Second Act Blues

"Do you smoke?" She asks. "Oh duh. That's right, yes you do." Her words vaporize in a puff of breath, squashed by the great quietude that reigns over this abscess of buildings called Port Angeles with a dark, wet fist.
Like a softboiled egg nestled with sadistic grace into a vise-grip, so the town sits between sealevel and mountain heights, two antipodal energies ebbing and flowing indefinitely, chipping away at it without pause or remorse and necessitating yearly renovation to the church steeples and classic parlor facades. A five-mile margin onsets at the southern boundary, escalating from there through streams and wildflowers into the craggy foothills of the Olympic peaks. During a lightning attack, the gods of those peaks can be seen huddled in great silhouette over their cribbage boards, crass and farsighted, flushing their heathen waste into the valley of the land where people grin, work, and pray. You answer her in some form or another and she reaches into her burlap purse. Its upholstery is a gritty mosaic of neon handguns: green, purple, blue, and by recondite terms, or at least terms you're too distracted to contemplate now, seems custom-suited to her. Much as Lefty's trucker hat seems custom-suited to him, and ditto for Max with his vanilla stripe. What about you, what is your 'emblem'? The sunglasses, fancifully, a sort of stoic blindness to man's eternal pissing contest. She hands you a whole pack of Marlboros with the plastic still on and when you start to express gratitude, one of those sibilant, weightless whiskeyburps escapes instead.
"Don't mention it," she shrugs. "I quit. I bought that pack a week and a half ago as a 'reserve', you know, just in case I wimp out. But of course there's a good chance I will if I always have some on hand. So f**k it, right? They're yours."
"Well, thanks." You tear two fingernails through the virgin laminate and already the blood in your lips is tingling more than it would if be she had presented a glazed ham. "Aren't you too young to quit smoking?"
"I only started because Max did. Then just as I got hooked, he quit for a little while. He's always 'quitting', just I think because he needs an excuse to be a jerk once in a while. Which I guess we all do. It's actually no big deal for him though. To quit, I mean. For weeks at a time! He can't really be as hooked as he lets on."
You mumble around the one in your lips that "everyone has their pastimes" while your hand goes for a lighter.
"What, smoking?"
"Quitting." You don't know why you said it. Well, yes you do, because you're a dick. And now Maddie's pessimism is effectively stoked.
"It's only a matter of time before he quits me."
Snapping at the wheel ravenously. Suckling the fire like a doomed infant. "If you really feel that way, the smart thing to do--I mean, if you're asking me, which I realize you're not and respect you for that--would be to quit him first . . . what the s**t?" They're menthols. You couldn't tell by the package in the scant light.
"What's the matter?"
"Nothing."
"Don't you like menthols?"
"Huh? No, I like them fine. Makes no difference. It's just your situation. It seems so . . . no offense, dismissible."
"I know it does, but it's complicated."
"Sure about that?"
"I love him."
This was a bad idea, you grimace, alone in the shadows left puffing on a candy cane. Off in the near distance, the derisive impact of waves delving into razorhewn rockbeds and creaking, barnacle-quilted buttresses of the pier reflect your private turmoil. A car turns the corner up ahead. You watch the headlights produce a series of roving, triangular shadows in the declivities of her face. She speaks evenly, keeping in check a latent slur, and squints into each step, leading you to guess she neglects a lens prescription, though she could pull off glasses just fine if she had to. Every so often she missteps and knocks into your shoulder but never all-out staggers and never heeds the error or interrupts herself to apologize.
"I know he doesn't love me. He says he does and maybe he even believes it." Her nostrils flare at your cigarette smoke and you suppose it's an awful tease right now. "But he's so young sometimes. He can't recognize real passion from a stupid impulse. I almost have to be like his mother. At least that's how it feels."
"Fucked up," you offer.
"Yeah, tell me about it. But who am I to judge? As if I know what the hell I want. I have no clue what to do after graduation. Get out of Port, of course. And that's another thing that scares me. Max talks big like he hates this town, but I honestly don't think he's got the ambition to ever leave it. He can't see the point in anything. Like I really admire what you and Lefty are doing. Getting out and seeing the states and meeting people. I've always wanted to go on a real road trip. Not just to the Grand Canyon with my parents, you know? But by myself, or maybe with a couple friends. Even just by myself though."
A frail cone of light collapses from the corner lamppost, hooked like a coathanger. You realize for the first time how familiar all these buildings are and that the street you're about to converge with is Main. There's an empty patch of grass up ahead, pitchblack now except for the foremost blades, but which distends into the park where you first encountered Rudy and his oh-so-topical brother.
Maddie nurses a sad pause. With her mouth shut, she's a vision of opalescence. Her long strands of hair are patched with copper under the lamp's throbbing wattage, their tips forming boundlessly into her hood's fur trim, and the shoulders of her coat are mottled with short, discrepant white hairs, estimably from a pet. Although she appears cold, you're perfectly comfortable in just a shirt and vest. The booze orgy simmers like a wet furnace in your gut. "Are you cold?"
"No," she replies offhandedly.
You turn left onto Main.
The Astro can be seen as a lonesome black nodule parked four or five blocks ahead, a great enough distance to vanquish your hopes of leaving Maddie to her thoughts and striding the last phase in silence. It would be sheer masochism to let her get dibs on changing the subject, so you'd better think of something fast--anything at all--before . . . "So what do you and Lefty do in Laguna Beach when the camera crew's not around? Go to college, he said. What for?"
That megalomaniacal b*****d. College! You might be tempted to laugh if everything wasn't so ugly. Literally. It feels like you've stepped into the wrong theater to watch the wrong movie and are only staying put out of courtesy to your fellow viewers--being Lefty, in this analogy. Maddie is the feature, at least the only part worth sticking it out for, like that one sexy actress in your mother's chick flick that makes it endurable; or better yet, your grandmother's 1940s musical. Honestly, look at this town! Any second now it'll start raining milk and Gene Kelly will jig out from around the corner wielding a parasol like some softshoe buccaneer. The architecture isn't architecture at all but mere unstable skins, and the only reason you're looking at them now is because Lefty wanted to sit this town through to the second act and try writing the third himself.
"Architecture," your lips blurt. It's all your musings manifest, but now you sound like George Castanza. Too late comes the realization how good you had it before: bunging her boy troubles. Gruel, sure, but risk-free gruel. And yes it's a ridiculous lie but does she have to laugh? Which one of you has the upper hand of sobriety anyway? She's a poser, like Lefty! A common lowlife.
When you don't elaborate, she makes matters worse with a cocky pretense of gullibility. "Cool. So, you both just decided to steal a van one day and head north, or where are you headed?"
"The van's not hot. Lefty only likes to toy with people's minds and make them wonder about things." The denial is totally reflexive, but maybe not feckless . . .
"Ah, 007 syndrome, I'm familiar with that. Max is the same way. Has to make everyone think there's this whole dungeon of personality beneath what he shows day to day. It definitely roped me in, and I do still believe there's something under there I'm never getting at, but, who knows?"
"If there is, I'm sure it's not interesting enough to warrant half the effort you've put in."
She surfeits another sigh. "You're probably right."
Never too low to sink lower, maybe that's her problem. Rather than suggest this, you ask how long they've been dating. Keep this Max talk up. It's obviously very cathartic for her, and why not f**k that kid over while you're in town? Maddie's got blueribbon looks, an average intellect, and could clearly be getting her hormones sated by a much higher pedigree of boyfriend.
"It'll be three years in August. August 12," she adds and blushes at herself.
She insists how much he wanted her at first. How, in the beginning, she'd even had her sights set on another guy one grade their senior but decided to give Max a shot because he was so shy, yet so persistent, and above all wrote her poetry.
Good poetry too, goes the story.
Then, after a "rocky patch", he fell away. There was nothing gradual about it, hence there was no kidding herself over the culpable factor. In her own blaringly cryptic way, Maddie tells how she'd hoped this factor, this "common experience", would be the glue to bind their hearts together forever, and not the complete opposite . . . You don't really have to pry to see the whole picture. You just have to wade unwontedly through a sort of righteous nausea. There's a rueful tremor in Maddie's voice that has probably been there since the day Max's eyes welled with fear and told her Hell No. She recalls taking so long to make up her own mind that he actually had to start lending her his loose hoodies or else people would have noticed.
To summarize Maddie's long, boring lament, in the end, common sense--and inversely, Max--won over. Thank god, she doesn't seem to be fishing for condolences, but still you're tempted to point out how her slender hips could not have withstood a delivery without maximum anguish, plus possible lasting trauma or deformation, and the alternative would've meant a garish Caesarian scar; though neither choice, in retrospect, was without its scars. To date, no one suspects a thing. Except of course the practitioners and secretaries, all town residents, and Max's older cousin, who loaned them the money from British Columbia. Best friends were even left in the dark, and so Maddie's final worry is that when Max does combust this freak excuse for a relationship, they "just won't understand all the facts". She's a realist, however corrupt of one; she knows her days with Max are numbered. But she gives him too much credit in thinking he'll one day draw her aside to spell things out. You want to explain that if he had those kinds of balls, he would have used them already. You want to tell her if he's not f*****g someone on the sly yet, he'll start soon or commit a different transgression. Knowing in a town this size she'll find out. Needing her, by some weakness you can't even imagine, to be the one to break it off. But then who died and made you the harbinger of pragmatism?
"Have you ever been in love, Stubs?"
"No."
"I don't believe you." Though of course she does. "Well what's your real name? At least tell me that."
You finish off your cigarette, watching the band of the filter curl into a blackorange squiggle. In time, Maddie gives up any hope of an answer. There's a million different names you could tell her, but this way seems less insulting. Hopefully she sees it that way too and stops expecting anything more from you than the physical fact of your company.
Entrenched breezes continuously batter a set of bamboo windchimes strung from the awning of an arts & crafts store. As you pass, oversized thread spools and garden gnomes stand in the window upon some Velcro-looking turf. Abreast in the background is Elvira's twin sister, only clothed and posed differently.
Maddie grabs your arm.
"Stubs, we can be 100% open with each other, right?" She is either smiling or cringing. Judging from her eyes alone, you'd guess the former.
"Sure seems that way."
She bites her bottom lip, twisting at the hips in a strange manner, and whispers loud enough anyone prowling on the roof could hear, "I gotta pee so bad you wouldn't believe!"
You return her stare blankly for a moment before turning away to flick your menthol and survey the street, not spying so much as an interior glow much less an open facility with public restrooms. Furthermore, none of the alleyways are wide enough to sit down in. "I don't know what to tell you."
"Don't you have to go? You haven't gone all night either. I notice these things."
"Guess my bladder's just king size."
"Oh, f**k!" Maddie squeals, bouncing up and down (to the disadvantage of her plight), a vexingly different person than two minutes ago. But the needs of the body nullify the needs of the soul any day, despite what poets like Max say. "--It just came on real bad all of a sudden." You wonder if you'd be out of line asking her to say f**k again. Never did the word sound so crisp and foreign. Just when you thought all of its incisive power had been castrated by time and tradition, she comes along with a new dialect.
"Say f**k again."
"I'm serious, Stubs!"
"Then piss on the curb. I'll keep lookout."
"Out here in the open? No way, there's too many windows."
All the upper dwellings look like giant brick slot machines hunkered in the moonlight, the slots being tall, inverted, rectangular windows that probably aren't a problem at this hour, provided Maddie hasn't woken everyone up with her shrill pleas and expletives. You drag her along towards your primary goal, the van.
"Stubs," she insists. "I really have to go!"
Pointing. "You can go behind there."
"Oh, Jesus." But she does quicken her pace and even passes you by, clopping across the asphalt in those shiny ballet slippers and laughing with her hands raised girlishly to her shoulders, long hair swaying like a moss veil. She makes as much noise as a f*****g showpony, still very drunk but seemingly able to turn it on and off with a switch when the picture gets too sloppy or too bleak.
Now that's the sort of girl one has to fear.
The cobblestone courtyard pans into view on your left, where you sat watching the sun dip just two or three hours ago.
"Wait here!" Maddie darts around the side of the van touching the curb and shrouded in a steep black angle. You creep up to the bumper and prop yourself there as you strike up another Marlboro. Now that you have them, you can't help but waste them . . . Burn them all up before Lefty can demand proration . . . You seem to remember him digging menthols once or twice.
Outside First National Bank, the flag snaps like a pair of cloth fingers, and the salmon effigies of the courtyard are an abstract silhouette you could never decipher in this late hour if you didn't already know better. None of the "precious futures" mural can be seen behind the scaffolding's camouflage of pronged, vascular shadows. A single pole spotlights the scene, sketching mossy blue blotches in the contours of the stairway and cracks between the stones. After much delay, a sprinkling of piss resounds. Maddie cups her embarrassed giggles; you can tell by the inconsistent way her stream wavers. Then she must catch sight of your cigarette smoke drifting beyond the fenders or something since she moans, "Oh my god f**k off Stubs you creeper!"
"What? If I was across the street I could hear you just as well. Good god, are we going to be here all night?"
"Get away!" She's trying to sound mad but can't help laughing because she can't stop peeing.
You oblige by crossing the street and incorporating yourself to the ghostly tableau of the courtyard. Just that quick, extraneous walk reminds you how sick of walking you really are. More specifically, making the same old rounds and winnowing off your so-called freedom on the same old streets. You have the van, why wait around for Lefty? If it came right down to it, could you do that to him? Sure. But not here. Maybe in the big city, someplace he could more easily dissolve and find others like him. Secure some sort of bankroll. Room and board by the graces of a synagogue if he could prove his lineage. After this last hearty binge (you hope), he'll be ready to go anyway. You wonder what misogynous array of topics him and Max have spanned by now and whether Max poured his heart out like Maddie did to you. The very idea makes you chuckle. The downside is, after he's cussed out Max for being an ingenuous dipshit, Lefty will probably break his leg scrambling off the roof to find you, which might prove providential, because if he doesn't break his leg he'll go and get himself arrested on the street. And then it absolutely and ineluctably will be "sayonara Lefty!" No regrets. Well, maybe only that it's nice never having to stop; driving in shifts and remaining peripatetic, like falcons. The trail is still so warm after all, and Jesus, you've wasted so much time already . . .
"Hey, Stubs. All set."
You turn around to find her slumped against the driverside door, long legs crossed and curling her hair around one finger in a sheepish fashion. "All set", you love it! You're about to give her s**t when a brilliant light slashes across her surprised expression, erupting from the corner on your left. The car's slithering velocity is evidence enough, but you squint a moment to verify indeed that there's a rack of red and blue lights affixed to its roof.
The cop eases his or her brakes as you plod across the street, cutting through the white glare of their lowbeams.
With sickening immediacy, all the tallies against you start racking up: No driver's license (i.e. identification of any sort). That will undoubtedly be the first question. What next? A stolen van . . . A stolen van full of pills, stolen money, and don't forget the quarter-ounce of shwag (rolled into a pair of socks when you found it but god only knows where it's wound up since). Stolen f*****g everything . . . Then there's the illegitimate plates you and Lefty swapped off that Mazda parked outside a Sheri's just over the Oregon border . . . So this is how it ends. No glamorous freeway chase or canyon shootout, hell no. Caught waiting for your new emo playmate to finish pissing on the curb outside a tai chi studio.
Maddie, as a town resident, is better qualified to address this sort of thing. You shoot her a look as you pass by, not sure yourself what you mean it to convey just so long as she understands there is gravity to the situation and she should play all her smartest, soberest, and if need be, flirtiest cards imaginable. A policeman climbs out from behind the wheel. You've casually propped yourself against the hood in a daft scheme to block the front license plate from view.
"Good evening, officer Punditte!" Maddie greets brightly.
"Why, hello Maddie."
So far so good. Meanwhile, you shuffle through a catalog of facial expressions: Amiable? Sleepy? Bored? Curious? Nothing seems able to depose your twitching contempt and neurosis.
Punditte is 30-something and looks like he still takes care of himself. You've noticed a pattern with cops that the 20 year-olds, the newbloods, are of course charismatic patriots when they first join the force. Their hair is usually spiked like some video game commando and they've still got a lot to prove in the weight room. With seniority comes a pretentious sense of entitlement wherein one stops judging theirself and simply judges the sleeve decorations, never mind how many under-the-counter upgrades of that sleeve size one had to request. This one, this Punditte, he's caught right between: probably still has an ab outline and knows he's got further to go before he can stop trying and start treating everyone like confluent s**t.
His tone seems genuinely bereft of suspicion when he asks Maddie what she's up to tonight, and there's an implicit smalltown intimacy that could very well end up saving your a*s. Whenever his eyes dart over on you--which is too often--you're sure to smile back, and you must pull it off well because he reciprocates with a nod every time. Cops, always saluting. He's got moonshaped eyes and a sandy crewcut, inside of which his ears perch exceptionally high.
"Oh, nothing much sadly," answers Maddie. Her coolness both astounds and impresses, so used are you to dealing with Lefty's untempered antagonism, even before she takes the necessary (and you can't stress 'necessary' enough) initiative to pursue a baldfaced lie: "I'm trying to convince my cousin Jesse here this isn't a totally lame town to live in. Maybe you can vouch for me." Then she swings her head around and flashes you a bright familial smile. As you return said smile, you also shrug an innocent shrug for Punditte's benefit, courtesy of Maddie's unconvinced cousin.
"Ah, you should've dropped by on a weekend," he addresses you now. "Or next week for the 4th of July up here. We've got a fireworks display the whole state talks about. Where you from?"
"Bend," you say. "Bend, Oregon."
"Don't say? I got a sister in Bend."
Of course he does. "Oh? What's her name?" For some reason, you've been holding the menthol down at your side but don't want Punditte to think you're 'hiding it' or else he will ask for identification, so you raise the filter proudly to your lips and take a long healthy drag, maintaining your attentive smirk through the smoke.
"Cassandra. Cassandra Punditte."
You shake your head in apology. "Nope, doesn't ring a bell."
"Ah well," he shrugs. "That's a nice town you got down there, Bend, I've been there many a time."
So have you, and that's why you picked it (in league with the Oregon plates), because you know you could field any general questions about Bend's layout or characteristics. Not that he asks any. As soon as it feels semi-natural, he moves right along to the subject of the van. "Say kids, I don't mean to hassle you" (that's the word he uses: hassle--he's hassling you) "but I couldn't help notice this van's been parked here since I started making my rounds at 8 o'clock, and I was starting to wonder whether I shouldn't call it in. It's really no big deal now that I know the score, Maddie. I assume, Jesse, this is your van?"
"Yes sir."
"We'll move it right away, officer Punditte, I'm sorry!" Maddie repents. "We were just doing the grand tour, which as you know, takes a little while on foot. But we had fun, didn't we cuz?"
"You bet."
She beams at Punditte. "It'll be parked at our place tonight of course."
"Of course." He's acting agreeable, but this dick seems to have ulterior notions. Even while Maddie speaks, he keeps trained on you. Waiting to ask, "Now which side of the family are you from, Jesse? Jack or Debra's?"
"Debra, sir." Adding needlessly, "She's my aunt."
"Ah, well, I was real sorry to hear about your uncle Hugh. That's a real shame right there, especially at his age."
"Oh, I know. Thank you sir. Thanks very much . . . did you know him?"
Maddie clears her throat, stares at her feet, threads some hair behind her ears. A meaningless jumble of tense body language.
"No, I'm sorry to say I didn't," Punditte shakes his head. "But Debra is a good friend of mine. I've known her for six years, ever since I transferred over from Port Townsend. Be sure to tell her hello from me if she's still up when you kids get home."
"We will," Maddie promises, and the words sound too obviously propelled by a sigh of relief.
Punditte plants one foot back in his squad car. Its door was left open the whole time. "Don't stay out too late now. Remember it's a school night. Jesse, it was a pleasure to meet you."
"You too, sir."
"Goodnight, Maddie."
"Goodnight, officer Punditte."
He shuts the door and lingers for a moment in his seat before shifting gears but doesn't go for the radio or even look up from an unknown article in his lap until it's time to wave goodbye. Only then do you step away from the plate, watching Punditte turn the next corner onto an inclined bystreet. The car's long body is meticulously waxed, probably a daily ritual between scribbling parking violations and catching hooky players. You feel almost disappointed, like you deserved a better match; someone who'd at least seen a gunshot wound that wasn't inflicted by suicide, or who could tell the difference between Mexican and Afghani heroin by sight. Two sinister red taillights blink out of sight. If you'd been out here on your own, things would have gone different.
"I want to move the van," you voice brusquely, stomping out your cigarette and budging past Maddie for the door. She says she understands. "I think I know just the spot too. Climb in." You'll thank her later . . .
Out the corner of your eye, though, you can't help but notice how she hesitates for a fraction of time before complying.

Reviews

[wyrd]

I have nothing usfull to say about your writting. Dang it, I enjoy this I love the way you describe things and your dialogue and I so want to say somthing smart and insightful. but ahh well, I love it will have to do