The Astro's right where you left it, taking a well deserved rest along the quiet, downtown curbside. It's only been your steed a few hundred miles, ever since you traded the sleek-yet-claustrophobic Hyundai in for it around Crescent City, but those miles were, for the most part, seamless.
There is nobody else parked in sight, although a sign ordains doing so until 2 AM. Nobody out on the sidewalks either. In the hour since your arrival, Port Angeles's verve has considerably fizzled. No longer do the steel chords of a live country show drift from the harborside bandshell; must be nearing 7 o'clock, gig's over. After all, it's a school night. People are hunkering down before the news, before American Idol or whatever the f**k's on; you haven't bothered with the numbing luxury of television in a long time. Lefty pops the trunk's hatchback to begin ransacking an old canvas duffel for something he can throw on under the cargo vest and over his ten-cent n*****s. A zephyr stakes its claim on the town, as if scouting ahead for night, causing a weatherbeaten Old Glory to whip on the pole outside First National Bank. With milewide steps and a columned Greek facade, it can't help but feel arrogant amidst the quaint, redbrick bazaar of East Main. As you happen to be zoning out, two lampposts ignite at the end of the street, followed by others, flickering toward you in semi-parallel automation. Dusk is probably still an hour off. Anyway, you welcome their beaded glow against the fogscape; it illusively raises the street's temperature by a degree.
Speaking of warmth.
Your pockets feel deplorably light. When you search them for that full pouch of leaf tobacco, the one you just bought in Forks, it's gone. Same story with your vest pockets . . . S**t. And you weren't even the one crawling around on the ground.
"Hey Left, borrow me a plug."
He pretends not to hear until you repeat yourself. Then, "Where the hell did yours go?" He begrudgingly tosses it over the roof.
"I dropped it."
"You dropped it." But that's all he's got. Lefty's not one for comebacks, or stealing cars.
"You know, Left." (Now that you've got his pouch and nothing to lose.) "I don't think you ever boosted a car in your life. Successfully, I mean."
"Bullshit!" His spluttering face pops around the van. He's got a white thermal shirt pulled halfway on, leaving the ribs across one side of his body fleetingly exposed like stacked samurai blades. A school of Technicolor squid slip out of sight. "What about this tank right here?"
"Don't count if the keys were in it."
You have to wipe some condensation off the van's roof before it can accommodate rolling a respectable doobie on. Fortunately, your papers managed to stick around. Now comes the trouble of finding a clean place to operate: Just a 2"x2" patch of naked aluminum not speckled with birdshit, is that too much to ask? By actually factoring things like crust value and discoloration, it's possible to approximate at which stage of your excursion you encountered any given bomber. The snowy, liquid-paper samples, for example, are all recent deposits--Washington flocks--while the flakier souvenirs that you can strike off with a fingernail hail from central California. Only when Lefty speaks do you register these triflings.
"Let me tell you something about my line of work," he rebuts. "One time I was in Santa Fe . . ."
It's the one about the Coupe de Ville, the deputy-sheriff, and the aerosol can. This particular narrative has stayed so consistent you're starting to think it might be true. Rather than pay attention, you fix your joint and study the row of apartments surmounting every retailer, trying to place which one belongs to the baby. It's actually a hard thing to determine because the hovel took up only one half of a story, the rear half, so none of it directly overhung Main. Whatsmore, all the taller buildings have similar bay windows that sort of take you back to the Castro lofts in South Frisco. "For Rent" signs lean in many of the sills, and the same can be said for their first floor counterparts, only moreso. Shops like these supposedly won't exist much longer.
A sharp, dissonant blast commands your attention. Lefty must have realized you can avoid his voice easily enough, but of course, a trumpet is quite another matter.
Cupping your hands over your ears: "Don't start!" you rage. "Don't you f*****g start with that here or I'll toss it into the ocean!"
"Let's panhandle. Get the pot and the sticks."
"No! I don't feel like beating that monkey drum tonight. Besides, who's gonna give us a cent? Do you see anybody?"
"We'll have to draw them out ourselves. Like little cobras." He makes an obscene, fluttery snaketongue motion with his fingers. "That church we saw! Remember? Folks will be filing out about now with their stuffed bellies and lips all mashed with sauce. They'll feel so insecure when they spot us. Guilty like." He laughs, "We might even score a couple plates out of it. Who knows unless we try?"
"Suddenly you're an optimist. Just like that."
"No, I'm just not a f*****g toadstool like you are. If we don't move around and dig some s**t we're no better off than we were, right? I said right?"
"Yes right right. Stop looking at me like that, it's not my fault. This damn regional gloom has got me feeling, oh, I don't know . . ."
"Depressed? We got help for that."
"No, not depressed. Lethargic."
He groans peevishly and slumps against the sliding door a few feet from you, redirecting his scowl at a Closed sign hung on the bakery glass. Five fat golden loaves sit out on a display table with miniature American flags stabbed into them out of seasonal tribute to the 4th of July.
"It's next week," you blurt, and Lefty snaps back, "What is?"
"Independence Day."
"Well strike up the band!" He lifts the trumpet.
"Look alright alright, don't do that! We can do whatever the hell you want just as long as it doesn't involve music. I need some peace from that wretched horn."
At this concession, he jumps spryly, mandating, "First of all, I say we stay put a while."
"How long?"
"Overnight."
"That's stupid, and dangerous. We're so close to Seattle, we'll spend the night there."
"There too of course. We must see Seattle. I've never been before."
"You said you had."
"Um, only once."
"We'll have to park out in the country," you say. "It's not safe in these small towns. Cops make it a special errand to prowl around tapping on windows."
"Agreed. In fact, I was thinking we don't sleep in the van at all tonight but camp out on the beach."
"Are you crazy? This isn't Cali anymore. I'm already cold and this wind will kick our asses."
"Yours maybe. Where's your balls?"
You throw him a warning look.
"Okay, so the night is young. We'll worry about accommodations later. What say we just walk around a little for now? Scope the place out."
"Whatever."
He extends you the trumpet. "Hold this, and don't be a smartass. I gotta roll a quick cigarette first."
You take it. Watching Lefty roll a joint is like, pardon the cliché, watching a child grow. He clearly contracts as much pleasure from constructing as inhaling. "Like a Chinatown orgasm," in his own words, it's something "cheap and intimate". Something to be rolled, licked, and lovingly twisted. Ah yes. To be kissed, singed, and sucked. You could see Lefty marrying a woman who implored the same systematic attention, but nothing more or less.
Greasy black ropes of hair fray out from under his trucker hat, perched so far back now only the words Inner Beauty appear above the brim. There is, through generous eyes, a latent attractiveness about Lefty beneath the redneck costume and steelwool beard. Hair can be trimmed. His plentiful blackheads could pass, from a distance, as stray freckles. So long as a few hygienic standards were met, and above all, Lefty abstained from the fatal error of smiling, he might theoretically pass as a handsome young man. But the second those too-thin, too-red lips split asunder, one instinctively flinches at the bizarre certainty that a butcher's knife is flying straight at their head. All of his manicured potential thus cracks into an asymmetrical paradigm of irreparable degeneracy.
Concerning the undisputed jewel (for this was, after all, intended to be flattery) of his features, it is the jaw. Even the slimiest hillbilly beard can't belie that--sheer congenital masculinity. So much so that it rescues the face from becoming banal. Unfortunately, this opposition between his stoic mandible and otherwise 12 year-old physique does tend to describe him as a little topheavy, and it's a wonder when he bends forward or charges earnestly towards some pretty b***h that he doesn't fall flat on his face.
When the joint is rolled, he huddles out of the wind to light it and declares, "We're off!"
You thrust back the trumpet with a totally feigned resignation and start off, for you were born on a cold December morning in 1986 with the paramount aspiration to 'get the lay of the land', as it were, on your own time and at your own pace.
In all seriousness, given the financial cushion and a proper exile, you could quite blithely spend your whole life haunting country dirtroads or neon superstrips or suburbia in-betweens like this. Alone, observant. And even where money was concerned, you wouldn't need much. Enough to settle for two meals a day and a bottomrate motel when the weather got s****y. Oh sure, you're a real primitive. That's the way you feel it ought to be, and you got to hand it to Lefty, he's much the same way. Except, at times, when it feels like he's got too much to prove.
A few watery sunrays manage to stab through some cleavage in the cloudshell, dabbing Main's rind with sequins of light. Traffic is sparse, pedestrians practically nonexistent, except for a lady in a knit cap and tall mustard coat walking her collie across the street in the other direction.
You and Lefty match each other's pace, moving east just because one of you must have chosen east on a whim and dragging your eyes over the most hackneyed windowshopping displays this side of North Platte. It's strikes you as amazing that the fate of independent commerce hangs by the thread of a few redundant antiques. Singer sewing machines, checker-topped steel tables, ivory mannequins in the height of summer (of love) fashion, but most profusely--and essentially that lifesaving kick of modernity--cardboard cutouts manifesting Hollywood's latest, hottest, one-night-stand:
The cast of Twilight.
It'd baffled you at first, naturally. Lefty too, when you pointed out to him all these sullen teens in alert poses appearing and reappearing and reappearing in two-dimensional form on billboards, bumper stickers, or in aforementioned windows. Finally, a local collegiate home for summer break whom you met on the pier was willing to stand near enough, long enough, to expound Port Angeles's new legacy as the partial filming grounds of a blockbuster adapted from Stephanie Meyer's vampire trilogy.
Apparently, according to the student, you and Lefty were among an incalculable list of 'tourists' who, until the film's record-breaking premiere "right here in Port" had been totally naive of the fishing town's diminutive existence. "This was where she chose to set her books, and quite honestly, you won't find a more ambient atmosphere in America." The guy shrugged off every other word to insinuate he wasn't part of the craze, nevertheless adding, "She's like our Stephen King. She's putting us on the map and, you know, she's not hurting the economy either."
No, you don't suppose there was much accruing in the way of tourist revenue before Twilight came along. A ferryline traverses the Strait to Victoria and back, there must be a lucrative commercial fishing industry year-round, and all these kitschy shops do attract a certain breed of transient retirees who tour the highway system in lavish RVs and winnow off the rest of their IRAs on pointless memorabilia for their children to sort through in the near future. However, these jaded teens are beyond all that, the town's new Christ, having garnered such a cult they my as well be real vampires. What else could account for you passing the fourth Robert Pattinson in under two minutes? Cheek pressed to his bicep as ever is the inimitably bland, doe-eyed Kristen Stewart. Yes, already you have the cast's names memorized, and quite unremarkably, since they're everywhere.
"Robert Ate Here!"
"Ms. Stewart LOVES Our Selection!"
"Twilight Fans Welcome!"
Lefty must be on a similar predominating wavelength, because he starts to say, "My buddy's ex-girlfriend was a vampire. Sometimes, after they'd been together a while, he let her cut him or he'd cut himself, I mean, real small cuts in places where it didn't hurt, like the chest or thigh, and she'd, I guess, lick it . . . I said I'd be game if he ever got sick of her. She admitted she didn't really need blood to survive but it was kind of like a crack high . . . Mostly though she was a psychic vampire, you know what that is? It's where, like, instead of blood, she stole people's energy. Without even trying, so she said. It happened to me a bunch of times when we were all just sitting around chilling and it wasn't cool. It wasn't like Vicodin or, you know, anything like that, it just made you feel totally shucked and boiled. A lot of guys fall asleep after sex, but my buddy said after she and him did it, he'd sometimes pass out for eight whole hours and she had to hit him with the copper wire or else he'd miss work. Crazy, huh?"
You grunt something in lieu of response, but most of your attention is bent on trying to roll another smoke and walk at the same time. It's not easy.
". . . So I really don't wanna get bit, not because I think it'd hurt, but like, it'd probably feel the same way afterwards, don't you think? I mean all drained like that. Only jacked up times like fifty. We'd be sitting ducks out there on the . . . F**k it, maybe we shouldn't sleep on the beach."
"Good point."
He muses at the sky. It's a typical Washington sky, at once lurid and bleached, coated in mauve chalkdust. "I don't know. My buddy's girlfriend was pretty beastly though, she had scoriasis. Like if that brunette pinned up everywhere wanted to bite me, I might even let her under certain provisions . . . But I guess I'd be the first guy ever to haggle with a vampire though, right?"
You make the mistake of not saying anything; so by recourse, he blasts a few bars through the trumpet and you about drop your nearly-finished joint. The aftershock is so reeling all you can do is cry, "Lefty! F**k!"
"Sorry, I was trying to summon her."
"The only thing you're going to summon with that is a f*****g albatros. Or the pigs, huh? So can it."
Instead, he's drawn attention of another sort.
At first you think you hear a small dog barking, its yips carried aloft by the Canadian weatherfront. A grassy plain opens up off the vertex where East Main corners with another road and the wind can plow unmitigated off the Strait. Even from 200 yards away, pellets of brine and water molecules pit into your face as though hurled by Poseidon's angry fist. Gazing out, you spot a small distant creature bouncing atop a cantilevered mass of playground equipment erected before the marina, the murky horizon, the strung white triangles of a hundred docked sailboats.
And this creature is squealing something in a prepubescent soprano. Something that sounds like, "Do it, man! Do it!"
Lefty halts. "Dig that midget," he laughs incredulously, raising the trumpet bell and announcing, "I'm gonna play for him."
Fine. You're just grateful for the chance to stand still and finish this damn cigarette. Lefty plays what, by now, you recognize as one of his favorite melodies. He's told you the name but you forgot. The trumpet came with the van, and Lefty at once made emphatic insistences on Fate, since he'd placed "lead trumpet in the marching band junior year!" shortly before dropping out. Within hours, the scales and rudiments came flowing back ad nauseum, which you were all but forced to tolerate, jaw clenched and window open to contest all the accidental squeaks and farts with roaring wind. Gradually, the frequency of those glitches decreased, Lefty regained some semblance of confidence and composure, until now, though you'd never ever admit it to his face, he's getting a real passable stride down on that thing.
The child's applause fills each rebreath. Lefty is reeled in by the attention. You finally have your smoke lit and are satiated for the time being. This wind is your only real gripe. At one instance, it snaps Lefty's hat clean off his head, barreling it into your chest, and once you pass it back, the whole cycle has commenced fluidly and wordlessly in under two seconds. Lefty never even interrupts his ode. Your vest lapels are sucked into your armpits and ripple backwards like meaty anterior fins. Even what few evergreens there are dotting the park bow resistantly with a time-worn rubberized lean in their trunks. The pine dome of the community bandshell looms to your far left, with no bleachers or other provisional seating. Two figures loiter onstage, one of whom you can also see puffing at the fiery speck of a cherry and probably having a much easier time of it.
Lefty marches in ragtime tempo, somehow not choking on his own song and making an egotistic spectacle of himself. Of you both, really. The notes hatch with confidence and then spiral outward like baby birds.
All these meager assets--the trumpet, the clothes, the lighters--came part and parcel with the expropriated Astro. By drawing conclusions from its minor property, you were able to paint a fair caricature of the former owner as a young (mid to late 20s) Buddhist surfer who revels in theater, Acqua di Gio smell-alike cologne, Kerouac, and obscurely monotonous synthesizer music that even Lefty was quick to discard at the nearest swap shop just when you thought he embraced all genres. This same dude endorses a pitiful shwag dealer and has a sister or some female relative who plays trumpet (the name on the vinyl case is that of a Valerie Doogan, in collation to the luggage tags, which all read Troy Doogan: presumably your Astro's beatnik benefactor). Both your current wardrobes emerged from one of two canvas duffels. The first, more practical, was assigned to designer-brand shorts, shirts, boxers, sweaters, swimsuits, hemp belts and sandals, etc. The other, coupled with a few volumes on stage direction and "actors' psyche", is the basis of your belief which makes a thespian out of Troy. Its stitches were strained, in some areas, to the point of combustion around a flamboyant womb of costume articles, props, fake jewelry and accessories, including a provocative selection of vests.
You and Lefty rarely patronize the first duffel.
In fact, your getup actually makes his seem mundane in comparison. A pair of baggy black and gray vertical-striped slacks with an underlying faint yellow-plaid pattern creates, for the admirer, somewhat disorienting effects. These are anchored in place with one hemp belt and untucked you wear a silk shirt, classy in its milkchocolate tones but for the outbreak of giant orange polka-dots. Over that, a vest less vauntingly masculine than Lefty's. Its material is red velvet affixed with three brass buttons, which you leave undone, and little gold chains dangling vainly off the buttons. No hat (you could never pull off hats), but clipped onto the open V neck of your shirt--molded now by the wind like a second skin into every rib and contour--are a pair of ladies' zebra-print sunglasses, which you alternate between On and Off a rough total of fifty vacillations per day . . . Justly stated, the van aside, Troy didn't lose much of value. Just a thin wad of $20 bills (cooperatively reserved as gas funds only), some Old Thompson almost a quarter drunk, and probably a little dignity for leaving his keys in the ignition. But hey, that's what happens when you rip too much bad weed.
The playground nears. You'd almost forgotten where the hell you were headed and why. It stands on an oblong island of woodchips floating centrally in the same park you and Lefty passed through hours ago to scrutinize what was then the loyal residue of a bandshell attendance watching five old men knock out Southern standards. A couple children approached to compliment your pants and then dart off in bashful conquest back to their mothers who sat on blankets smiling clean, rosy smiles at you. The fathers in general were openly suspicious figures cutting Marine Corps stances over their huddled families. Some evinced curt, formal nods. It was the fathers who could sense a broad range of dichotomies and made no pains to hide it. You had no trouble smiling back, they were such sympathetic creatures.
The worst attention you drew that afternoon came during the band's stomping rendition of "Folsom Prison Blues". In brief, it met Lefty's approval.
Not until you're actually stepping onto the woodchips does your remiss logic demand to know: Why? When you ask the question aloud, Lefty's answer, if he answers at all, is inaudible over the squall off the Strait. Before you can coax him into turning around and ditching what strikes you as your second avoidable run-in with extreme youth in only the past 30 minutes, his ebullient admirer has already leapt joyfully off the jungle gym, arms aflutter like little pink wedges of bologna. To be fair, it's probably more unshed baby rubber than actual fat. He looks about 7 or 8, wears a Mariners T-shirt and a crooked haircut. There's a neon green Band-Aid stuck inside his right elbow.
"Like what you hear, kid?" Lefty preempts.
Giving up any ideas of dissuasion, you hang back a few steps from the chatter that follows. The boy nods, feverish and out of breath, reminding you of a cousin you think you met once at some distant reunion. "Can you play anything by the Black Eyed Peas?" he asks.
Unless it was just a friend of a cousin.
"Hmmm," Lefty mulls. "How about Sweets Edison, he close enough?"
Just the utterance of an unfamiliar name makes the boy's eyes glaze over with boredom. "I don't know who that is."
"Oho, Sweets? He go a little something like this." Lefty tongues the mouthpiece and puffs his cheeks. You're hunched over, attempting to rekindle a cigarette butt you picked off the woodchips and perfectly content playing the scabrous old man.
"Wait!" The kid interjects. "Play something dancey! I'm a real good dancer you can ask any of the girls in my grade one time we had an Easter dance at the armory and there was this DJ who was super cool and his name was DJ Buster spelt B-U-Z-T-A, like 'bust-a' but with a 'z' so like buzzzz you know like a hornet I got bit by one last week wanna see? Right there between my fingers which is like a super bad place to get stinged and it hurts a lot I got to keep my fingers apart all the time and sometimes I forget I got it weeding 'cause my dad makes me help my brother every Saturday before I can do anything with my friends and he doesn't even let me have sleepovers or go to sleepovers on Friday nights because I won't be back in time for weeding even though it’s like the same exact thing if I weed in the afternoon or I weed at midnight with like a flashlight or whatever and I made sure he felt real bad for making we weed that day because I never would have stuck my hand in that hornet's nest otherwise he tried telling me it wasn't a hornet's nest it was just some bumblebees but I got my insect book and showed him what they looked like and it was a hornet I don't think he really felt all that bad he was just pretending because he made me weed again the next Saturday which is like super harsh, huh?"
Even the wind gulps in astonishment.
Lefty's stare has stayed totally deadpan at the trembling little chop-cut of this wide eyed runt, but you can see clearly enough his annoyed ego growing anxious to move on and it makes you laugh. Could an adolescent case of ADHD, Autism, or whatever really be the bane of Lefty's mythic verbosity?
"You talk too much, kid." He shakes his head in what can safely be called disgust. "Especially to strangers. Are you here by yourself, or are your parents around?"
While asking this, he scouts around, vigilant enough to set you on edge. At the southeast corner of the lawn, a horde of adults stand outside a supper club upon the side exit's wheelchair ramp. Some lean glutted against an iron guardrail. They're far enough away where you can't make out any words but are still able to catch clauses of a shrill parrot laugh that any closer would be irritating.
The kid points at the supper club. "My parents are eating in there. We all went out for the Wednesday buffet because it's my mom's favorite and we do like every week but I'm a super fast eater and I get bored waiting for everybody else to finish because they all talk-talk-talk too much with everyone they know so they said I could go play on the jungle gym if Max went with me so I begged and finally he said sure because he don't like it either and I can do the monkey bars back and forth 12 times without stopping--"
Lefty grabs the kid's shoulder as if to shake some sense into him, and your eyes stray back on the adults.
"Whoa, there you go again!" he cries. "Hold up now, who's Max?"
"My brother!" The kid rebukes, as if Lefty just asked what state this is. Then, wriggling away with ease, he turns and points at the jungle gym. "He's sitting right over there and he's got a real nose ring."
So far you seem to have gone largely unnoticed by the tiny dancer. Retreating a few steps, you follow his finger until a metal bench pans into view on the other end of the woodchips. Seated there is a teenage boy clad all in black studying a hardcover edition propped on his crossed legs and oblivious to the discourse between Lefty and his brother thanks to a set of thin cords trailing from his ears. Sensing, however, some stealth-invasion of his privacy, he raises one painted eye (the other is hidden by bangs) and you shift back behind the cover of a tube slide, deeming it just as well if he saw you because you don't want to hang around much longer. Neither of you have eaten for roughly 10 hours and your stomach has begun tying itself in indignant knots.
When you look back, Lefty has his shirt raised for the boy to admire his squid menagerie. This is all it would take to raise a few of the diners' eyebrows.
"Wow!" The boy approves. His right hand nimbly makes a grab for Lefty's. "My brother's gotta see this! He wants a tattoo too but dad says nuh-uh-uh . . ."
Next you're meeting them around the jungle gym, caught between humor and chagrin at the sight of this voluble misfit towing Lefty like some stray dog to be judged before the family.
"Hey kid," you hear Lefty ask, "is your bro a vampire?"
"No, he's an emo."
The brother, having grown indolently attentive, unplugs his earbuds and sighs, "Who's an emo?"
"You are!" The boy punctuates every decree by bouncing.
Lefty pans around for you in need. "What's an emo? Stubs, you gotta tell me, I know you know."
"Ask him." You nod at the older brother, who is eyeing your clothes with perhaps a mote of jealousy at being one-upped in terms of local eccentricity. Or you're just flattering yourself.
For the first time, the little boy seems interested in you too. "Is your name really Stubs?"
"Sure, why not?"
"He's just kidding, Rudy," says big brother Max.
You catch his eye. "No I'm not."
Max studies you a moment, then shrugs and goes back to his book, not wary enough to seek out anything further in the character of his sibling's new ragtag companions. Lefty's intrigue, on the other hand, can't desist so fast. "Seriously, what's an emo? Like a vampire wannabe?"
A fair guess. Max punctuates his elemental blackness with hotpink checkered shoes, rainbow wristbands, an illegible bloodsplatter logo on his black T-shirt, and promotional badges for certain bands or brands sewn to his fitted black-khaki jacket. As testified by Rudy, a silver hoop curls out Max's left nostril, and a platinum blonde streak paves the way from his hairline to the tip of his lopsided bangs, combed paper-straight. His visible eye is shelled in cosmetics, like a nautical patch against the diaphanous, fog-induced pallor of his own flesh. Even his lips look milkily deprived of blood. Max stares at the pages of his book, immune from your judgmental tirade by an imaginary partition.
You speak thoughtfully and didactic, attending to Lefty's question. "Emos, as I understand it, are genetically defined as a more sentimental derivative of the common goth." Max sniffs at this, head down, so you refer directly to the specimen, "Is that about right?"
"Whatever."
"Oh yes. Emos say whatever a lot. Almost like a creed of sorts, and they're also given to the snug adornment of transgender articles, particularly in the pants region as demonstrated thus."
Lefty puzzles this all so severely you're not convinced he's playing. "But you say whatever a lot, Stubs, and so do I. Are we--emo?" He wields the word like a loaded gun, unsure of his verbal authority.
"Emos don't play trumpet." Max offers this tidbit himself, by now withdrawing his apathetic front and reluctantly warming to the jest, which really (at least for you, and you think for Lefty) is nothing more than a futile passage of time.
"Maybe emos can't play trumpet," Lefty challenges. "Do you play anything?"
"I play bass."
"He's really good!" affirms Rudy the Dancing Dumpling Boy.
Lefty points past your shoulder with the bell of his trumpet, toward the smokers on the bandstand, and says, "We oughta have a freestyle jam session right over there and show up those cousin fuckers earlier. Were you here for that? Gawd, I thought about lynching myself off these same exact monkeybars."
Max guffaws and wipes some loose spittle off his lips. "Yeah man. They're like the town's only band so I've seen them probably a million times. It's gotten to where I don't even hear it anymore. They're just, like, part of the sky or whatever. Pretty ridiculous."
"You said it," Lefty snorts, still hung up on his jam scenario. "Dang, we could rumble. Stubs there plays a mean pot."
Out of regard for the child, you keep your mouth shut.
"A pot?" puzzles Rudy.
"Yeah, man!" Lefty clears his throat and 'discreetly' melts into a hip pose, the pose customized for this stock introduction. "We are but humble street performers. Peregrinating from town to town. Reliant only on our patented subgenre of Jiggy Bop to afford a cold meal each night . . ."
Max has gone back to his book and you interrupt Lefty to address him. "Are you reading Twilight?"
His one black eye pivots up, honing in on you like a venomous chokehold and befitting the blitzkrieg of passion by which he replies, "Those books are gay! I'm so sick of it. People who buy into that stupid industry should eat s**t and die."
At any number of secondary schools, it strikes you, a frazzled PTA mom is spouting comparable maledictions against, say, halter tops.
"You shouldn't talk like that," Rudy warns, "or I'll tell dad."
Lefty is checked out, fantasizing off in some private Babylonia. "That brunette though, man, I'd drive a stake through her s**t any day, know what I mean? F****n straight up."
Rudy stares.
Max, now in total disparity with his former literature-based rage, laughs out loud. "I don't think she's actually a vampire, man. I mean like, even in the movie."
". . . Still."
The conversation wanes from there when Max's cellphone rings and he drops out, leaving only Rudy to expel tireless topics ranging from the "boss level" on Zelda to 2nd Place in a recent science fair, wherein he documented Holly, his rat terrier's, response to multiple stimuli of music ranging from reggae to bluegrass to electronica. It's all too wholesome for Lefty and he starts scratching at the old track marks again, a subconscious tic even rehab couldn't quell. Partially, the sight of Rudy's Band-Aid could be to blame.
Someone finally sings both boys' names from the direction of the supper club and Rudy abridges himself to squint sulkily yonder. Max ends his phone talk with a dispassionate "later babe", then hangs up. Tucking his ear buds into a breast pocket, shutting his book, he stands, disguising what you're sure is a sigh of relief as a yawn. "Let's go, Rudy."
"Hey! Do you guys want to ask our parents if maybe you can come over for a little while and watch Futurama, or else help me--"
"No, Rudy. Come on."
"Say fellas," broaches Lefty, his lively eyes shining all the greener. "Um, now I just wanted to say you're the first real cats we met in this place, and what really tugs my heartstrings about that is how you liked, nay, how you appreciated the serenade. What I started to explain before is Jiggy Bop, something the drummer and I are fine tuning. It incorporates a whole spectrum of Afrocentric genres and, like most art, requires funding to survive. Why back in the old days--"
"Sorry dude," Max cuts in brusquely. "I'm broke."
"Of course, of course! Times are tough for us all in this bitter age of recession."
Rudy's leaden jaw snaps shut. "Money?" He turns to Max, "Is he asking for money?"
"Come on, dope. Mom and dad are waiting over there."
But comprehension has pierced the smog of Lefty's bombastic sales pitch and Rudy jams a fist in his pocket, withdrawing: "72 cents. It's all I got now, but we get our allowance tomorrow, right Max? Will you guys be here tomorrow?"
You: "No."
Lefty: "That remains to be seen."
Then he shamelessly swipes the change with a low bow. Max rolls his eyes but doesn't intervene.
Farewells are exchanged: Rudy's a boisterous wave, Max's a nod and a grunt. They cross the park together towards a middleaged couple rooted beneath a wine-colored awning and almost certainly trying to dissect you as much as you are them. Father wears a blue windbreaker, unzipped, over a horizontal-striped polo that does nothing to flatter his Wednesday-buffet-overloaded paunch. He has a square pink head like an eraser, glasses, and a prickly blonde crewcut. His wife, even from this distance, is clearly more who Rudy takes after. They have the same chestnut hair quality. Her frame, in classic juxtaposition to her husband's, is slim and avian. You wouldn't be surprised if it was she who'd born the parrot laugh earlier.
"Let's get out of this wind," you say, craving a cigarette but all out of papers now too.
Something about this town is making you smoke a lot. More likely, it's the utter lack of objective. You watch a seagull dispatch itself from the flock above and swoop down, landing only a few feet away to peck at some invisible morsel among the woodchips. This morsel turns out to be a scrap of Styrofoam. Lefty doesn't share your attention. He is clenching the boy's pittance in his hand and watching the family resorb with a peculiar, wistful in his eye look that confides to you he's actually looking past the family, past the log-cabin exterior of the supper club, past the regal seal of the Knights of Columbus, and at all those shimmering, steaming basins of comfort food heaped into convenient assembly columns for the limitless gorgings of all who can simply administer a fixed price. Not 72 cents.
Though they might be unaware of each other, in this moment, Lefty and the seagull foster a strong kinsmanship.
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