Elvira

A Chapter by Doc Macabre

"Who Spilled Coffee On The Moon?"
That's what Lefty lets the three of you know is the title of his newest composition he's tonguing down the torpid boulevard ahead, effectively snapping on porchlights and drawing strange bleary phantoms to their flower-silled windows. Florid people with too much flesh on them, packed as loosely as their flannel pajama bottoms or starchy once-plush robes or faded wifebeaters with the n*****s poking through and tufts of hair sprung out over slack collars. Most of them look impeccably well-groomed for the unconscious hour: hair slicked, skin moistened, hairs plucked, teeth brushed. One woman in particular whom you smell before you see is smoking at the head of her driveway. Judging by that charry tang, it's a Pall Mall . . . Time to beat the proverbial pot.
"Evening, miss." You pause in your tracks, letting the others pass. "I couldn't trouble you for a smoke now could I?"
Some light from a kitchen window falls on her frumpy frame. She's a big girl with lax posture, the front of her oversized sleeping shirt tented by two tits and a Pantheon belly. She's got cotton jams that match your sunglasses, zebra print, and is standing on her property barefoot. A great curly morass of brown hair bobs on her butternut-shaped head like one of those illustrious Olde English wigs.
"Can't help you kid," she croaks. "Now tell your friend to show a little courtesy. Some of us around here like to turn in early."
"Sure mama." You move on, disparaged.
Fortunately, at this point, Max dispenses a nudge and a Marlboro each to you and Lefty. "Maximus!" the latter squeals. "May your pecker grow great as your virtue." You're sufficed to grunt thanks and wave off the Zippo when he offers it, but in that briefly upheld flame, you do spot a line of consternation pinched across the bald half of his forehead.
Thanks to you, what would've been a restless, pondering, Pabst sipping evening bunked out in some blustery hole of hermetic beach is now injected with a sense of mission, however juvenile. As the four of you articulate a plan, parading down the road towards an alleged B.P. at the corner, one quadrant of your mind stays vigilant for the tell-tale creep of a patrol car from either direction, probably armed with dead-on descriptions of you and Lefty, which, between the clothes, the trumpet, and the two-dimensional hostage, would prove difficult to negate. To the naked eye though, you're positively carefree and have been the whole time, even back when you announced payment was an unrealistic option for you or Lefty without so much as a library card to show for yourselves and should thus be evicted from the realm of possibility. Max objected at first, vehemently using the words "not worth it" and threatening to drag himself--and Maddie--away should the plot proceed. But using cool, avuncular tones you were able to explain that supposing the improbability of capture should prevail, they, the two emos, could always claim ignorance of the hooch's heisted properties, and you and Lefty, with nothing to gain or lose, would confirm just that. Your optimism must have instilled shame, because he has made no rejoinder and stayed quiet ever since, hoping you'll mistake his insecurity for indifference.
Maddie keeps silent too during the overture, not supporting nor rejecting your perilous idealism, but emanating, all the while, a nervous electricity, and you can tell plain as day she's having more genuine fun tonight than this starstruck town ever allowed her. If these kids want to get shitfaced, that's all good and fine, but for you, the ultimate incentive runs much much deeper.
It's deliberated that in regards to everyone's safety, the emos should keep aside and "take notes", as it were, from a covert lawn next to the B.P.

When the moment comes, Lefty stands poised, his brass bell raised to the halogens, which course through the instrument's body like a liquid rainbow. Numbered gas pumps surround him with an aluminum canopy overhead. He's in plain sight of the cashier's window when he blows that first note so hard any unsuspecting pedestrian would swear a kamikaze angel has shrieked into the heart of the neighborhood. The high G melts into a fitful arpeggio. Lefty's knees wobble and he drops his a*s in rhythm to the music--some man eating snake only he can tame. The horn's bell is whitehot. It hisses, ala Miles Davis, like a sewer grate into Hell. One phrase after another spews out the wayward funnel like so many trucks and sedans spew their noxious fluids on the same bed of asphalt as, fortissimo, he summons every great force to represent . . . The peaks and tremulous gulches of the mountain Jericho to the south (ticklish mists, precipitous rebirth, discotheque thunderstorms) . . . Tsunamis off the fat black vein of tempest da Fuca rollicking sailboats and richman's yachts. Tapping toe of the greedy Pacific . . . He stretches his bubble north, popping sacrificial bloodvessels, to embrace Canada in all its savage heft like a bassy deepgreen "Timber!" volley when nature collapses or explodes, nature f***s spurns sustains and buries us.
Retching cold fire.
Spraying his seed.
At last the station's door flies open and a short black man in all denim sprints out. On its chain rocks the CLOSED sign, which pertains only to the building and not the pumps so that there's still a pernicious risk of customers being scared off by this Barefoot Maestro stealing halos and subjecting every social pietist on the block to what a soul sounds like. Noisy. Before the door can swing shut again, you've leapt out from behind an ice chest and traced the cashier's very tracks inside.
Thirty seconds later you emerge, lugging a full-sized paper bag of heavy, clinking bottles. As you sprint toward Maddie and Max's patch of lawn, Lefty's incorrigible music compels you to steal a glance over your shoulder at the poor cashier who is still being roped through the motions of some rude dance as Lefty weaves backwards around the pumps, horn trained on his pursuer like a gun's muzzle blasting automatic knifeshowers of jazz.
"Oh my god," Max crows, letting an exhilarated tremor slip into his voice. His eyes are fixed on the bag as you drop down on your belly beside Maddie, sandwiching her between two bodies. "I cannot believe that just happened." His laughter is genuine, but fraught with panic. You realize you're lying on Lefty's damsel and tear her out from under you. "There he goes," Maddie alerts, a strangely calm song to her voice.
Lefty, his wits activated by the purge of performance, has escaped around the opposite side of the station, and the cashier, it looks, is either too tired or circumspect to follow more than a few paces.
Once he's back inside, the three of you stand and head cautiously over to the employees' parking lot where Lefty disappeared. He meets you around the corner wearing a grin peculiar to the man who just played Carnegie. The brim of his hat juts at a sloppy angle, his bangs are matted with sweat, and the trumpet hangs passively by his thigh. "What'd we get?" are his first words, almost a plea that his greatest invocation to date wasn't just another stupid gimmick. He's panting heavily.
"Plenty," you reply, weighing the bag. Maddie hands over his crumpled vampire chick with all the ceremony of a Purple Heart.
"We should go now." Max can't stop scanning the gas pumps.
"Where to? Somewhere close, and preferably low-key." Even Lefty's advocating caution now, but Max doesn't have a response.
"This is your town," you remind him.
He whips his bangs in lieu of a shrug.
"I know a place," Maddie chimes in. She looks at Max like he should understand but he's ignoring her. Suddenly he's ignoring everyone, the b***h. Steadfast she contends, "It's perfect."
So off you start, her holding Max's hand, cutting blindly through backyards onto a road that runs parallel the one you approached on. The whole way there nobody specifically lauds Lefty's 'virtuosic' finesse or technique, only his balls, but he doesn't seem the least bit put down--guaranteed, in his mind, it was above all three of you.
Maddie's 'place' turns out to be surprisingly adept, not just some rundown shed, shady park, or other such cop magnet like a less charismatic teenager would propose. Right downtown, just a block off Main, there is one of several pubs, and overscoring the pub is a stilted green sign ablaze with promise of accommodation. It reads, La Quinta Hotel. The hotel is next door, four stories high, while the bar, called Red Ryder's, is built low and squat like a bunker. A pipe juts from one of the sidewalls at a right angle, hooking down into the earth. It's just high enough for someone over 5'5" to step on and hoist themselves up by clutching the roof's sharp edge.
Max goes first and helps his girl. Then Lefty, then you.
At first, the wind's tenacity is annoying higher up, but the parapets are elevated about two feet past the tarpaper roof itself and, when seated, act somewhat as a shield. Furthermore, you're huddled behind this buzzing green electrical box that does its part as well to hinder the elements. Maddie sits the slowest, folding her knees to one side and tugging all night in vain to make her skirt reach them. Max sits crosslegged and you half expect the seams of his jeans to burst. Lefty plunks down right between the two, across from you, forming a diamond shape of which the heart is all the booze. The roof is surprisingly soft, at least at first, and the concerted expulsions of the drinkers and the jukebox below create massaging vibrations.
"Right on, Stubs, you got some of everything!" Maddie, of all people, is somehow the first to appropriate your loot and lines up the bottles single-file with feminine neatness. They gleam in the refracted light of La Quinta's sign, an emerald spine of whiskey, rum, vodka, tequila, wine, and wine (a red and a white). Every appraising face is also blanched green and strangely tentative, after all this, to upset the regiment. What amuses you most is how breezy Maddie's morals are regarding the recreational feat of burglary. She's even the one who asks, quite informally, whether you refrained from making any sort of "mess" during your perusal.
"Sure," you smile. "Poor a*s shouldn't notice a thing until he takes inventory, not unless he checks the tapes every night."
"We'll be long gone by then," vows Lefty, who at last jumps on the Cuervo.
A square aluminum chimney belches out distorted audio nearby and the deepfried smells akin to any place called Red Ryder's. Its aperture is screened by some old chickenwire to prevent bird entry. Max is fumbling absentmindedly at the Smirnoff's paper seal. It's a mad free for all, a de facto buffet. Maddie inspects the plum bottle of Tempranillo placed before her. You ask if she drinks wine. No, she says, she hardly drinks anything but beer. And vodka sometimes when her sister's in town.
"How old's your sister?" Lefty asks.
"26."
"Is she hot? Max, tell me for real, she got a hot sister?"
"Yeah, sort of."
"F**k you." Maddie's response is too automatic, like she suspected it all along but never ever thought he would come clean. It looks to you like she's about to punch him but loses the will and simply imparts a hurt look. He pretends not to notice, much like he's done all night, and holds the bottleneck to his lips for a long time before actually taking a sip. The one he does take is too big and he starts to cough, stifling himself with yet another robust plunge. His shoulders are sunken and his jaw slack even as he glugs away in the demeanor of some hapless blue collar.
Lefty ignores the tension he's indirectly caused, though it's hard to know just how indirect it really was or by what underhanded motives he's operating--if he just wants to see a fight so he can openly mock both contenders, or if he's even nursing naive hopes of getting in Maddie's pants. You've got a hunch the first scenario is just as unlikely to pan out, because that's not how modern couples function. The more you let your grievances build up unmediated, the greater basis there is for calling it quits later, and that's all either of them are truly shooting for. It's an endurance contest, these things, a deliberate suffusion of drama to sustain one through the doldrums of indentured adolescence.
If there's anything you can sympathize with, it's the tendency to manufacture conflict in a realm devoid of positive or negative sensation. You've seen with your own eyes individuals freed from punitive isolation, convinced that something had shared the dark enclosure with them, something or someone who always meant them harm. And that's when you first grasped the Hegelian conflict that all human brains hunger for, moreso even than camaraderie. Wars have been fought and entire civilizations enslaved so we could arrive at the present state of existence. The brain, in its rebellion against total gray bliss, can recognize via a private and wiser consciousness that conflict is the keystone of evolution. And this applies to everyone, albeit with varying validity, from Shiite insurgents to bored American teenagers . . . See what sort of syllogisms you're reduced to? Tossing back periodic sips of Jim Bean. Literally fighting to keep awake.
Even Lefty, the debauched 'life of the party', is speaking more to someone named Elvira than he is to you. If he's actually f*****g inventing people, now that's bad! Wait no. Elvira appears to be his cardboard mistress. Even worse. He can't be bothered to remember the actress's name . . . Come to think of it, neither can you, though you knew it a moment ago . . . Must mean the whiskey's working . . . It's a funny thing, these fads . . . these sporadic idolatries the media promulgates for us each week. Back before the media there were prophets. Freelance messiahs who went around telling people what was holy and what to live by and how to think . . . Jesus was kind of a vampire now wasn't he? Rising from the dead and whatnot. He certainly advocated the drinking of blood, you remember that much. Hell, maybe you weren't so far off when you joked that these starlets, these tortured young sanguinary souls, were a contemporary manifestation of the Christ syndrome . . . rather a vain syndrome. Anthropomorphism knows no bounds when our monsters get distilled through the same tubes as our Savior.
"Hey, wake up! What are you, counting calories?" Lefty jabs at how somberly you've been staring into the copper well gripped by the fork of your crotch. You shake from your reverie, pleased to hear someone slurring. How long have you been sitting here? He's already gotten a good four inches through the tequila. 'Elvira' is creased at the waist and sitting upright against the electrical box, wearing Lefty's trucker hat over her face. The trumpet stands on her lap. Just as you look up, Max passes the Smirnoff over to Maddie and she's accepting it with what looks like a faint conciliatory smile. "I know that look. You got something enlightening to say," Lefty pursues. "Please. Enlighten us."
"Left, you don't by chance got a corkscrew on you? Check all those damn pockets of yours--What's in the other one?--No, that ain't it.--Okay. Never mind."
He stands up and ambles over to the roof's edge to peer in at all the LaQuinta rooms without their curtains drawn. An alley delineates the two buildings and Lefty flirts with the idea of falling in. For the benefit of any guests who are watching, he unzips his fly and the steep smack of urine is soon audible even from where you sit, though the other two don't (or pretend not to) notice. They are ostensibly having one of those silent conjectures that couples are able to carry on with their eyes; and for reasons you don't feel obligated to translate, an impulse to snatch the vodka bottle from Maddie's hands and hurl it into the street below is nearly inconsolable. It's dire that she drink something other than vodka, or--to come right out and say it--that she toast her first glass of wine with you. There's a corkscrew in the van, but the van's a long way off. You could always smash off the bottleneck, but somehow that seems whitetrash and how could anyone imbibe without shredding their mouths? F**k it. F**k wine and f**k statutory rape. You're no better than Lefty. Purge yourself with more whiskey. Hot and syrupy, scalding its way down your esophagus into the acidic void that is your guts. Pure liquids, feel them sizzle and groan. The Bean erupts like a cannonball--keep this s**t away from Lefty! Whiskey detonates that inflammable b*****d. Rude memories of a rural rest area 700 feet above sea-level. Starring Old Thompson and a handful of little white pills called Sulpirid, you think. A standard babbling plot which escalates into Lefty clambering inside a urinal and attempting to wash the squids off his hide by repeatedly flushing down down down. Scrubbing, flushing, scrubbing--with coarse brown paper towels--flushing again. It sounds funny in retrospect . . . maybe it was funny at the time too . . . just a little . . . no, not really. He'd used all his clothes to stop up the sinks, and after an hour or so of your own delirium you waded into an inch of gushing tapwater and had to evacuate his red-chafed, fetal-looking corpse by dragging it across the flooded tiles. Luckily, the nature of the rest area was so rural, and the hour so late, that no travelers stumbled by chance upon the site until you had securely packed and ferried all traces of guilt miles up the road. Him asleep in the backseat under a blanket, muttering vitriol at Uncle Clem.
Reeking of urinal cakes.
"--We're too classy for this crowd, eh Elvira?" He nearly trips over her on his voyage across the roof, disappearing from sight behind the electrical box and then popping up again on the eastern border, peering down at the bar's entrance. Telling him to back down will only make things worse. Look on the bright side, he managed to stuff his dick back in his pants. Lefty hasn't popped any pills since the courtyard, at least not to your knowledge, and you're to the point where you can fairly estimate his capacity, so in reality he's probably exaggerating right now, if just a tad. Like most lowlifes, he tends to exaggerate his inebriation. It's so they can act on their most base impulses in confidence that whatever entails will be more socially excusable by morning. Eventually some lightweight sailor or divorcee (or another class of man who frequents the pub on Wednesdays that you're forgetting) will stagger out, and Lefty, at worst, will shout some invectives or hawk a loogy on him. The recipient, in his state, won't be liable to call the cops, if he can even manage to trace where the insults are coming from. Nobody calls the pigs when they're drunk. They handle s**t themselves. So this may go on for four or five more loafers until the bartender gets wise, and then it will be time to clear out.
Not like the disbandment will be anything to mourn. The lovebirds are talking again. Just like that. Max is smiling and friendly and pathetic and wants to know if you have a Facebook account.
"Yeah actually," you tell him. "I set one up years ago but never went on after that."
"That's great!" Maddie smiles, her cheeks bright red. "So we can stay in touch after you guys leave."
You say nothing.
Max asks, "So, when I'm looking you up, should I just type in 'Stubs'? Is that like what your account's under?" He finds this hilarious and can't stop laughing until he gets the hiccups.
Maddie joins in but she's a little less tipsy and stops quicker when she notices you staring her down, completely sober, or at least faking it well, and it turns out she is too, enough to still feel self-conscious. She puts her fingertips to her lips in this cute old-fashioned way as if to stifle further 'unbecoming' outbursts. Yep, she's an odd one alright. More odd than Lefty by all counts. The kind of girl who would be flattered if you slit her stalker's throat but wouldn't look at you for weeks if you, say, ran over a chipmunk. A sexy f*****g c**t, no joke. Bet she tastes like sweetmelon. Batting those big eyes at you, cumming so hard she weeps. Flex those ivory thighs baby. Grabs your hair by the fistful, rips you up and bites your tongue, makes you bleed just the right amount--"Get down from there you stupid drunk . . !"
So it begins.
"Hey, man. When do the vampires come out?" It all slurs together as one word.
"What? You're crazy." But the voice on the sidewalk is laughing.
"Thurz vam-pahrs 'n theez eer hills! Leeches and werewolves. But we got provisions. Come up here, man, where it's safe. We got plenty of provisions."
"Oh yeah?"
"F****n A." Lefty sweeps his arm as though at a veritable Shangri La that's been floating here unbeknownst over the man's head. "Shrimp, lobster, T-bone, grenades, bazookas, machetes, Manischewitz, Stinger missiles, AR-18s!"
Maddie clasps her entire hand over her mouth this time and gapes at you. Her face defines your feelings: regaled but uneasy. Lefty looks like a tattered hobgoblin up there with his hair tousled, his vest thrown by the wind, arms alternately akimbo or signaling like antennae to motherships in space. It will take subtle tact to bring him down without incident; you tell her to hand you the Cuervo. As she complies, Max grows disengaged with the loud comedy and stumbles over on his haunches, looking rather rubbery, to the alley to piss.
"Hey, Left!" You call and tip the bottle up high for him to see. "Mind if I polish this off?" Clearly there's enough tequila left to render that challenge impossible, but all the same, he comes zagging in your general direction like you'd tipped Pavlov’s bell instead. You put up no fight when he claims the juice, but still he reacts as though you do, swiping it away with excessive meanness and losing a long wasteful stream.
"Get your figgoty motts off my battle!"
You jump to your feet--taken aback by the sudden radical orbit of your whole world--and throw a blind punch which just so happens to crack him in the collarbone and sear through your knuckles in pain. Naturally, you don't let on. He gasps, wails, and teeters again toward the brink, only this time backwards.
"Look out!" Maddie cries like a spot-on movie extra.
He gives a hell of a show, floundering and wobbling--believable, too, except that he never loses another drop of the sweet stuff. And when he suddenly halts an inch or two from certain paraplegia, there's that lopsidedly juice-pungent grin you were waiting for, aimed especially at Maddie for voicing her concern with such zeal.
Max returns and finds the three of you laughing. He joins in.
About twenty minutes later, Lefty iterates for the second or third time, "Max, you should go get Rudy to join us, he'd love it up here!" Only now his tone is more agitated, having made it a personal mission to uncork one of the wines. Max only smiles mistily but doesn't reply. He's been the minimal contributor to the conversation, which has danced through a succession of topics each briskly forgotten once the next is introduced.
"He must be in bed now," says Maddie. You watch her, as you have been all evening, and spot something maternal in the nature of her smile. Perhaps fat little Rudy is the fringe benefit of her relationship with Max. After the first complete silence in a long time, her eyes flit over to Lefty and his stubborn trials with the Tempranillo. He pauses to suck his thumb, which he's been using to try and jam the cork down into the bottle. No one has felt like purporting how goddamn stupid that is, and now it's throbbing bright red and probably bent weird for life.
"Food Mart must sell corkscrews," she suggests. "They're open until midnight."
Lefty pops his thumb out long enough to state, "I'm not going in there."
You stand, feeling your ligaments yawn. The salt air this high up feels like freedom aboard the bow of a ship, and you're soused enough right now where such eminence is, by all means, legitimate. There are two things you like to do when you're drunk: talk philosophy or wander aimlessly, and you pretty much philosophized yourself out in the nascent stages of this little picnic. "I got to move around a little, I'll go get ours from the van." Meaning the corkscrew.
"Trusty Stubs," commends Lefty, so softly it's more to himself.
"I'll come with."
And then Maddie is on her feet too, swaying slightly but catching herself. Most of her focus goes into meeting everyone's stare head-on with an almost recriminating insouciance. Max emphasizes a yawn. Honky-tonk Pop issues from the chimney and Lefty intercepts, pushing away the wine bottle in disgust with one of his timely rants already cocked in the chamber. "Remember that gas station in, uh, was it Pistol River? Remember passing through there? Can't forget a name like that. It wasn't long after we, yaknow, traded for the van."
While he talks, he nods along to the music, or some innate music overdubbing the memory, and though you're obviously the only one he could be addressing, he stares out past your knees into space.
"Remember? That was the last time we got drunk drunk, I just realized . . . this crazy chick, she was a bona fide soccer mom I swear to God, but she was cool s**t. Filled up her minivan right next to us and, yaknow, she took care of her body and everything . . . Anyway, she came over like a godsend and asked us if we knew some cat named Jerry. I think it was Jerry. She said he lived on a houseboat and that everyone knew him around here. We told her we weren't from around here and were just toolin' around on our summer break from campus" (This with a straight face, as if not part of the woman's delusion but a gospel truth.) "and how somebody back in Frisco must have recognized how innocent we were and clipped our wallets! But luckily, luckily we kept most of our travel funds stashed in the van, right Stubs? . . . So she felt all bad about that and us just wanting to get home to see our families. I forget where we said they lived."
"Eugene."
"Eugene, right. Anyways, I said we just passed a whole fleet of houseboats a few miles back 'cause honest to god we did. Stubs was driving and I looked down over the cliff and there they were, and I think I even said something like how that'd be the life, didn't I Stubs? But really they were all docked so tight together you couldn't rip a*s without your neighbor hearing it. So we offered to backtrack a few miles--it wasn't but a few miles--and show her the spot. Yeah. And in return--us not having wallets and all, and the guy running shop, yaknow, the gas station, being a total dillweed--she bought us two bottles of homegrown Merlot--I mean, our money of course--except for the corkscrew she chipped in herself just in case we didn't have one. Which f**k if we didn't!"
You lock eyes, wanting to determine if he remembers this is the same night he tried to flush himself down a urinal. Lefty breaks away first to take a prodigious draw of tequila and you think you have your answer.
"A nice lady," he goes on. "No bones about it. Said some pretty wild s**t before we left about her son just getting a kidney donor and how she was reveling in the Lord's charity because now he got to live umpty more years. But hey! First Christian I ever met wasn't a total hypocrite." After a moment's bittersweet introspection, he finishes with, "I sure hope she fucked that Jerry guy."
Everyone lends some ingratiating afterthought on the anecdote. Actually, he couldn't have imposed it at a better moment, as it gave you and Max a chance to decrypt Maddie's curveball while pretending to listen; though in all fairness, he had the benefit of not bracing to quench any slippery confessions.
"What time is it?" the emo slurs, even as he goes for his phone.
"Who cares?" Maddie berates him, foreseeing some weak attempt to call it a night. "We can play sick tomorrow. It's not every day exciting new faces are popping up in Port Angie." Max glares at her, too far gone to look half as dour as he thinks he does. It's her turn to ignore him, her words fluttering along like an anxious butterfly. "Great story Lefty. Now, will you keep my Max company and both of you make sure the other one doesn't jump off the roof? Me and Stubs will be right back with the, uh, corkscrew." She turns to you for the first time in a long while, asking pertly, "Are you parked far?"
The boyfriend submits no protest. In fact, he turns away and bores his eyes into Lefty like a monk under intensive tutelage. You're left choking on the weirdness of it all. "Not far," you manage to say and lead her over to the roof's edge, watching yourself mock-argue (cutely) over who should descend first. She cedes and you catch a good look up her skirt, realizing by now that this is all really happening but not sure what you mean by this. You hold her hand as her foot finds the pipe. Over your shoulder, Lefty launches into a delirious scat: "Fee-yabadadeedo-ska-pureeba-mono-no!" that about spikes your blood pressure into the cosmos. You turn around to say something, meeting Max square in the eye. His young face is flushed with stony contempt, and when he opens his mouth, the words "Don't take too--" are curtailed by Lefty's own valediction.
"Yeah! Don't show your a*s back here without them Birkenstocks."