“Call
her,
” the skinny one kept goading his no-neck friend.
“Which one?”
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“The one I was talking to at the bar.”
“Should I?”
“Hell, yeah. Go for it, man! Her name’s Cindy.”
No Neck picked up the phone and dialed. “Hello? Cindy? You don’t know me, but I got a message for you from Dick Hertz.”
He cupped his hand over the receiver and winced in his effort not to laugh. “Whose Dick Hertz? Well, now that you mention it, Cindy, mine’s killing me. Care to give it some relief?” He slammed down the receiver. Their loud guffawing and table-whacking made half the people in the place look over in our direction.
“Jesus Christ, Birdsey, these guys make
you
look suave,” Leo said.
“No wonder we’re losing the fucking war.”
No Neck’s buddy stared over at us for a couple of seconds, then leaned forward and tapped Leo on the shoulder. “Excuse me, pal, but what’d you just say?”
“Huh?” Leo said.
“I asked you what you just said. To your friend here. Something about my buddy and me and the ‘fucking war’?”
Leo looked bewildered. Then he laughed. “Fucking
whores,
is what I said. I said this place is full of fucking
whores.
”
“Oh. Well.” He looked over at his buddy and back again. “You got
that
right. I thought you said something else.”
“No problem, my man,” Leo said, flashing him the peace sign. I shook my head and smiled.
Leo was all horny energy as he scanned the room. His leg was tapping a mile a minute, his knuckles rapping against the tabletop.
“Table 7, over by the bar?” he said. “From left to right: C-minus, C-plus, B-minus, C. Table 18, near the door, everyone’s an F except for the brunette in the white top—the one just sitting down. I’ll give her a B. Nice ass, nice set of lungs, but she loses it on the schnoz.”
“The nose knows,” No Neck leaned toward us and said.
“She could bend over and use that thing as a dildo on her friends,”
his buddy added. Leo acted like Popeye and Bluto were invisible.
“Now there’s a couple of A chicks right over there, Birdsey. Table 12. Those two brunettes in the minidresses. What do you say we put I Know[264-339] 7/24/02 12:45 PM Page 291
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them out of their misery?” He picked up the phone and told me I could have the one with bangs.
It was “mine” who answered. Leo told her he and I were visiting the East Coast from L.A. and we just had to know something. “You work for Twentieth Century Fox, too, don’t you? Haven’t we seen you on the lot out there?”
I groaned and shook my head. “Honest to Christ, Leo,” I said.
“Sometimes I can’t believe you.”
He cupped his hand over the receiver. “You can eat shit, Birdseed. You’re listening to a maestro at work. You ought to be taking notes.”
He wove an elaborate story about how he and I were both Hollywood stuntmen and personal friends of Steve McQueen. Leo said he’d done some stunt work in
Bullitt
and that he’d just finished filming a new James Bond that wasn’t out yet. Had she and her girlfriend seen
Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid
? The part where Paul Newman and Robert Redford say goodbye to each other and jump off the cliff? That was really Leo free-falling in that scene, not Rob Redford. That was what all his friends called him, by the way: Rob.
He and Leo played cards together once or twice a month.
You could tell from the girls’ body language and the way they were looking over at us that they were skeptical. Then the one with the bangs handed the phone to the other one, who said something snotty to Leo. He told her she could blow it out her ass.
“See, that’s what I hate,” he said, hanging up. “An A chick who
knows
she’s an A chick. It goes to her head, like a brain disease. I’ll take a good-natured B chick over an A with a bad attitude any day.
Your basic B chick knows enough to be grateful.”
Our waitress stood at the table, dark and slight, her long hair twisted into a braid. “You’re
scoring
these women?” she said.
“No, we’re
hoping
to score a couple,” Leo told her, looking her up and down. “Hopefully two from the A or B division.”
“Oh, well, I’m sure they’ll be impressed by your sensitivity,” she said. “What’ll you guys have?”
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next table reached over and yanked our waitress’s braid. She banged her tray down, pivoted, and faced them. “Keep your hands to yourselves or I’ll have you thrown out of here,” she warned. “You understand?”
“Hey, sweetheart, I was just trying to get your attention,” No Neck said. “Can we get us another pitcher? And how about some food? Can a guy get food at this dive?”
“Yeah, you can get food,” she said. “What do you want?”
“How ’bout you, darlin’? Can I get an order of you sittin’ on my face?”
I leaned toward them. “Hey, look,” I said. “Why don’t you guys ease off and let the lady do her job?”
“No,
you
look,” she snapped. “I’ve been working here since noontime and the woman who was supposed to relieve me two hours ago
still
hasn’t shown up yet. So the last thing I need is you starting a brawl in my honor, okay?”
“Okay,” I said, holding up my hands, palms out in surrender.
“Fine. Forgive me.”
She turned back to the sailors. “We have sandwiches,” she said, poker-faced. “They come with chips and a pickle. That’s what we have.”
“Sandwiches, eh? You got any baked Virginia ham sandwiches?”
“We have ham,” the waitress told him. “I don’t happen to know its point of origin.”
“Hey, baby, if you’re on the rag, it ain’t my fault. Get me a baked Virginia ham sandwich on rye with mustard and another pitcher of whatever this panther piss is we’re drinking. Scofield, you want anything to eat?”
“I’ll have some of that dessert you were talking about before,” he said. “Some of that pie
à la
sit-on-my-face.”
“Assholes,” the waitress mumbled. She was stuck between our two tables and I stood to let her by. “I’m not doing this to be a gentleman or anything,” I said. “Honest.”
“Just shut up,” she said, pushing past me.
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dirty mouths tended to be less inhibited in the sack. I wasn’t really listening. I was watching our waitress—the way her order pad swayed in the back pocket of her jeans as she hustled back and forth, the way she retied the string on her apron and lifted up her braid to massage the nape of her neck. She was short—five feet, if that. Nice bod, nice face.
There was something sort of gutsy about the way she was working the room. I couldn’t stop watching her.
The TV above the bar was turned to the moon landing, twenty or twenty-five people huddled around watching. Not that they could have heard anything over the music and the squawking deejay.
Walter Cronkite was lip-synching everyone through the experience.
The astronauts still hadn’t emerged from the lunar module.
I nodded up at the TV screen. “Remember when Alan Shepard went up in space? What a big deal that was?”
“I was in sixth grade,” Leo said.
“We were in fifth.”
“Who’s we?”
“Thomas and me. Our teacher brought in a radio and we got to sit around and listen and not do any work. After the splashdown, we all stood up at our desks and sang ‘My Country ’Tis of Thee.’”
He nodded. “You know what I been noticing about you, Birdsey?
Whenever you talk about something, you always say ‘we.’ Like you and him are joined at the hip or something.” His eyes looked past me. “Whoa, mama, I’d like to be joined at the hip with
that
one.”
My eyes followed his to a long-haired blonde over by the bar. I scanned the crowd for the little waitress. Found her three tables down.
“I was
into
all that astronaut shit when I was a kid,” Leo said.
“You?”
“Oh, yeah.
Big
time. Gus Grissom, Wally Schirra, all those guys.
I had this whole astronaut scrapbook. My main ambition in life was to go down to Cape Canaveral and shake hands with John Glenn.”
“Thomas and I had astronaut lunch boxes,” I said.
“Me, too. I had one of those. Thought I was hot stuff.”
I told Leo I wasn’t even sure
how
I felt about our landing on the I Know[264-339] 7/24/02 12:45 PM Page 294
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moon. “I mean, shit, it
is
kind of a mind-bender—science fiction made real or something. Hooray for the guys with the slide rules.
. . . But it seems so pro-Nixon. The triumph of capitalism, victory over the evil Communist empire. So what that we’re napalming a whole fucking country and getting our asses kicked besides. Right?”
“God bless America,” Leo said.
“My stepfather went out and sprung for a TV to celebrate. He’s probably sitting home right now, getting a hard-on watching it.”
“Speaking of which,” Leo said. “Check out the redhead wearing that plaid thing. Table 16. I think I’m in l-o-v-e.”
Just as he picked up the phone to dial, some other guy asked the redhead to dance. “Too bad, Sundance,” I ribbed him. “Guess you’re going to have to jump off the cliff a little faster than that.”
“Jump off
this,
Birdsey,” he said. “Hey, you know what Dell told me? About the astronauts? That it’s all a hoax—that they’re not really up there orbiting the moon. He says they’re hanging out in some top-secret TV studio in New Jersey. Nixon arranged it to take the heat off of the war. Dell says he read all about it in this newspaper he gets.”
“That would be the
New York Times,
right?” I laughed.
“Fucking Dell, man,” Leo laughed. “I don’t know
what
planet that guy’s from.”
A big part of that night is a blur to me. I recall dancing with some blonde in pigtails who reminded me of Ellie May Clampett. I remember the Dial-Tone passing out free champagne after Armstrong and Aldrin’s moon bounce. Remember No Neck throwing a punch at someone and getting escorted out by two bouncers.
Somewhere along the way, we changed waitresses.
“I’m going outside,” I told Leo. It was sometime after midnight by then. “Walk the beach or something.”
He had connected with the redhead after all; their slow-dancing was starting to look like foreplay. “Nice knowing you,” Leo said.
Outside, the air was cool and misty and the moon had a hazy glow. Someone at the far end of the parking lot kept trying to start their car, grinding the ignition over and over and over again.
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I climbed up the bank and down the other side to the ocean. The tide sounded like a flushing toilet. Clots of seaweed littered the beach.
There was nobody else around. I took off my sandals and flung them back toward the lifeguard stand. Rolled up my jeans and walked down by the water.
The cold sea air sobered me up some—washed away the wooziness and the stink of cigarettes and the strobe light flashes from inside. Meat shows: that’s all these bars were. I could still hear the thump of the music inside, but more and more faintly, the farther I walked. The surf lapping over my feet felt good. I stared back up at the moon.
I must have walked for a mile, mile and a half, just thinking about shit: how it must feel to be way up there, looking down at the earth. Not being a part of it. Taking in the place, whole. That was the thing, man. That’s what was hard: we were all moon walkers, in a way. Me. Leo. Ralph Drinkwater. My brother. Even my stupid stepfather, locked in a three-against-one with Ma and Thomas and me. Even all the clowns back there at the Dial-Tone Lounge, getting loaded so they could get up the nerve to try and fuck some girl—
any
girl—tether themselves to
some
one, even for a couple of minutes in the backseat of someone’s car. For a couple of seconds, everything was all clear. It all made sense. Who was that guy we’d read in my philosophy class last semester? That existentialism guy?
He was right. Every one of us was alone. Even if you were someone’s identical twin. I mean, why
had
Thomas gotten up in the middle of the night and run those laps around the dorm?
None
of it made any sense, man, that was why. Because the whole freaking world was absurd. Because man
was
existentially alone. . . .
Whoa,
far out,
I said, teasing myself back to earth again.
Heavy, man.
I’d actually remembered something from school a whole month after the final exam. I was turning into a freaking philosopher
.
I reached down and picked some rocks off the beach. Chucked them, one by one, into the rolling surf. I don’t know how long I stood there, pitching stones.
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up in the lifeguard’s perch. Someone small. “Yoo-hoo,” she called.
“Do you have jumper cables?”
I told her I didn’t. “Were you the one I heard a while ago? Sounds like you might have flooded her. If I were you, I’d wait a little while longer, then try again.”
As I approached, I realized who it was: that little waitress from the Dial-Tone. She was sitting with her knees to her chest, wearing a sweatshirt with her hands tucked inside the sleeves.
“Not that I’m trying to rescue you or anything.”