Michael Chabon (6 page)

“Hey, Gil,” I said. “Well! It sounds as though someone is enjoying himself in the rear office.” Following Arthur’s example, I’d begun to affect an overgrammatical, precious manner toward people like Gil Frick, to keep them, as I imagined Arthur saw it, from wanting to talk to me.

“Yeah, someone,” he said. I noticed he sported a small set of facial bruises, and a fresh glum chunk of electrician’s tape on his eyeglasses.

“Were you involved in some kind of scuffle or fracas, Gil?”

“No,” he said, coloring.

I didn’t press it. Crossing the gum-blackened white tile floor from the front of the shop to the bins chock-full of abysmal children’s books (this week:
Tuffy the Egg
and
A Zillion and One Really Funny Jokes to Tell and Color)
by the back room, I decided that the current festivities must be the result either of liquor, despite the early hour, or, more likely, of five or six dozen doughnuts, both of which seeds of brute merriment were sometimes introduced, with pathetically good results, into the usually sere Boardwalk moonscape.

Actually, there were both whiskey and doughnuts, but the laughter was due not to these but to Ed Lavella, three hundred pounds, and his brother Joey, two hundred and seventy-nine pounds, who had on dresses, high heels, and makeup, and in their costumes were demonstrating cardiopulmonary resuscitation.

“Bechstein!” they shouted as I entered the room. “How about a date, you big fag?”

I winced inwardly, though Ed and Joey always called me this; for the first time I took it half-seriously, as though my friendship with Arthur made me gay by association. Of course, I reminded myself, they didn’t mean homosexual, exactly; what they meant was: you thin, weak kid whom we could completely crush under our tremendous butts or dismember with very little exertion. I laughed.

“Ha ha,” I said. “What is this?
Some Like It Fat?”

“Ha ha,” said everyone in the room. These included, in addition to the pair of giant future paramedics: three chainsmoking, bulimic young women who occupied various higher levels in the byzantine Boardwalk management hierarchy; Rodney, a tall, quiet black man who had gone to jail for evading the Vietnam draft, and who was now in the process of converting to Catholicism, with the eventual aspiration of becoming a Trappist monk, “like Thomas Merton,” who, as Rodney often told me, died in a terrible and ridiculous fashion; and Calvin, another budding paramedic, a fan of knives and small firearms, and Gil Frick’s only friend at work—one friend more than I had myself. These people sold books in the shadow of the University of Pittsburgh.

“Skit Night at the station tonight,” said Ed, lurching to his feet. Joey remained flat on his back, his upper body a mess of décolletage, the tangled gray straps of his bra, and wadded Kleenex. “Just trying out the costumes on you’ns.”

“Great costumes, fellas,” I said. “Terrifying. Um—it’s not ten yet, is it? I have time? Excuse me. I have to make a phone call.”

I walked back out into the store, hands shaking, and up to the telephone at the front.

The phone was busy at the Bellwethers’. I tried to determine whether this was fear I felt, or anxiety. What, I asked myself, what is the big deal? They were still laughing in the back room; two customers stood nearly on the threshold, probably eyeing the doughnuts. Who was he talking to? What would I say if he answered?

Despite the several girls I had loved and made love to since my last year of high school, my childhood weakness and sexual uncertainty, all my suffering as a “fag” under the insults and heavy forearms of stronger boys, and what amounted to my infatuation with Arthur had made me an easy victim to this unintentional surprise attack by the two cross-dressed fatsos. I asked myself, in that matter-of-fact, soldierly way one asks oneself this sort of question, standing with the still-chirruping telephone in my hand, if I felt like having sex with Arthur.

“Art!” shouted Valerie, the smartest, most important, and most alarmingly thin of the women at Boardwalk. “You were just about to hang up!” She looked at me sternly; Valerie considered sternness to be the most effective managerial technique, and could deploy a tremendous battery of stern expressions, made even more effective by her long, heavy eyebrows and Afghan hound’s face.

“Why, yes, Valerie, I was. Gee!” I said, quickly hanging up. “How’d you know?”

“Home Improvement,” said Valeri, “now. It looks like they’ve been playing jai alai in it.”

“Right.” I grabbed a feather duster from Gil and headed back to the Home Improvement section, to make order and glittering shelves; to push around the dust until my head was thoroughly ringed with little clouds of motes and murk.

All day, as every day, I wove past customers with my arms full of books, repeating the words “Excuse me” so many times without getting a response that I began to feel genuinely inexcusable. Like the mounting evidence of a subtly evil betrayal of daily life (dead birds and telephones, the roisterous sheriff’s sudden sobriety, the neighborhood children chanting in mesmeric circles in the desert schoolyard) in a movie about invasion from outer space, it seemed that every ten minutes a new reminder of homosexuality intruded into the usually eventless world of Boardwalk Books—a handsome couple of men, a copy of
Our Lady of the Flowers
that I’d never noticed before, a worn naked-man magazine that fell like a severed limb from inside a book on wiring and fuses. It all culminated with a little boy who came and stood beside me.

“Um, mister?” he said.

“May I help you?”

“Yeah,” he said. “I’m looking for a book about makeup.”

“Makeup?” I said. “As in, say, cosmetics? Health and Beauty books? You mean
makeup?”

“No way!” he nearly screamed, stopping the assault, saving the earth at the last moment from complete alien domination. That wasn’t what he meant at all. He meant werewolf makeup and exploding-forehead makeup. I could have fallen to my knees in thanks.

I wasn’t, I insist, stupid enough to imagine that the mere fact that I had a gay friend—though I’d never, to my knowledge, had one before—meant that I was myself, somehow, a homosexual. I was, however, insecure (and stupid) enough to imagine that the only reason Arthur had befriended me was to seduce me, that he found nothing in me to admire, as I found in his manners, his intelligence, his clothing, his ease with others; in short, that he didn’t really like me. If any of the attempts I made that day to telephone Arthur had succeeded, I would have asked him nothing. I would only have listened to the way in which he spoke to me, listened for accents of friendship: the banality, relaxation, and lack of style that characterize a conversation between two friends.

After their morning fun, the day, for the others, dissolved into utter antihilarity and six or seven reputedly atrocious late-afternoon hangovers. I was watching the clock slowly fold up my last ten minutes like the pleats of a fan, when an enormous BMW motorcycle, 1500cc, jumped the curb outside the store and made the plate glass shake. The rider, wearing black leather chaps, black jacket, and an impenetrable black visor, dismounted without cutting the engine. The bike was so loud that Valerie and Ed and Joey came running up from the back, Valerie pressing at the headache in her temples.

He wasn’t big, the biker, not tall at any rate, but he had a gut, and his boots thudded as he tore open the front door. Why couldn’t you have waited eight and a half minutes? I thought. Usually the bikers went right over to the magazines, to
Easyriders,
and giggled at the Biker Chick of the Month for a while in the air-conditioning before stealing
Hustler
and swaggering out;
usually
they turned off their motorcycles and left their helmets hung over the sissy bar, or whatever, and did, not loom at the front counter like symbols of Twentieth-Century Leather Death. I looked at Valerie, who was trying to prepare a stern look, and then turned to face the biker, who had pushed up his face shield. He wore glasses, Clark Kents.

“May I help you?” I said.

“Yes,” said the biker, but he just stood and examined my face without speaking. His gaze drifted up to my hair, which seemed to check with something in his mind, and then back.

“You forgot to turn off your motorcycle, mister,” I said.

“Goodness me,” he said.

“May I help you?”

“I’m looking for
Son of a Gangster
, by Art Bechstein,” he said. He smiled, big teeth.

For a moment my mind was perfectly blank; all mental activity ceased. Then I felt afraid, and in my bewilderment I opened the cash register, then closed it. I looked at the clock and was unable to interpret its message. And yet I was not at all
surprised
by the arrival of the Fell Biker. It was as though I’d finally been caught at a crime I had long been committing, and I thought: So.

I was being called to account for my father’s sins; old scores were being settled. I decided to do whatever he said. I didn’t see a gun, but I didn’t have time to give the setup much careful consideration. I simply surrendered.

“Just kidnap me, okay?” I said. “It’ll work. I know how my father thinks.”

“Let’s go,” he said. He seemed reasonable. He smiled again. His front tooth was chipped.

“What is this, Art?” said Valerie.

“It’s Gangland,” said the biker.

“I might need a few days off,” I said.

He pulled me from the register stand and dragged me out to the sidewalk. I looked back into the store and saw Valerie going to the telephone. Ed and Joey lumbered out behind us and hesitated for a moment.

“It’s okay,” I said. “Don’t make trouble. Punch my card for me.”

“Who is that guy?” said Joey. He looked more interested than ready to roll.

“I’m Death,” said the biker.

“Come on, man,” I said. “Let’s go. I can walk.”

“I can walk,” he said in a squeaky voice.

Climbing onto the gigantic black saddle, I began to tremble, and clutched the hot bar behind me. I imagined being taken to some Bloomfield garage and thrown up against the grimy wall and shot. They would have to drag the Monongahela to find my riddled corpse. My father would get on the phone and plead with his bosses for an eye for an eye. My cousin Debbie would play the guitar and sing “Blackbird” or “Moonshadow” at my funeral.

We pulled out onto Forbes Avenue, and when we finally hit a red light he reached his right hand around behind him and held it out for me to shake. I shook.

“Art Bechstein,” said my potential executioner, “how the hell are you?” He laughed, the light turned green, we headed toward Highland Park, he didn’t stop laughing: He actually went “Heehee.”

“Cleveland,” I shouted.

A
RTHUR HAD TOLD ME
the story of Happy, the most beautiful dog in the world, and of her ruin by Mrs. Bellwether, who was insane.

One day several years ago, Happy had appeared at Jane’s feet, collarless, playful; a large puppy, perhaps ten or eleven months old, almost completely white, housebroken, well-behaved, and breathtakingly lovely. The family made no effort to discover who had lovingly trained then lost her, and adopted her immediately into its tortured bosom, giving her her tragic and idiotic name. Wrapped in her extravagant fur, with her long, noble face and elegant walk, Happy was, in every way, the Anna Karenina of dogs, even expressing, Jane claimed, a distinct mixture of fear of and fascination with the trains they would have to stop for in the course of the marathon walks they took together. When Jane took Happy out, people slowed their cars to watch the dog’s perfect gait, her leash superfluous, slack, vulgar.

Jane loved the dog and had cared for her well, letting her take the firm white remainders of strawberries from between Jane’s own lips, unleashing her for three-hour chases across the Highland Park cemetery (since, she said, dogs love graveyards), and painting pink the collie’s black toenails; unfortunately, however, Happy spent most of her days with Jane’s mother, so, in time, the dog developed both colitis and a skittish fear of women, even of the sound of their footsteps, and her coat began to turn the tan that now, years later, had become a fragile, shifting brown.

Thus the dog became a genuine Bellwether, visiting Dr. Link, the veterinarian, as often as migrainous Mrs. Bellwether visited Dr. Arbutus, her internist; as eczematous Dr. (of Philosophy) Bellwether consulted Dr. Niyogi, his dermatologist; as imprisoned, fearful Jane went to weep before Dr. Feld, her psychotherapist. Though it may seem a silly conceit to view Happy’s consignment to a doctor’s care as an inevitable result of her adoption into the Bellwether family, it may seem less so when one learns that Jane one day descended into the basement to rummage among her father’s abandoned five irons and woods, and found her mother administering blows to Happy’s unbearably beautiful head with a ball-peen hammer, because the dog had managed to void her agonized bowels onto the basement floor.

Well, unhappy families may each be unhappy after their own fashion, but their houses are always alike, at least in my experience. The Bellwethers lived in the only ordinary-looking house in a wooded, wealthy section of Highland Park that was otherwise filled with period pieces, stylistic excess, and eccentric ornamentation. Peaked roof, red brick with white siding, white “lace” curtains blowing out through the open windows of the kitchen, azalea bushes, concrete driveway, a French horn of garden hose in the front yard. Nothing I’d heard about the Bellwethers prepared me for the discovery that the house in which Jane had grown up looked exactly like my grandparents’. Cleveland parked the bike in the street, and as I swung off the seat and did a couple of stiff deep-knee bends, I sequentially settled on each of the neighboring houses as being the probable residence of the crazy Bellwethers, before Cleveland, with some amusement, grabbed me by the elbow again, as though we were still playing Crime, and tugged me onto the slate path of stepping-stones that made its typical way to the Bellwethers’ front door.

“It’s this one; this is the nice normal house where Arthur is living for the Bellwethers while they’re ‘on holiday.’ ”