The BOYS

Episode FORTY-THREE

So that was, well… most likely… that! He was a free man, now, and if he wasn’t exactly rich, or even prosperous, at least Walter had spending money in his pocket (once he’d cashed the Federal check at the title pawn place that charged only three dollars and sixty one cents) and, even though his days and nights were thoroughly screwed up and Elle’s were too – she was ragged and increasingly viperish with the demands of work and school. Now that he had the time and money – well, a little bit - he wanted to do something nice for her, take her out on a real date, the way real people used to do before this fuckin’ recession, the one that was looking more and more like a depression.

In fact, three of the places he’d take Missy and the kids to when he was still flush with Braxton swag had bit the dust… Venture, Kiril’s Russian Teahouse and the Olive Garden on the other side of the hills, (where the fires still blazed up from time to time)… Juby’s Steakhouse was still breathing, but on a respirator the last time he’d toodled by. Bored servers staring glumly out into the parking lot, pasting on feral smiles as he’d slowed the Lincoln to a crawl… spiders in the window. So, instead, he took Elle out to Parmenter’s, which used to be a hole-in-the-wall in downtown San Cris, but had moved up and out to a vacated Pier One by the Interstate – a multilevel maze of glass and bleached wood that, unfortunately, magnified by a factor if six, if not ten, the multi-level vista of empty tables and silence of absent merrymakers making merry with their families or co-workers.

Elle was in a squirrelly mood, and all those empty tables under white linen apparently reminded her of coffins or something, because she whined “I hope this isn’t one of those places that the Health Department put a notice on for selling bad peanuts, or something…”

“Hard to fault a place, seeing how as we’ve both scarfed down dozens of Good Dogs and worse from the Pound, and we’re still alive,” Walt scolded, but gently.

“And what’s that upside down triangle in the window – and that writing, is it Dutch? German?”

Parmenter’s was, in fact, green… they had a green menu with lots salads and free range entrees, and the servers wore green shirts; theirs was Nicholas… not just plain Nick… who explained that the upside down green triangle was some sort of award from the European community. Nicholas was a little younger than Walt, a fortyish straight American male with a deferential but weary expression that hinted at a previous, better career in banking or electrical engineering or psychology. But the guy was giving it his best – and that was another thing that Walter noticed, not only about Parmenter’s but the business world at large – what visible jobs that were out in front, in the public eye… no matter how menial… well, these jobs were more likely to be filled by adult, English-speaking Americans than they would’ve been a year or two ago. Americans who could do simple arithmetic and converse without tossing in “ya know?” or “Que?” every five seconds… scared Americans, scared of losing the minimum wage jobs that were their last rung on a ladder, below which was a deep and bottomless pit. Now that he was one of them, Walter Fales understood, and he appreciated the extra services… the window seat that Nicholas guided them to, the cold water, the linen napkins with Parmenter’s logo that the server unfolded and spread across the diners’ laps without a hint of impropriety. So Walter smiled as he ordered two of their Hump Night Specials… meat with rice and a green salad, and iced tea, too, since he was feeling about a thousand percent better and didn’t feel like putting Elle… or his new friend, Nicholas… through the ordeal of identity verification.

Munching on a breadstick from the green basket that had been set between him and Elle, he ventured…

“So… how’s it going with… you know… the school and all?”

“It’s alright,” Elle replied, glumly.

“Guess there’s some kinda future in… what was it you’re taking?”

“As if I haven’t told you a hundred times,” she snapped, but without adding an answer to his question.

Walter crammed the rest of the bread into his mouth… it was good, damn good… and washed it down with a long swallow of tingly ice-water. “Is there something you wanted to tell me?” he finally said.

She looked down onto the napkin on her lap, then up again. “Davy tried to commit suicide,” she finally head. “Of course Mr. C. wouldn’t tell anyone anything, but I heard it directly from Eunice, and she’s almost always right. Pills. They pumped out his stomach and took him down to this hospital in the city…”

“Well,” Walter nodded, “that’s a shame…”

“Now Barry’s all wound up, I think Mr. Z. read him the riot act and he thinks he should have done something to stop you from doing, you know, what you did? So he’s going to take charge personally of Davy, Mr. Z. will, and rehabilitate him, so he says.”

Walter winced. The prospect of being rehabilitated under Mr. C’s supervision sounded like a fate worse than death. “Probably just a legal gesture, covering his ass,” he ventured, confident that, even if the jerk did rehabilitate himself and come back, Walt himself would be long gone from the Dog Pound by then.” Even a brain-dead loser like Davy who can’t even manage to waste himself, well, he comes up with one of those TV attorneys who goes up against Hilton Omartian, well…” and he made a rude gesture as Nicholas arrived with their suppers.

“It was your fault,” Elle said, before digging into the meal and, lacking anything sensible in the way of a reply, Walt just nodded and dug in too. Parmenter’s meat with rice was gristly, and the sauce had rather too much black pepper for his taste, but hey… it wasn’t cold Mexi-Dogs, a couple of Chihuahuas past their expiration dates, and he wasn’t even up to making a ruckus - not like he’d done if he’d been kicking back at some casino buffet with Matt and Evan in the good old days, and that was when he remembered that he hadn’t hooked up with the gang in weeks. Hell – Evan was probably on his way to Baghdad, by now. With all the Muslims tiring of blowing themselves and the occasional American up so often, Iraq might be a sweet gig. Sweet, like Parmenter’s tea, or Elle’s…

“You look like you’re thinking,” his date interrupted.

“I am. Was.” He stopped in the act of raising fork to mouth, and rotated it once, as if spoon-feeding Scottie or one of the other boys when they were babies, years ago, except that he was the baby, now. Heh heh! “I used to have a lot more than I do now,” he said, “things, by which I mean, possessions… nice house, big flatscreen, all those toys…”

“And,” Elle shrugged.

“It’s like… first there was a mountain, then there was no mountain, then there was…”

“Huh?”

“Used to be mad with myself. Fixing a hole, see…” and Elle nodded, but tentatively, nibbling on a piece of green something that was like lettuce, but not, something costlier.

“Is that, like, German philosophy? Or Greek…”

“British? Sort of…the person who owned these things, I… well I… he… wasn’t a very good person. Not a criminal,” he emphasized, “I just did what everybody else does to get by. Even so, I lost everything I had, due to other people’s acting out against me, and I changed, but maybe now for the better, I’m starting to realize…”

“I know,” Elle said, lifting her own fork. “You were one of those nasty old people, those businessmen. Always trying to get into my pants or, what’s worse, acting like that in order to get along with all the other nasty old businessmen, getting people in trouble for nothing. Just because he can.” She put the fork in her mouth, without expression. “I saw what you did to Jason, how you got your job, almost. Barry is too full of himself to remember, but I saw…”

“I’m sorry,” was all that Walter could think to say…

“Forget it,” Elle said, wiping her mouth with Parmenter’s linen. “Jason was an asshole. Like Davy. So forget it, let’s start over… you look like you’ve been thinking,” she teased.

“I have been thinking,” Walter said.

“About?”

“I’ve been thinking about…” and Walter lifted his fork, as if what he was about to reveal was something important, something that would impress upon the schoolgirl the fact that he was not just a guy in a funny hat, selling hotdogs… that he was not, even, the vaguely shadowy businessman whose past life, as he’d inferred, had been an Elysium of platinum, no, titanium credit cards, hundred-dollar lunches, the mansion in its gated community… no, that Walter Kenneth Fales was and, in fact, had always been, a person of substance. A man of deep thoughts and luminous perceptions, an observer of the fallacies and follies of the times…

The fork wavered. Walter’s mind lay open to the cosmos, but all that registered was a distant, anachronistic pay telephone ringing in some corridor of Parmenter’s, midway between the restrooms and broom closet. There was a slice of meat on the fork…

“Meat,” Walter nodded and, when Elle frowned, he hastened to explicate… “meat… and the impecunity of perception.” He knew he hadn’t used the right word, but he hadn’t exactly known which word was right to use until he’d used it… so best just forge on. “You take your average hot dog and, well, Dog Pound dogs are nothing if not average…” and he made a little jest of rolling his eyes and pretending to look around in case Mr. C. or even Mr. Z. might be lurking up on the mezzanine. He waited, Elle finally chuckled.

“You figure your average hotdog fits in a bun, so it has to be long and thin and sort of round, and that’s what you get when you order hotdogs. Every day, in every way… here, in Los Angeles, Denver, New York, what the hell, even in Frankfurt, which is in Germany, you know, from whence the word frankfurter derives…”

“OK,” Elle said after a moment.

“There’s an old story,” Walt warmed to his explication, “that, back when Jack Kennedy went over there during the crisis, to West Berlin, that is… and there was the crowd, and the Wall so Kennedy said… and I don’t know if he actually knew German or one of his speechwriters just told him what to say, he said “ich ein Berliner”. Something like that. Which he would not have been able to do if he were in Frankfurt, of course, because he just would have sounded silly – or if he had been in Hamburg, for that matter. And that brings me to the point… the point of which is that we have our preconceived prejudices of what frankfurters are supposed to look like, and, by that I mean the food, not the Germans, nor the philosophers and, also, by the way… and keeping in mind that the red-light district of Hamburg was where the Beatles got their start, the hamburgers…”

He smiled.

“So?” Elle said.

“So who is to say that you couldn’t take a hotdog and make it into the shape of a hamburger, put it in a round bun instead of a long, thin one, smother it with ketchup and onions instead of mustard and sauerkraut? Or shape hamburger meat into a long, thin tube and put it in a hotdog bun. You see? It would be a novelty…”

“Wow!” Elle nodded. “That would be like… reversing the system… profound…”

“It would shake up the industry,” Walt agreed. “But do you expect to see hotdogs shaped like burgers or burgers like hotdogs at the Dog Pound in the near future…”

“Probably not,” Elle giggled.

“Of course not. Because the people who run the Dog Pound… Louie’s a nice guy even if Barry is a sack of shit… well, they just don’t comprehend. Neither does Mr. Z… he might, if he took the effort, but his energies are focused on Mars. Which may be profound too, in fact, it might be a meta-profundity, but not appropriate to the issue at hand,” Walter said, putting the fork and the meat and rice into his mouth, then waving a hand for the server’s attention. “Nor can you expect vision from McDonald’s or Taco Bell or pretty much any of the fast food places. Chicken places, either. If you want to go green, how about turkey burgers? Now I’ve heard that there is poultry in Dog Pound dogs, sometimes, but that’s just because they use whatever happens to be lying around, there’s no strategy involved. Green… why couldn’t we just dye the hotdogs green, that would get attention, they sell green beer on St. Patrick’s day…

“Check!” he called out.

A few moments later, Nicholas sauntered over to their table with a pitcher and the bill. “More tea?” he suggested. Walter declined, motioning downwards with a mock-pained expression that spoke of prostate problems and a surfeit of tea, a liquidity issue that couldn’t be resolved with any governmental bailout. Seeing him, Elle put her hand over her glass. The tab was sixteen dollars, thirty two cents and Walt gave Nicholas a twenty and smiled.

“Keep the change.”

“Thank you, sir” Nicholas replied, but before he left, Walter crooked a finger for his attention.

“Any jobs likely to open up here in the near future?” he asked.

Nicholas glanced around the place to impress on the couple the futility of the question. “We’re probably going to be gone by Christmas. Hours down, tips off… I wouldn’t wish this job on a dog. But what can you do? It’s the times…”

“That’s what it is,” Walter agreed, and he and Elle got up to go. He’d read in a paper someone else had left in an emptyh booth at the Pound that George Jones would be playing a Thursday night gig at one of the casinos on the res before cruising down to his weekend gigs in San Diego, but… even on a Thursday… the cheapest sets were thirty bucks… each… money that he didn’t have anymore. So their evening out was concluded – except for an encore back in the Joy Luck fuckin’ trailer heaven once Fran took off for her midnight to eight AM shift, a bottle of three-buck chuck and the classic country station... even a little dancing, drinking and hollering until some wet blanket trailer trash came around around two, or, maybe, three, banging on the side of the trailer with a something metallic, an aluminum baseball bat, maybe….

“I wanna make noise,” Walter shouted back, over the aluminum on aluminum tattoo. “I wanna sing!… whew… (WHAM!)… white, uh…”

“Knock it off,” Elle said. “That’s Desmond, and his tire iron. Iron is stronger than aluminum, so if you keep it up, he keeps it up… and if he keeps it up, he’ll punch a hold in the side of the trailer…”

“But it’s his trailer, I mean don’t they own these tin cans?”

“Desmond don’t care…”

“White… uh… white wine,” Walt wound down through the pummeled trailer wall, just hoping that Desmond would go and leave him and Elle alone. “White wine… and cheese, like at my wife’s social disease…”

“You sick, mon’…” Desmond swore through the aluminum. And then, holding each other tightly, Walt and Elle heard his footsteps retreating back into the shadows of Precious Joy Estate, trailed by trailerville’s lazy cats, and its chorus of howling mutts.

“I meant to say… social gathering?”

ä ä ä ä ä

So Walt and Elle copulated furiously… but noiselessly… and after a wonderful, dreamless sleep, he struggled back to wakefulness on Thursday morning, the day-before-Halloween morning which was supposed to mean something, but not in America. In Mexico? His head felt like a Mexican xeriscape out there, beyond the tin and glass and new dents that marked Chez Slater… a Mecca of rocks, cactus and scorpions.

“Well, God grants all of his damned creatures free will,” he thought, and even opened his mouth to say something to Elle, but it was dry as dust, a million years old… and his teenaged lover was gone, too. He was alone and naked under her cowboy comforter of cowskulls and tumbleweeds, and his prick was as hard and as large as any desert boulder. Of course most of that was his bladder, and so he rolled out of bed and fumbled through the miscegenated mound of clothing around and under the bed… his unwashed suit pants and jacket, at least, less skanky than his white, sell-‘em-more-Orange-County-debentures shirt. No underwear in sight but Elle’s… he’d have to go commando, “fire in the hole,” he groaned as he pulled on the reeking fabrics. Only now did he notice Elle’s alarm clock, it was ten thirty-nine, and he hoped that the laser of light delineating the rectangle of the aluminum shade meant it was daytime, and not some clever hoax, perpetrated by scientists.

He weighed, abandoned the notion to take a piss in Elle’s tiny closet and lurched… barefoot… out the door and into the tiny cubicle that contained a sink, toilet and shower that had apparently been designed with skinny supermodels in mind. And, after he’d done what his blacker commanded, he slapped some sinkwater… super-chlorinated, still foul… on his cheeks and followed the voices back to the kitchen where his lady love was eating Dark Knight flakes with about three drops of chlorinated tapwater and watching “Ellen” on the five-inch TV.

“You into that lesbian shit?” were the words that jumped… unbidden… from his mouth.

Elle crunched her batflakes, lifted another spoon halfway to her mouth. “Worked through all that back in middle school. Three-fers. Five-fers. All those holes to fill, those pills…”

CRUNCH!

“Just fixin’ a hole, where the rain won’t go…” Walt hummed through his tortured palate.

“What?”

“Just something from Paul McCartney’s old band. Isn’t there anything wet in this tin can?”

“Beer,” Elle said, turning up the volume as Ellen’s guest did something with shrimps, limes and slices of ginger on a studio griddle. “Or vodka…”

“Guess I’ll take beer,” he shuddered, opening the moist, sweating fridge and removing a generic beer, after noticing a pint carton of milk with something that swirled at the bottom when he picked it up, then put it down as probably having something to do with family relations. He pointed at the little television. “You ever think… your name and her name are almost the same?”

“Does that mean I could be on TV?” CRUNCH!

“No, but I… no, I didn’t mean, if you wanted to be, if you applied yourself. Hey, you’re still young, you might not have all the opportunities… privileges… that rich kids have, but you’ve got spunk…”

“Yeah,” she rolled her eyes, “I’m full of that!”

So Walt found a bowl in the sink and rinsed it, and carried it over to the kitchen table. He poured some Dark Knight cereal… discounted, at the dollar store, the latest Batman movie had bombed… poured some beer into it when Elle warned him not to wake up her mother, who’d arrived home from her graveyard shift at the vegetable garden just long enough before dawn not to notice the dents in the trailer…

“She has to wake-up everybody with her crap punk-rock music…” CRUNCH! “but we,” Elle sneered, “we have to tiptoe around, like mice, so Her Highness can get her beautyrest…”

“Who pays the rent on this thing?” Walter waved, savouring the sensation of failed, franchised cereal and cheap beer, finding it not so bad as he might’ve thought, a while back.

“Good point,” Elle answered without answering, and the watched the rest of “Ellen” and the beginning of “ while Elle explained her plans for the day… “Barry has been making up these weird shifts, and with school closed today, I have to go in at noon, noon to eight… but you can bet your ass he’ll send me home, soon as the rush hour homeward dinner rush winds down… six thirty, maybe seven. Just before Louie takes over… Louie would let me finish, but the Roach… he’s a mean bastard! Of course he says it’s the economy…”

“Just means the customers have to wait in line a little longer,” Walt calculated, between spoonfuls of batflakes, “actually, the economy helps places like the DP. The rich people, getting rich off all this crap… their fancy joints are doing OK… it’s the mid-level places where middle-class Americans like I used to be, they’re the places getting killed off, just like the middle class.

“Didn’t you used to be rich?” Elle challenged him, actually pointing her spoon at his face… “I mean, Alta-Vista? What Scottie said…”

“Scottie probably exaggerates,” Walt waved off the implications, then changed the subject. “So… no classes today?”

“Weird, isn’t it? All the community colleges canceling the Friday before Halloween… I think it’s a Wiccan holiday, they’ve very political, you know… or maybe it’s the Mexican day of the dead…”

“Hey, if…” and then Walter automatically course-corrected, “… if Fermeley and her sistahs can have King Day, and Louie gets Columbus Day, why not have a day off with pay holiday for the dead people?

“You know,” he added, raising his own spoon to emphasize the point, “there are more of them than there are of us!”

“Yeah,” Elle considered. “I wish Ma would’ve let me buy a pumpkin. It just doesn’t seem like Halloween without a pumpkin…”

“Elle, you may be living with your mother, you may be living off your mother for all I know… but you shouldn’t let her beat you down like this. If you want a pumpkin… I’ll go out and get one, I don’t got anything to do until my shift starts. Well, I do have to clean these fuckin’ clothes…”

“Yeah, I wasn’t gonna mention, but…”

“This place have washing machines?”

“As if!” Elle grimaced. “There’s a Laundromat on 249^th, but it’s pricey… a better one on 245^th…”

“And, since I’ve got a car…”

“Unless Desmond went after it with his tire iron…”

“Don’t hex me. I gotta come in at five, so that takes care of my day… wash my clothes, buy a pumpkin and carve it…”

“You’re sweet,” Elle smiled.

“Oh, you better believe that! Like candy corn… uh… you have stuff for the little monsters on Monday night?”

CRUNCH! Through a mouthful of dry Dark Knight, Elle said “Ma was talking about getting a bunch of those teeny-tiny bottles of vodka. They’re only fifty-nine cents at the Korean market, six bucks a dozen. Of course I think she was being facetious, but with Mom… well, I can never tell…”

“Just in case, I’ll pick up a few packs of Fun Bars at the Dollar Store… if the kids don’t come, then we can eat ‘em…”

“Better than cold hotdogs,” Elle agreed.

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