Serenading Stanley (11 page)

With that, Ramon twirled like a ballerina, sloshing scotch halfway across the room, and hustled back into the apartment heading for the kitchen. There he announced grandly to his guest, “It’s the fruit of your looms, dear. Come to tame those cowlicks.”

“No, I’m not!” Stanley bellowed.

He cautiously poked his head through Ramon’s kitchen door and saw his mother sitting at Ramon’s kitchen table with a glass of scotch in front of her. Well, it wasn’t really a glass. It was more like a quart jar. She wore a hairdresser’s cape draped across her shoulders. The cape was so big it covered her all the way down to her toes.

Ramon was looking rather proud of himself. “I discovered your mom out on the landing gasping like a goldfish that had flopped out of its bowl. One thing led to another, and now we’re doing a makeover. It’s my very first!”

No kidding,
Stanley thought.

His mother’s little head, which was poking out the top of the cape like a mushroom, appeared smaller than usual. Then Stanley realized why. Her lush auburn locks, which usually hung down to her shoulders rather prettily, were now lying on the floor in tangled clumps. Ramon had sheared her like a sheep.

The kitchen was so filled with smoke, it looked like a foggy London street corner. Stanley wouldn’t have been surprised to see Jack the Ripper come looming out of the haze in a top hat and cape.

“Holy shit” was all he could think to say as he stared at his mother’s teeny tiny head.

His mother’s eyes were at half-mast, and she had an insipid grin on her face. “My baby boy!” she gushed, spotting him for the first time.

Stanley recoiled. His mother
never
gushed. She never grinned either. And she certainly never called him her baby boy.

He whirled on Ramon. “What have you done to my mother? You’ve
ruined
her!”

Mrs. Sternbaum took a dainty sip from her Mason jar, pinkie up, like an effeminate hillbilly with a bottle of moonshine. Stanley prayed to God that Mason jar of scotch hadn’t started out full, because now it was just about empty.

His mother carefully plunked the jar back down on the table and patted the side of her head, a la Mae West.

“What?” she said. “You don’t like it? Ramon says I should go pink.”

“Punk,” Ramon corrected.

“Oh, yeah. Punk.” And then she spotted the melon under Stanley’s arm. “Nice watermelon.”

To his utter surprise, Stanley watched as his mother pulled a hand mirror as big as a car door from underneath the billowing cape she was trapped under and held it to her face, studying her own reflection. She turned this way and that, considering her new look. Stanley couldn’t believe it, but she actually seemed pleased with the transformation.

That must be some excellent scotch,
Stanley thought.

Ramon was back at work by this time, standing behind his mother, eyeing her first this way then that way, and once he decided what he wanted to do, he dipped his fingers in a jar of hair product he mysteriously hauled out of his cape pocket like a magician pulling a rabbit from his sleeve. He scooped up a fistful of goo and started spiking his mother’s hair, oh so carefully, as if each tiny spike was a work of art unto itself.

All Stanley could think to say was “Different.”

“Oh, thank you!” His mother squealed.

This was a day of firsts all around. Stanley had never heard his mother squeal,
either.

“Isn’t this fun?” Ramon said, plucking the woman’s hair into so many stiff little spikes she began to resemble a hedgehog. Ramon’s eyes were streaming tears because his head was engulfed by the smoke drifting up from the cigarette that dangled from Stanley’s mother’s lips. Stanley prayed to God she wouldn’t drop the cigarette in the Mason jar filled with scotch, or the ensuing inferno would annihilate them all.

She snatched up the hand mirror again and watched every move Ramon made. When he finished with a nelly little flurry of limp wrists and flapping fingers, she squealed again.

“I love it! Oh, Ramon, you’re going to be a wonderful hairdresser! I’m not the same woman!”

“You’re not a woman at all,” Stanley groused. “You’re Sputnik.”

“Oh, hush, Stanley.” His mother tipped up the Mason jar and poured a couple more ounces of Scotch down her throat. “If you can’t say something nice, don’t say anything at all.”

Now it was Ramon’s turn to squeal. He jumped up and down like a cheerleader. “Oh oh oh! Thumper said that! In Bambi! I
loved
that movie! Well, except when they shot poor Bambi’s mother. That was sad.”

“Sad.” Mrs. Sternbaum giggled.
Funny,
Stanley thought,
she doesn’t
look
sad
.
She looks like a Chia Pet.

Still smiling with her mouth, his mother somehow managed to glare angrily with her eyes at the very same time. She looked totally schizophrenic, like two snapshots of the same head registering two different emotions and glued together to make one confusing countenance. “If you don’t like my hair, Stanley, then take your watermelon and leave. Ramon and I are having fun. Don’t spoil it. You always spoil everything.”

Stanley blinked. “Do I?”

But his mother was lost in the hand mirror again, checking out her new look.

Situating the watermelon more comfortably under his arm, Stanley wheeled and headed for the door.
Do I really spoil everything?
he asked himself.

Before he could think of an answer to that question, he heard his mother say, “I want my hair to be the same color as yours, Ramon. Hot pink. And pour me a little more scotch, Sugar Buns.”

Ramon was ecstatic. “Oh, goody! My first color job! Here take the bottle! Let’s see now—oh, hey! I’ve got green hair color too. Are you sure you wouldn’t rather be green? Or stripes! We could do stripes!”

Stanley felt a horrible sense of impending doom creep into his bones. He prayed to God he wouldn’t be around when his mother sobered up and found out she’d been transformed into a spiky green hedgehog with a pink racing stripe down the top of her head.

He closed Ramon’s door behind him to seal himself off from the upcoming travesty and headed for the stairs.

Little did he know his life was about to change dramatically.

S
TANLEY
’
S
life change came in the guise of a bag of brownies hanging on his doorknob. Apparently Sylvia was branching out, trying her hand at something other than Toll House cookies. Wow! This was great. He forgot about his mother immediately in the happy realization that now he wouldn’t have to cook dinner.

He ate a brownie while wiggling out of his backpack and dumping his watermelon on the dining room table. He ate another brownie while he unpacked his two bags of groceries. Since it was just getting dark, Stanley went around turning on lights in the apartment while he ate a third.

The brownies were really delicious. It was a funny thing, though. The more brownies he ate, the hungrier he became.

He plucked one more brownie from the bag and let it melt in his mouth while he stripped off his clothes and stepped into the shower to wash away the day’s grime. While he was in there, he found himself thinking of Roger Jane. And they weren’t just
casual
thoughts, either. They were
amorous
thoughts.
Really
amorous thoughts.

So amorous, in fact, Stanley looked down to find a boner staring up at him. It was only his own, of course, but still… there it was! And it was a substantial boner too. He was tempted to lather that baby up and take it for a spin, but he fought the urge. Given half the opportunity, there were a few
other
things he’d like to do with that boner if the opportunity presented itself. And who’s to say Stanley couldn’t make it happen? All it would take would be a little bit of nerve. And suddenly Stanley seemed to be
teeming
with nerve
.

After all, Roger Jane was directly below him at this very moment. Maybe the man was down there right now, standing in his own shower, contemplating his own boner, just like Stanley. And boy, wasn’t
that
a hot possibility.

Then Stanley thought,
Good Lord, am I really thinking these thoughts? What’s gotten into me?

Then he thought,
Have another brownie.

So Stanley and his boner hopped out of the shower. Still dripping wet and rock hard, he stood naked in the kitchen and ate
two
more brownies.

The next thing he knew, he was giggling.
Damn,
he thought.
Those are some happy-ass, giggle-inducing brownies.

He looked in the bag to see how many were left. That’s when he saw the note.

Oh, dear,
he thought, in another spurt of giggling.
Maybe I should have looked in here earlier.

“Enjoy the brownies,” the note said. “I’m trying out a secret ingredient. Your neighbor.”

Well, wasn’t she sweet! Stanley stood there, still naked and chewing, and began folding the note this way and that. He worked diligently with the tip of his tongue sticking out, and when he was finished folding, and refolding, and folding all over again, he had a perfect paper airplane. He then strode to the living room window with his hard-on bobbing around in front of him and launched that fucker into space. The airplane, not the hard-on. He watched it soar and dip and swoop and finally slide to a perfect three-point landing on the sidewalk half a block away. Wow! That was cool!

He was so excited by his test flight, he ate another brownie. Then he burped. Then he giggled again. Still standing naked in the kitchen, he gave his boner a couple of pumps just to really make it stand up proud. Then he spotted the watermelon.

Hmm.

Spinning on his heel, Stanley headed back to the bathroom, toweled off, brushed his teeth, ran his fingers through his hair in the hopes it would make him look a little less insane, and threw on a pair of shorts and a T-shirt.

Barefoot and humming a little tune, with the watermelon once again tucked snugly under his arm and his hard-on in remission, thank God, he headed out the front door, giddy as a schoolgirl. Sorry. School
boy.

Being giddy felt really strange. Stanley was almost never giddy. Maybe he was having a chocolate rush. Or maybe all those years of higher education had finally caught up with him and he really was insane all of a sudden. Wouldn’t that piss his mother off. Sort of like buying stock in a factory just before it blows the fuck up.

Well now
that
thought was a little surprising. Stanley almost never cursed inside his head. Or
out
of it for that matter.

Oh, well. By the time he’d banged three times on Roger Jane’s door, he’d forgotten all about what was going on inside his head. Just before the door opened in front of him, Stanley
did
have the presence of mind to glance down to make sure his hard-on was still on hiatus. He had just enough time to see it was, and also to be properly astounded that he wasn’t nervous at all, before he was suddenly staring into Roger Jane’s incredibly green eyes.

“Hi,” Stanley said.

“Hi back,” Roger answered with a quizzical smile.

He looked down at the watermelon under Stanley’s arm. “Oh, crap,” he said. “Are the pod people sprouting again?”

“Huh?”

Roger tapped the produce. “Your watermelon. What’s up with the watermelon?”

Stanley seemed to have lost his momentum. He could feel himself blushing. “It was an impulse buy.”

“So what is it now? A pet?”

“You’re not making any sense at all,” Stanley said. “Let me in.”

Roger backed up a step and did a very nice salami, salami, baloney bow, waving Stanley in.

As soon as Stanley crossed the threshold, he presented the watermelon to Roger like the head nurse handing off the newborn baby to her mother for the very first time. “This is for you. Housewarming present.”

“I didn’t just move in.
You
did.”

“Oh, yeah.”

“Uh. Well, gee, Stanley. Thanks.” Roger accepted the offering and gave a grunt. “Wow. This thing is heavy. I love watermelon. How’d you know?”

Stanley shrugged, looking around the apartment for the first time, wondering why Roger had better furniture than he did. Then he looked back at Roger and wondered how the man could be so handsome in a baggy pair of lounging pants that had certainly seen better days, and a faded muscle shirt that showed off two of the most gorgeous shoulders Stanley had ever seen in his life. Those heavenly biceps were doing their thing again, too, rolling around while the man cradled a two-ton watermelon in his arms. And that little patch of dark chest hair peeking over the top of the shirt! That was certainly fetching. It truly was.

To take his mind off it, Stanley said, “I love watermelon too. What d’you say we have some?”

Roger leaned closer until their two noses were almost touching. Stanley’s heart did a little tap dance thinking Roger was leaning in to kiss him. Unfortunately, that wasn’t the case.

“Your eyes are dilated,” he said. “You have a simple-minded simper on your face, and your shirt is not only on backwards, but it’s also inside out.” He plucked the tag under Stanley’s chin and pulled it far enough out for Stanley to look down his nose at it. “See?”

Stanley giggled.

“And you’re giggling,” Roger said with a grin.

“And your point is?” He stuck his hand on his hip and looked down. He passed his hand under his arm where the watermelon used to be, suddenly saw Roger holding the damn thing, and said, “Oh,
there
it is.”

Roger laughed. “Good grief, son, you’re stoned.”

Stanley appeared mortally wounded by that observation. “No, I’m not. I’m having a chocolate rush.”

“Oh, I see. What the hell were you eating? Brownies laced with marijuana?”

And at that Stanley blinked. Then he blinked again.
My God, were those
—?

Roger finished his thought for him. “My God, you were.”