with me. The world was surprisingly peaceful. But then some frustrated young man in a trench coat was shouting at his girlfriend up by the seawall, and I actually thought about walking up there and pointing the gun at him to straighten him out. That’s when I realized how easy it would be to kill someone for no good reason, and I went home and put the revolver back in its box under the bed where it belonged.
I WAS EMBARRASSED ABOUT HAVING MY ONE AND ONLY GIRL stolen out from under me, so I began taking out other nurse’s aides. Getting women, especially nurse’s aides, who were often lonely and outnumbered me twelve to one, was suddenly easy. I had inadvertently, with the long practice high school had given me, discovered the essential trick in capturing women’s interest, which was to ignore them entirely. Living with Bonnie probably had something to do with my success too. These curious little creatures had seen me with Bonnie and that somehow stamped me normal or perhaps even dangerous. Sex, though it was not half of what it had been promised to me by popular culture, had helped to cure my acne. I had some pretty girlfriends and some ugly ones too. The ugly ones were not always the best in bed, as the legend goes, and neither were they any more grateful. They were also harder to get rid of. I would always take the pretty ones down to the 7-11 in North Park to watch Bob writhe in jealous amazement.
In mid-December the first love letter arrived. My admirer was supposedly anonymous, but I recognized the leaky, purple, graceless hand. “I can’t live another day without you,” Bonnie wrote. “I guess you would say that I am obcesed.” I read the letter again, nonplussed. I knew that she didn’t love me. What could have possibly changed? A shred of curiosity remained, but it was overridden by a sense of unease. I didn’t want to encourage her. And she was married now. I threw the letter away.
More letters followed. They had the same mushy, lost, and disturbing tone as the Scrabble notes we had passed long ago on Landis Street. I stopped opening them after a while.
Then the phone rang one night. It was late February. Dewy was off with his Nazarene girlfriend. I answered on the first ring. “It’s me, Baby,” said the husky feminine voice.
“Who’s me?” I said.
“I need to talk to you,” she said.
“How did you get my number?”
“Can we talk?”
“Go ahead and talk.”
“I mean, can we meet somewhere?”
“Why?”
“Because I need your help.”
“What kind of help?”
“I’m the one who’s been writing the letters.”
“I know that.”
“Then you know you’re the only one who can help me.”
I