Lovesick (6 page)

I loosen the lid with my bare hands; fifty years of coagulated gook comes undone.

“Nice job, small fry,” he says.

“Small fry” is Sid’s nod to my hero, Linden Fry, the inventor of the Bellowing Big Mouth Bass. At the turn of the twenty-first century, it wasn’t flying cars or nanotechnology that captivated the country’s fascination, but a reanimated trophy fish that could sing and dance the “La Bamba.” The Patent Office has this rule about inventions being “useful,” and Linden Fry’s bellowing bass suggested the bar is pretty low, but the potential rewards, infinite.

One of Fry’s millions of singing trophy fish graces the wall of the pharmacy. Belinda started calling him “Corey”—as in the singer Corey Hart-the-one-hit-wonder—after she heard the big mouth bass belt out “I Wear My Sunglasses at Night.” Gregory
happens to be pretty fond of that fish. That’s because Lydia gave it to him for Christmas years ago after seeing it on
The Tonight Show.
When Lydia was alive and the two of them were healthy enough, Paige says her parents loved to fish together—neighboring Boone offers some decent fly-fishing. If Gregory’s in the right mood, nothing makes him happier than seeing Corey swing his head forward, wag his tail, and perform Johnny Cash’s “I Walk the Line.”

“There it is,” Sid whispers, squinting into the dusty guts of the vacuum like he’s spotted pirate booty. “Electric current powers
that fan
right there and the blades force air and debris toward the exhaust port into the vacuum bag.”

“Uh-huh,” I say, pretending to understand.

“We need to change the direction of the fan so it blows the air
out
the
intake
pipe,” he explains.

“So we’re reversing the polarity,” I conclude.

“Come again?”

“Reversing the polarity: making something negative positive,” I explain.

Sid impatiently waits for me to recant.

“Yeah, I’d be making that up.”

“Just unscrew that fan unit and flip it 180 degrees. We need to lower the level of air pressure outside the fan,” Sid says.

I’m more confused than ever and he knows it.

“We need the fan to
blow
, not
suck,”
he says simply enough.

Sid goes inside the garage to find an extension cord. Meanwhile I jury-rig the vacuum to his specifications by screwing in the fan the other way around and reattaching the swivel top. With one heave-ho, I lift and mount it on top of my car. As I duct tape the metal pod to the center of the car roof, I ignore the little voice inside my head telling me this is a terrible mistake. Then I run the flex hose along the roof, and I duct tape the upholstery nozzle so it hovers just above the windshield.

Inside the garage a rack of hubcaps crashes to the floor.

“Oopsy-daisy,” Sid chuckles as the last disk takes forever to settle on the concrete floor.

I ask if him if he’s okay; he’s fine.

“Small fry, I’m thinking this one’s PMP-worthy,” Sid yells from inside the garage.

“Exactamundo,” I scream back.

Gone are the days when an inventor needs tens of thousands of dollars and a deep familiarity with arcane law to patent an idea. A few years back the Patent Office came up with an invention of its own: the Provisional Patent, or as Sid and I call it, the “Poor Man’s Patent” or “PMP” Nowadays, if you’ve got an idea, all you need is three hours to fill out a simple three-page application plus about three hundred bucks for the filing fee. A PMP buys you exactly one year to experiment with the idea, make and market it, and decide whether it’s worth patenting for real. The best part about a PMP is it entitles you to start using two of the most powerful words in the English language: “Patent Pending.”

I remember our first PMP fondly. It was September. Sid designed a ladder stabilized on three sides like a camera tripod. Then in November it was my dog umbrella. In March: side-access Velcro sneakers. Both of our names appear on every application; it’s just a matter of which inventor is the headliner. Neither of us is made of money, so nothing gets filed unless we’re in total agreement. For example, I couldn’t convince Sid to PMP “Urine Bed.”
Who needs the bathroom in the middle of the night?
I pitched him.
When you’re in bed … “Urine Bed.”
Sid stopped me right there. We now have a standing rule: all bladder-control devices are off-limits.

I tear off a piece of duct tape with my teeth. Just then the Vomit Mobile pulls into Gregory’s driveway across the street. This clown car has been out of the shop for all of seventeen hours. The driver’s side door slowly swings open and a bleary-eyed beaut climbs out. She’s just finished a killer shift—4:00
A.M.
to 12:00
P.M.
Tack on the forty-five-minute commute each way plus a quick workout and Paige is toast by 2:00
P.M.
Ready to slink back into bed, Paige slowly throws a gym bag over one shoulder and a garment bag over the other.

“Yoo-hoo!” I scream. “Come here!”

With her back to me she weighs her options:
Maybe I can pretend
I didn’t hear him.
I yell over to her again. Paige does an about-face and trudges across the street like a pack mule. Sid appears from the garage dragging one end of an infinitely long, thick yellow extension cord. I plant a kiss on her cheek.

“Why aren’t you at work?” she asks, doing her best not to sound too judgmental.

“Yeah, I decided to take the day off. Stanley from Walgreens filled in.”

Stanley and I dropped out of pharmacy school a week apart. We’re both about three hundred practitioner hours away from becoming fully certified pharmacy technicians.

“Sid and I really need to nail down this invention, and today worked best for Sid, isn’t that right?” I prod him.

He doesn’t react.

“Sid’s retired,” she reminds me. “Every day works best for him.”

“You’d be surprised how busy retirement gets,” he chimes in, finally.

“So what do you think?” I ask her, giving the device strapped to the roof of my car an exaggerated “ta-dah.”

“My dad could
really
use your help at the pharmacy, Andy,” Paige replies. “And Stanley is …”

“Stinky?” I suggest.

Stanley’s not big on showers.

“Stanley makes him uncomfortable,” she says. “Let’s leave it at that.”

Stanley also has this habit of breaking into a human beatbox machine every time he counts out pills.

“He’s fine,” I assure her. “Five bucks says your dad doesn’t even notice he’s not me.”

“You’re wrong,” she insists. “He
needs
you, Andy. You
get
him. Stanley doesn’t. Daddy likes having you around.”

Sid nonverbally seconds that.

Maybe there was a time when Gregory liked having me around, but not anymore. That ended the moment he learned I was dating his daughter. No one has ever been good enough for Paige. In
French class, Paige used to regale me with stories about how much her father detested the guys she dated. I think that’s part of the reason it took me years before I asked her on that second date. Baseball players, budding actors, and future business leaders of America, to Gregory, they were losers, lemons, and future failures. Even that All-American good-looks-Porsche-driving-girlfriend-stealing Tyler Rich didn’t cut it.

“What?” Paige asks me.

“What?” I ask her.

“What?” Sid asks us.

“You’re looking at me funny,” she says.

“I’m thinking. This is my thinking face,” I explain.

“Is it my sweats?” Paige is wearing a velour powder blue running suit. “If you hate them, just say so. I promise I won’t be mad,” she swears.

This is the oldest trick in the book and I’m not falling for it.

“And this is not a trick,” she assures me. “So you won’t be falling for anything.”

Saying that it’s not a trick is also part of the trick.

Sid shakes his head begging me not to do it.

“I really wasn’t thinking about them; I was thinking about something else and they happen to be in the space where I was thinking. But if you’re asking me my opinion, then it’s a no, they’re not my
favorite.”

I hate them. I was just thinking that I hate them.

Sid flips his head back and starts whispering
why
to the sky.

“But they’re just workout clothes and they’re so J-Lo!”

No one speaks.

“Fine. How much?” she asks.

“Ten dollars,” I offer quickly.

Sid raises an eyebrow.

“Ten? Are you disturbed? These cost me thirty. Twenty,” she counters.

“Fifteen,” I say, fishing the bills from my pocket.

While Paige deliberates over my offer, I dangle a Hamilton with one hand and a Lincoln with the other.

Once in a while I buy Paige’s clothes. Not to wear them but to burn them. Paige has a standing offer to do the same with mine but, like our points system, has yet to exercise the option. There are rules, of course. Paige has to initiate the ritual and I have to be certain that she’s “in the mood.” Previous purchases have included short shorts, sandals, and last month, a lovely pink mini-T with diamond sequins. I used it as a car rag and scratched my hood. Karma, she insists.

Paige snaps up the two bills.

“Fine,” she says flatly, stuffing the cash into her gym bag.

“Good!” I spit back.

We hate to argue, but for some peculiar reason we love to pretend.

“Fine!”

Sid is completely perplexed.

“Thanks,” I tell her. “You get points.”

“I do?” she says, blushing.

Paige offers to change out of my new clothes here, but I tell her it can wait.

“We’ll destroy them Thursday,” I suggest.

Paige turns to leave and I grab her around the waist with both hands.

“Stay!
We need you.
It’ll take three minutes. All you have to do is sit here. Promise,” I say, theatrically holding open the driver’s-side door for her.

Paige indulges me, and I squat down beside her.

“What is this contraption?” she asks, rubbing her eyes.

Contraption
sounds like
harebrained scheme
, but I let it slide.

“This is Stage One of Operation Jet Stream,” I tell her. “You’ll need to use your imagination a little. On the roof above you is a rudimentary prototype of our newest brainchild—the bladeless windshield wiper.”

“I don’t get it,” Paige says.

She’s uttered the four most devastating words to an inventor’s ears.

“It’s no longer a vacuum cleaner,” I explain quickly. “We’ve
reversed the polar … We’ve altered the direction of the fan. Here’s what will happen: You’ll turn on the car. Then Sid will turn on the hose and spray water onto the windshield, simulating rain.”

Sid gives Paige a shy smile and waves hello. He’s in khaki shorts, a white V-neck T-shirt, his homburg hat, black dress socks, and black leather sandals. Paige waves hello back. Eyeballing the height he’s holding his hose, I tell him to lower the nozzle a couple of inches; that’s all I need, some blind guy shooting water directly into an electrical appliance. Sid complies.

“After the water starts flowing, I’ll turn on the-appliance-formerly-known-as-a-vacuum and tiny jet streams of air will shoot out of this upholstery nozzle, in turn pushing the water off the windshield. What I’m looking for from you is a sense of whether the air jets properly disperse the simulated rain. This sort of trial run is what’s known in my profession as ‘reducing the invention to practice.’”

“Mm-hmm,” she says with an abundance of skepticism.

“Our system could make the conventional windshield wiper obsolete!” I scream, realizing I need to take my enthusiasm down a notch. “All I’m saying is this could be big. We really may be on to something.”

Keep using possessive plural pronouns like “we,” “us,” and “our,”
I remind myself.
Make sure Paige feels a sense of ownership.

I reach across her, key the ignition, kiss her on the mouth, and then scream to Sid, “Initiate the water!”

Sid loosens the nozzle on the hose and adjusts the spray stream so it hits the windshield just below the vacuum upholstery nozzle.

I shut the car door and steady the black flex hose with my elbow.

“Behold, the first bladeless windshield wipers!” I yell.

Then I flip the switch on the vacuum.

The vacuum motor slowly revs after being inert for so many years and I instantly smell smoke. The machine is clearing its throat. The vacuum coughs three times and out floats black gunk
from 1952. My gag reflex kicks in.
Do not vomit.
As I reach over to turn off the motor, it suddenly finds a comfortable place in the twenty-first century and begins purring.

With things under control, I cautiously lean over to see whether air is blowing out of the vacuum and onto the windshield. Paige catches my attention and begins frantically waving her pointer finger back and forth across her neck. The “kill signal”—a familiar hand gesture to the seasoned television broadcaster. But does her pantomime refer to the vacuum or me?

Two things happen very quickly: I hear the sound of metal crushing metal and then everything goes black.

I’m on the ground. In a blind stupor, I hear the sound of duct tape coming undone; then the sound of what can only be a heavy metal vacuum cleaner tumbling off the roof of a car. The Eureka Attach-O-Matic crashes down and in its wake takes out my passenger-side mirror and my left ankle.
Am I wetting myself?
No, Sid hasn’t let go of the hose and he’s kneeling over me fumbling to find the off switch on the vacuum cleaner. Finding and flipping it, the contraption slowly winds down.

“What the—?” I say standing up, wiping hairballs and black dust from my eyes, nose, mouth, and ears. I’m a human ashtray.

“We should have emptied the vacuum bag before starting,” Sid concludes contemplatively. “It took a few seconds, but I believe the entire contents inside the vacuum bag hit you in the face.”

I spit. I cough. I pick mystery crud from my tongue.

Paige gets out of the car.

“It was terrifying and thrilling all at once,” Paige says, wiping tears of laughter from her eyes. “Sweetie, are you okay?”