Bark at the Moon

 

At the top of the stairs lay a quiet residential patch of moonlit lawns and white plastic houses. Nobody stirs. The night is ruled by inanimate chatter. A few flags clank elsewhere on poles, prouder this time of year. Blue swaths of light spill out picture windows across sidewalks, and the spring-loaded hiss of a screen door stalls for a few dramatic seconds before slamming shut, startling the crickets' hymn into brief subsidence. Lampposts are spaced few and far between. Besides porchlights and the like, the interim is mostly shadow, though the only homes totally dark at this hour are those with realtor signs spiked out front. From where you stand, you can count three. Even the moon is just a waning sickle. Against the sundry black noise, one ingredient stands above the rest.
You exchange glances. Its source lay somewhere just beyond the threshold of the nearest lamp, so whatever is steadily coming or going down this longitudinal road called Beecher remains invisible. Up here, the wind is dampened by two-story box frames and a shelf of maples barricading the plateau's view of downtown. Their leaves rustle in sleazy excitement, like men crinkling dollars at a strip club. The noise progresses, engendering a shrill perpetuity like the rotation of loose casters. You pace yourselves to meet it halfway. A bicycle, a stroller, a little red wagon? Anything slow and tremulous. Once the lamppost is behind you and your eyes adjust, gradually a figment assimilates. Someone lowbuilt or crouched, pushing his their burden ahead of them; and the weary scuffling tread of footsteps gets more and more defined before, definitively, it halts.
Whoever it is must have spotted you. Lefty hollers an impudent "Oi!" but the shape doesn't respond. Nor does it retreat. Nor resume its funereal procession. A short, rasping breath carries across the divide, however; harried and asthmatic sounding, too tired to go on at present. Lefty eggs you forward, content to ride your heels rather than take precedence himself. You could swear the jarring squeal of rusty wheels still sings like a cochlear defect even though the object responsible--a grocery cart, now that your eyes adjusted--stands immobile in the clutch of its driver.
Neighborhood life carries on in its plotted cubicles. Many a potential widescreen view onto your encounter is neglected for spastic LCD visions instead. Only a kitten languishing over the backrest of a sofa watches, quite impartially, this clandestine Meeting of the Tramps. On one side, you and Lefty. On the other, some rustic caricature of a sooty old St. Nick. The bank must have foreclosed on his sleigh and eight tiny reindeer, so now he makes the yuletide rounds less majestically and starts much earlier on in the year. He wears an ankle-length jacket, stripped of fluff lining, and a limp beanie so high over his ears that the excess crown stands upright in hollow alert. As close as you get, he offers no address except that same arduous breathing--more of a panting, really--which illustrates, in your mind's eye, his lungs as being riddled with pinholes, bubbling out viscid green fluid on every exhale. He keeps his head lowered, renouncing eye contact, striving to stay still as a snow rabbit when the fox (or foxes) comes trawling by. Nothing about him would turn heads hundreds of miles away in a town, say, like Eugene, or anywhere bigger than that, but in this moment you're aware of those same clouded vibes of displacement as you felt back in the 'Costume Shop'. There is definitely another side to the coin, so to speak: a subcutaneous poverty which Port Angeles authorities allow only the most ephemeral of existences, and even that with utmost reluctance, you'd guess, since the Twilight tourist influx.
Your three bodies form the points of an isosceles triangle. The further you tilt your head to try and catch a glimpse of his face, the further he drops his long beard with mirrored control into the high collar of his jacket. The grocery cart's shallow contents are hidden by a tarp, but a putrid smell of dumpster trimmings percolates through. At one point, Lefty brazenly starts to fold up one corner but has at least enough sense to draw back when the bum adjusts his menacing respiratory flux into a low growl. Not a "f**k off" but a bona fide growl. All the same, his body stays stonily detached and his mouth never leaves the warm scoop of his collar.
"Oh geez." Lefty points at the ground from his new prudent vantage point a few steps back. "He's barefoot, Stubs, look."
For some illogical reason, you want to tell him to lower his voice, though really there's nothing excessive about its volume. It's just your own brain counseling you to whisper, as if you're not dealing with some crotchety vag but a half-sedated panther. His tallowy feet indeed glow like whitebread loaves against the pavement, ten horny toes squirming self-consciousness as he grunts another disclaimer of phlegmatic gargling, This one's definition is less blunt to construe, but there may be a note of entreaty. Even the June night is not so comfortable to warrant naked feet, and supposing it was, you still couldn't write them off as the vag's leisurely prerogative . . . just as you can't imagine why Lefty is hopping up and down on one foot right now along the curbside, threatening to break his neck.
The hobo throws him a sidelong stare too, growing more uneasy.
"There's another pair in the van," Lefty explains, back on both legs. "Some pretty fly Birkenstocks, remember?" With that, he drops Troy Doogan's Chuck Taylors onto the tarp with less reverence than a w***e's aborted fetus. The hobo is resolutely indifferent. He stares at the shoes like they've been there the whole time or are even some audacious defilement of his musty tarp. Lefty taps his toe a few moments, grows disgusted, and shortly stalks off. You shrug and follow. A bum is just a bum after all, whatever his coordinates. Not until you're a full block away does the cart resume its song.

Beecher Blvd. curves inward, tracing the uniform subdivision, but you and Lefty eagerly desert it, straying over a grass median into a well-lit parking lot for Food Mart. The place boasts Open 'Til Midnight and Your 1-Stop Shopping Money Saver in ostentatious neon, making it hard to resist even if nothing about your financial status has changed and it goes without saying that to step inside could only incur trouble.
Lefty prances ahead with deliberate effeminacy, agile on his toes, which are surely no less calloused and unkempt than the hobo's ever were. Complete with the horn, he strikes one as a sort of slumdog pixy. The Iso-carbo-oxy-zoid or whatever is peaked inside his system. Maybe a normal person couldn't tell the difference, but you two have ridden long enough now where you can differentiate between his hairline hemispheres of standard indiscretion and transcendental mania. Lefty has built up enough of an immunity--or perhaps tolerance would be the more clinically permissible jargon--to scripts of all kinds (mainly amphetamines, which ironically he needs the least), so that a generous dosage of moderate-strength medication will only stoke him two shades brighter than he would otherwise burn. You've always envisioned that upon absorption into Lefty's system, the drug pauses, agape, so misled by the already scintillating synapses and hot-to-the-touch nervestalks that it draws a vocational blank on how to proceed . . . Part of it's the Jew in him, an implacable people: half mad really, and lastingly traumatized. But Lefty is a million miles beyond that, more equivalent to a shark in that he'd die if he ever totally stopped moving. He charges ahead until sleep intervenes like an overloaded automaton. To this day, he is psychologically challenged by all he sees, and while that might evoke ambition in a more scholastic mind, in Lefty it forges only trenchant bewilderment and scorn.
Though to be arbitrary, what has he seen that 'more scholarly minds' have not? Even you don't know. During your many months of acquaintence, the topic of the past (exempting rare outbursts against some scapegoat relative) has never arisen.
"No one lives long enough to have a future," he declared once in one of his more pedantic, wine-addled moods. "They're born with their pasts lain out before them."
"So you're a determinist."
"What's a determinist?"
You explained.
"S**t no, that's what the rest of 'em are! I'm not saying the past is . . . colored in yet, I'm just saying it's there."
"Because by past, you mean future . . ?"
"I told you," he sighed. "There is no future."
Everything under the sun seems to him to be an icon of defensive vanity, sometimes in the regular aesthetic sense, but mostly a conceptual one, such as religion, rank, politics, etc. Defensive against what, one might ask? Why that ubiquitous decay that is man's universe, of course; or at least the only quality of the universe one is genetically predestined to savor. And so knowing this (or believing he knows this), Lefty 'loves' nothing. Naturally. The word itself might vaguely exist from the annals of a storybook some wet nurse read him long ago but got enlisted among other words like 'soap', 'broccoli', 'feces', in the same tactile class. His whole sequence of existence is a sleepless, vicious, vomitous thunderclap of frustration for having been forced to live at all. Sort of a reverse poltergeist. Suicide, in Lefty's eyes, is synonymous with birth, and having theoretically committed a second suicide, he is horrorstruck over what he may encounter next. (Case in point, after paging through a few of Troy Doogan's Buddhist essays on reincarnation, he about s**t his pants in despair.) Contradictly, said pissy existentialism is really what makes the b*****d such a cheap thrill . . .
Most of the cart corrals are empty. Only a dozen or so vehicles are parked toward the very front of the lot. The bottom portion of the store's facade is all windows, sectioned by steel and tinted, so that at this hour an inverse surveillance of all clerk activities is easy just by loitering out front. A cement patio conjoining the entrance and exit supports a few slatted crates of various melons, their prices marker-scrawled on yellow cardboard. You pass through the automatic doors into a vestibule stacked with shopping carts and from there try to keep to the store's fringes. Only register 4 has its number lit. A bored teenager with a nametag flips through the magazine rack at the end of his row. He doesn't look up as the two of you follow the depleted display cases of an after-hours deli. Billy Joel croons "Downeaster Alexa" on the loudspeakers. Emptying your pockets, the net profit from the salmon fountain, plus Rudy's gratuity, is $2.85 cents, barely enough for a box of Saltines. Lefty won't hear a word about waiting outside while you filch some vacuum-sealed sandwiches from the deli rack, though you try explaining you're nervous about his feet.
"Two of us can carry more," he insists, when just at that moment a very managerial looking cat in a short tie and collar rounds the corner. Maybe it's just because you're so put out to see him that you notice right away he has a set of the most unattractively puckered eyes you've ever seen and nostrils the size of kidney beans. Plus that red vest makes him look like an outsized valet boy. On one wrist is a gilt wristwatch, just another shimmering last effort to hyperbolize his rank. He attunes instantly to Lefty's barefeet and the black parade of simian tracks trailing him inside. "Hey, son!" Pointing up and away at some undefined girder. "You can't be in here like that. Go on now, scoot." He sort of leans into his stride like Groucho Marx; an inflexible, halfwit rhinoceros.
"Scoot?" Lefty echoes. Neither of you give an inch.
"Come on, come on!"
His arms are spread now and he's physically herding you towards the putative entrance you just came through. Lefty keeps slanting in the direction of the merchandise and the manager keeps reeling him back, at which point you lag behind a few paces. When he turns to fetch you, Lefty strays off again. An infuriating ballet.
"Hey Kent, check out this guy's feet!" Groucho guffaws at the acne-plagued cashier, who has never confabulated with his boss and isn't about to start now. A woman and her old mother reach the aisle with a loaded shopping cart, warily eyeing the manager's stressed politesse. Under the store fluorescence, everyone is dying of jaundice.
"Hiii-yah!" Lefty shrieks, and the next thing you hear is a bombardment of aluminum cans smacking the tiles. You whirl around in time to see him lower his leg from a Judo stance and a shelf wiped clean, sizing up his captor with a demented grin probably meant to bear some semblance of charm. Improvised decision making is not one of the manager's job requisites, so you have plenty of time to unleash yourself on a cardboard endcap of Twilight DVDs; this entails ripping off a lifesized pop-up of the brunette heroine and using her body as a Louisville Slugger to bowl over the rest. The display crumples under your feet, several plastic cases skating fanwise across the floor, while cashier no. 4 and his patrons gawk from their perfunctory fog. The manager finally digs one of his claws into your clavicle, but you shrug him off violently and sprint for the doors, taking for granted that Lefty is right behind you.
Outside, the cool night tingles against your cheeks, pounding with blood and vigor as you blur past the cars, superfluously hurdling a few of them Dukes Of Hazzard style. Lefty is whooping it up. His bare soles slap on the pavement like a painful succession of bellyflops. A crater of stars twinkles in the iron cloudshell. Fireflies suspended in blue jelly. Bordering the far end of the parking lot is a mulch bed crammed with 7'-tall fir trees. You tuck your head like a linebacker and plow between two trunks, coming to a stand-still on the other side. Lefty appears three feet over.
You each sit down on the curb overlooking a bystreet that winds into the parking lot of some dark edifice that could be a dentist's office. From up here, on a sort of shaded knoll, one can observe the comings and goings on the main road that passes Food Mart. Lefty is confident you have nothing to worry about, that the stooges in the store will just sweep up the mess and try to pretend nothing so disruptive ever happened. Asserting his calm, he blasts a few euphoric bars into the trumpet and the village absorbs them like nourishing sunrays. At some point, it comes to your attention that your duo is now a trio--Kristen Stewart has managed to tag along. The body you ripped off the movie display lay between you. She is understandably bent from how you manhandled her, but none too worse for wear or tear. At the sight of that, you can't stop laughing. Then neither can Lefty. He rolls on top and begins kissing her staid, irresponsive lips with enough passion to bulwark a whole orgy, still buckling so uproariously he's got to clutch his side. Nothing's really funny--it's all just too much. What with your widescale predicament, you shouldn't be having this much fun. You should be prowling sewers and crevices, sleeping in dirty barns, rising before the rooster and cutting out on backroads, i.e., making as little noise as possible).
"Lefty." Once the mirth settles. "A man named Santayana once said, 'That life is worth living is the most necessary of assumptions, and, were it not assumed, the most impossible of conclusions'. Give me your thoughts on that."
He is quiet for so long you decide he's not listening. Just as well. You don't know why it popped in your head just now except for this toxic sense of impunity which is owed to adrenaline and will pass. Then he goes, "That's some awful heavy s**t, man. Too heavy. From his music I'd have guessed him to have sort of a more mystic outlook, wouldn't you?"
You can't be sure, but you think he thinks you meant Santana.
A pair of figures appear over the hump of the sidewalk running perpendicular to your curb. Young skinny silhouettes, one of each sex, bantering faintly, their voices lost and recovered by the wind. When you squint, the taller of the two takes on a dubious familiarity. A name buds on the tip of your tongue, still warm from its last recital but so disheveled are your thoughts that they actually need Lefty's help in order to coalesce. He's picking out pebbles from the tar-stained soles of his feet when, like a wolf catching scent of timid blood, his attention mimics yours. "I'll be damned--" One hand keeps massaging the foot. "Hey, homey!" This makes the strangers halt in their tracks and he mutters aside to you, "It's Mark."
"Who?"
But in that same moment, a passing headlight accentuates on the male character a platinum-blonde streak. The couple stands peering dumbly at the fir trees until Lefty jumps up and flags them over with poor Ms. Stewart's ravaged body, yelling, "Looky who we found!" Max explains something to the startled girl and, taking her hand, leads the way over. She plods at a reluctant speed and Lefty jeers her impatiently. Though he's free to meet them halfway he would rather skip and pace like a golden retriever ecstatic to see its owners back from vacation. You know you bore him. A smirk on Max's face grows wider as they draw near. Lefty's eccentricity will probably earn him society points and make him a man of the world in his girlfriend's eyes without ever having to set foot outside of town.
When he opens his mouth, it's evident he's playing it considerably more chilled out and affable than at the park. "You rockstars are still bumming around Port Angie?" He tosses his bangs aside with a neurotic flick of the head, failing to introduce or even acknowledge whoever hangs at his side one or two steps back. Lefty doesn't speak. The Twilight cutout strikes even him as a sad joke beside the appearance of Max's little trophy, though anatomically, they're quite similar. If she was thin from a distance, up close she's utterly porcelain. Bloodless and brittle, yet tapped into an alternative--and admittedly superior--life source.
"Where'd you find that?" asks Max. Identical to the question you were silently asking him.
When Lefty answers, his voice thick is with saliva. "She found us."
Max's eyes land on you for a coherent explanation. When you offer none, they momentarily seem to falter in their self-assurance. "Guys, this is Maddie." He actually draws her forward like a prize mare, or his extremely sensitive ward. "Maddie, these are, um, some people from the park I think I told you about."
She smiles, and it's a confident smile--immensely attractive, why deny? She pantomimes a quick limp wave as if you were gnats, her first words directed at Lefty. "Where are your shoes?"
Her own feet are adorned in some sort of cutesy ballet slipper. They even have silver buckles, and stemming out of them are her legs, striped in lace nudity by semi-transparent black stockings. They're long and straight with no discernible kneecaps. The hem of a purple pleated mini skirt is just visible under her long black-nylon jacket. Her hands are in the jacket's pockets, her shoulders bunched, and you can tell she's the kind of girl who is chronically cold, weather notwithstanding.
Lefty retorts, "I gave them to a ghost." From anyone else it would sound like an inane attempt to be clever. He just sounds like your run-of-the-mill weird kid and you can't imagine why he wouldn't want to talk up the one selfless act committed in his life.
Maddie, to her credit, never misses a beat, leading you to presume Max must say a lot of stupid s**t. "Hmm. What would a ghost want with your shoes?"
Lefty enjoys being talked to like a child, and whatsmore, he's aware that he does and is maybe even embarrassed by it, so he takes pains to keep his face virile and blank, shrugging her off in a cryptic way. "Who can say?"
She looks at you now, then back to him. "Where are you guys from?"
His simpering lips twitch. They produce nothing. Even though he is acutely trained on her, you can feel his energy begging you to man the podium. For some reason, a sexual tension has welled up too great to wade through since he's the only one wading. Funny as it is, if you don't acquiesce quickly, he might say something tactless, like how long it's been since he laid a girl his own age.
"Laguna Beach."
They raise their eyebrows at you in amusement or disbelief or something like both.
"No kidding?" Maddie laughs. "Like where MTV films that spring break thing?"
"You bet!" Lefty pipes up, recalibrated and rearing to stealing your thunder. "We're regulars, we go every year. MTV actually comes find us at this point. They want sort of like a Where's Waldo? gimmick for the poor schmucks out in Wisconsin, except it's Where's Lefty? Yaknow, if the television viewing audience comes to recognize us over time, it's like reuniting with old friends. All marketing strategy. Those corporate hogs have psychologists on the payroll telling them where to hang signs and who should stand where. Pretty outrageous. Every year they call us up: the regulars, with a few new faces tossed in. For the most part, though, they want that All-American, Vision of California look. Big bronze, bodacious, tight-abbed studs and skanks from the county, see? Douse them in free Bacardi and let the money print itself. I was lucky to get in at all, what with my condition. See, I have a rare form of muscular atrophy that will kill me in the long run. Or maybe even the short run, who knows? I'm the same as anybody, and pretty strong too, considering. Stubs here can't tan, poor m**********r. Must be that Scotch blood--you're Scotch, right? Man, I've done all sorts of crazy s**t there I'm not proud of. On camera and behind the scenes, right Stubs? Good ol' Laguna Beach. No regrets though! Nuh-uh, it's a blast . . ."
She's got these indigo eyes that belong on some gypsy's charm bracelet. Dusted and incensed by coppery cosmetics, wreathed in lashes any girl would murder for, they're done up more modest than Max's and exude a cinematic light that sharpens the distinction of every grass blade at her feet, but only if one goes out of their way to notice. The sole detail overtly emo about her ensemble is a Hello Kitty barrette clasping her bangs in place, otherwise they would fall in long sheets past her face like a muddy rain, hiding the pleasant gemstone architecture of her skull--all soft planes and angles, her cheekbones either poignantly blushed or burnt by the wind, and her lips, almost too plump for her face, colored a nacreous rose (naturally, you think, but what the hell do you know?) like the inner fold of a conch shell. You stare until your studiousness backfires when you notice how deftly she wrangles that patient, mirror-studied smile in check.
Almost ruining her for you.
An unmarked car pulls slowly onto the bystreet so Max and Maddie have to step up on the grass. You watch it pull a benign U-turn in the dental parking lot and drive back out, but you're seated too low to make out a driver. Lefty never so much as takes a breath. He drops Laguna Beach only when you stab him in the ribs with your elbow. Instantly, Max affects an expression suggesting some freshly-sparked epiphany, when it's obvious he's been waiting the whole time for Lefty to finish so he could say just this:
"Hey, are you guys 21?" It's the most personality he's exhibited thus far.
"F**k you think?" Lefty chides, still haughty from his interruption.
"Cool, cool. Could you like, score us some booze? It's not quite 8 and, uh, we'll pay you obviously."
"With interest," Maddie adds shrewdly, though she gets a look from Max.
"Well, see, the thing is," Lefty fumbles. "We don't have IDs."
Max frowns. "How about a driver's license?"
"Don't need 'em," you say. It's hard not to smile at his stark incomprehension.
Maddie (with, if you're not mistaken, a hint of wonder) concludes, "You guys drove all the way here from Laguna Beach with no driver's licenses?"
"Yeah, well, we don't really buy into that bureaucracy bag too much," Lefty sniffs. "Never did us no good, right Stubs?"
You: "Sure, we can get you liquor."
Max: "Really?"
Lefty: "Really?"
Maddie just keeps on smiling.

Reviews

[Doc Macabre]

don't worry wyrd. i think the same exact thing reading yours, no s**t.

[wyrd]

man do I hate people who are so good at their craft they make me feel all a fool for even trying. But even if I do have to hate you just a little bit I love the way you use words.