A Mirror of Before and After - CHAPTER XXI
By Frank Moore circa 1970s
“You better give me the money,” Carol told Moe, who was running up the tower steps to change the record. “That’s why I came today. Don’t ask me why I am doing it, or how I made up my mind. I didn’t. But there is nothing I want to do, and Frank does need a ride home.”
“Couldn’t we just go … send the money and go? Louise will wire me some more,” I said. It was getting too complicated, and time has the ability to stretch out while you are taking care of things. I would never have gotten to D.C. in the first place if I’d started thinking how hard the bus ride would be or how dangerous carrying dope was. Other people did that for me … thinking and worrying. Trying to talk sense into me. Sorry, it can’t be done.
If I took all of the precautions, then that would be all there would be to do … taking precautions … not doing things, going places. I rarely look realistic. I have dreams, things that I want to do. I believe in dreams. That makes me unrealistic, a dreamer. I’ve been told that all my life. But I am not satisfied with dreaming, wishing, praying. I take risks to make my dreams into reality. I am a realist in that way. A realist living a dream.
I know things may happen, may attack me. OK. I’ll handle them when they do. I can handle them, or someone will be along in a while who can. You never get more than you can handle if you don’t freak out and forget that you can handle it. Things will come up. But they can’t jump me by surprise because I expect them.
You can be trapped in the fear of things or by the surprise of things. Carol had rational reasons for not going right away. The car had no insurance, so we had to wait until it was transferred into her name so as not to put her brother in risk. That was reasonable, sensible enough … even though I hadn’t planned on getting into wrecks. I was willing to wait for that. With the money left over from the car, Carol was going to the Triple A. You know how cars break down on trips. I didn’t know … but then I was a dreamer who didn’t know about things like that, who had forgotten what a dime looked like. There was no money left for gas, oil and food. A call to Louise could get at least $25 more of my welfare money. But Carol wouldn’t hear of it. She had already taken more of my money than she should. So, it was up to her to get the extra money … meaning a job. Right then, my realistic dreamer’s sense sensed that it had gotten too complicated, that we should split as soon as possible. But how to go over Carol’s morals … her “should” and “shouldn’ts”? Shouldn’t take more money; should help pay for the trip. Then she added one more precaution that she had to take before she could go. Get one other person who was going West to share traveling expenses, to take turns driving, and to help with me on the road. Made rational sense. Especially traveling with me. A girl driving across the country in an old Ford with a crippled guy … not even money enough to stay in motels. Winter wasn’t even over yet. It made perfect sense to get a rider who could take me into the men’s rest room in gas stations.
But if I had perfect sense, I’d be home watching TV. But how could I tell her that? So, she went off to mail the money to her brother and to join the Triple A. I kept telling myself that we were going in two weeks. I had to get back soon. Suzy came in a little while later with a bundle of underground newspapers under her arm. It was a good thing she hadn’t come in earlier when Carol was there. A comic thought. Suzy might get hurt if she saw me with Carol. There might be a scene if that happened … if they came in at the same time. Before, I had no girls at all … and now I had two girls, which was a stickier problem. I began to think how to keep them apart.
I felt like the guy in the control tower when two jets are about to collide. Carol had said she would be back after she joined the Triple A. Which meant … I slid down in my chair. Oh, no! I looked to Moe for help. He just winked, oh yes! He saw the position I was in and just chuckled. I had to laugh too. Suzy just sat there not being able to figure out what we were laughing at. Although I was laughing, I was afraid. Afraid that if Carol found out that I was, or had been, “involved” with Suzy, she wouldn’t take the time to see me. For a minute, I wished Suzy would go away, disappear, shatter. It seems too weird now. Why would what I had with Suzy make any difference to Carol? But that is the layer of dust on a mirror. Dangerous!
I got Suzy to take me selling her papers in front of the drugstore nearby. Got her out of the store. We sold just one paper in the time we spent getting cold in the shadows of sundown … to a housewife who fumbled in her pocketbook for a quarter and ended up giving us a dollar, almost forgetting to take her paper.
“Would you get jealous if I had another girlfriend?” I felt like a one-year-old asking that in that way, but it cut the fuse.
“No … do you?”
“Yes. We are going to Santa Fe in a couple of weeks.”
“Oh?”
That was all she said about it and went on selling papers as if nothing had happened, as if it didn’t affect her. I was happy that she took it so well. I was relaxing into easiness when we got back to the store when Suzy cocked her head, looking at me with sad, lost eyes, and said, “Do you love her more than me?”
“You are jealous!” I tried to laugh but couldn’t for a grey feeling inside.
“I am not … Do you?”
“I can’t answer that. I love her in a different way than I love you … but not more.”
Suzy don’t get hurt. Don’t let me hurt you. Run away. Scream, cry! Hate me. Don’t just sit there, lost and helpless. Numb. Don’t just be numb. Feel something. You were right … I can’t love somebody that doesn’t feel … not in the way I need to love. Feel, and I wouldn’t need to hurt you. You feel … love, pain, jealousy … but you won’t admit it. You feel unknown.
I don’t want to hurt you because I have been hurt in the same way. I knew this pain … letting myself feel it, everything of it and showed it. I was not a silent martyr. And I knew when the pain stopped because I had felt it and then I had stopped hurting. But Suzy just sat there numbed. She was still sitting there when Carol came in and hugged me.
“The wheels have been set moving. Want to take a ride in our car?”
“Why not,” I said.
Suzy kept sitting there, staring at Carol so hard that Carol must have noticed.
“This is Suzy … the girl I told you about,” I said.
“Hi … Frank, have to talk to Moe before we go,” Carol said and walked into the back room.
Suzy didn’t speak but started pointing out words on the talking board. Back to the board.
“She is nice. I won’t get in your way.”
“Good.”
“Can I go with you?”
“No. I want to be alone with her,” I said as Moe and Carol were coming. Suzy just didn’t understand.
Get out of my way, Suzy. Don’t stand there in front of me with your sad eyes. I won’t accept the wave of guilt that is coming in. Don’t follow us outside without your coat … following us to the car like a shadow. That is all you are. A shadow. A ghost. I can’t love a shadow. And I am not afraid of ghosts. So, stop holding the car door, staring at me. I refuse to feel like a bastard … like I am hurting you. Don’t sit in my useless wheelchair, cross legged, like a Buddhist about to be burned.
“Come on, Sexy Suzy. You have a date with me. We’ll show them,” said Moe, pushing her back to the shop as if she was in a wheelbarrow. We drove away.
The bastard Ford drove away into the night. I wanted to get close to Carol, to lean on her arm, into her, enjoying the ride. But I couldn’t. Suzy’s face kept staring at me … the face I might as well have smashed in with a brick. I couldn’t listen to Carol’s usual monolog or to the radio with its speed talk DJ because everything that Carol was saying, while it had nothing to do with Suzy and me, made it clearer and clearer what I did … and each song made me more depressed. That was not my usual self … I didn’t go around hurting people. I wanted to go back and talk to her. But it was too late now. I should have become clear as the mirror before we drove away. Suzy might be gone before we got back, or she might stay overnight … It was hard to tell with her. And I couldn’t make up my mind which I was wishing for.
“You haven’t been here with me since we left,” Carol was saying. “It’s like you’re thinking way off somewhere … very solemn, sad. It’s that girl, Suzy, isn’t it? She wanted something from us, from you. Do you think we should go back to be with her?”
I grunted no. What was the use? “God is a concept by which we measure pain”, John Lennon was singing on the radio when she flipped it off. What was the use?
“Good. I didn’t want to go back. That girl scared me a little. She doesn’t seem quite real … and there was something in her eyes that I didn’t understand. But at the same time, I wanted to cuddle her, protect her. She’s so tiny, so fragile. You are doing a lot for her just by loving her. Wonder if she believes in Jesus. You should find out. Probably not. That’s why she’s so lost.”
Carol was silent for a while. Without my board, I couldn’t tell Carol that Suzy not only believed in Jesus, but she saw him and talked to him.
“Moe slipped me enough grass for a joint,” Carol finally said. “Now we need someplace safe to smoke. There is a church up here aways … the world center of Protestant churches. It is one of my favorite places to go and sit. Sometimes. I’ll take you when it’s open. It has some great stained-glass windows … also, a big empty parking lot.”
As we pulled into the driveway past the white church that looked like a bad piece of futuristic art, it started to drizzle. There were just two other cars in the huge parking lot … so the cops couldn’t sneak up on us for a surprise attack. Carol rolled a joint and was about to light the coconut incense that Moe had provided in the kit, when we ran into a problem … no match. But Carol wanted to drop by her house to pick up some things that we could use to really celebrate the decision to drive to Santa Fe.
Her house was a large brick house sitting on a hill above the sidewalk. The whole street was sleeping peacefully in the midnight darkness. Carol ran up the steps into the house, leaving me alone in the dark car. It was the first time in weeks that I had been alone … really alone. A thought about Suzy came in … but there would be enough time to worry about that later. I looked at the dark outline of the house. A long way from Before and After. I’d be a flaw in that well of orderliness. After a while, Carol opened the car door, turning on the inside light. She had a match, two cupcakes, and three cans of beer.
“I made these cupcakes this morning and have been saving these beers for when I need to feel good. You do drink don’t you?”
“Sometimes. But I like dope better.”
“Let’s smoke it here … the quiet street is the safest place. Then I want to take you to one of my favorite places.”
Carol turned out the car light and lit the joint. Then she put the lighted end in her mouth and blew smoke into my mouth … almost a kiss. The way I had learned to hold my breath since I started smoking dope would have made any speech therapist happy. But it was all show because, except for some super stuff, grass didn’t do anything to me. But I always pretended to be stoned because it got people high when they thought they got me high. After the joint was gone, we drove, not saying anything, me leaning on her.
“That is the school that those kids were from today,” Carol said as we passed an old stone mansion with a great hilly lawn. “I hadn’t noticed it until I drove by today after I left the store. I drive this way but never noticed that it was a school before … kids never play on the lawn. Living there must be like living in a cold castle. All it needs is a moat. I bet the inside looks like a sterile laboratory. Up there ahead is the park … my favorite place. I let Bo off his leash and run with him, pretending not to hear the cars around us. A lot has happened to me here. This is where I first made love a long time ago … up there in the woods.”
We turned into a narrow parking lot beside a well-attended green lawn running up the hill to the woods. There was just one other car in the lot … which started up its engine and eased out of it nervously as soon as it saw us approaching. But when it got a better glimpse of us and saw we weren’t dangerous, that we were the same as it, it slid into a parking space a little way off from us.
“You can lean on me, but I might have to push you up fast so I can start the car if a cop car comes along. It is illegal to have an open can of beer in the car, you know.”
I just couldn’t take this paranoia seriously. If we were still smoking a joint, it would have been different. But I couldn’t see us getting busted for just drinking beer. Absurd! So, it was just a game to me having to spring up every time a pair of headlights flashed in the rearview mirror, Carol’s head turning around, trying to make out what kind of visitor it was, her hand on the key for a quick get-away. The other parked car soon had enough of the game and drove off. But for me, the game just added another bit of excitement to a new experience. I had never parked with a girl alone in the dark, getting drunk before. Carol laid back on the car door and stroked my head on her breast. It was very romantic, except for the piece of cupcake stuck on the roof of my mouth, sticky icing going down my shirt, and beer foaming back out of my mouth and all over everything. I didn’t mind. I was enjoying just being like that, close with her.
“Just close your mouth when you’ve had enough beer. It’s been a long time since I came here with guys on dates … just a few dates. That was in high school. Me and a girlfriend would get dressed up, do ourselves up, and go to a bar down in Northeast. Drinking a glass of beer very slowly at a table … we couldn’t afford anything else … watching the college guys playing pool … hoping that we weren’t too obvious … but also wishing they would notice us. They sometimes did … a few times they brought us up here. That’s how I got turned on to grass. Then I let one guy I thought I loved take me here up in the woods. Now you should have seen how I looked then. I was nothing at all how I look now … slim … long hair … wore miniskirts and make-up. I looked so in. But I was so lonely, I wish I had known you then. I tried to make it on my own after high school … had an apartment of my own and was a secretary. That was the loneliest I ever want to be. I couldn’t take it after a few months, so I moved back home and quit the job … actually, I got fired. I started dropping acid when I had the apartment, and I changed too much so I couldn’t stay home for long … especially after Dad killed himself. Mom used to visit the grave every day, and I went with her. In a way, I like the peace there. I still go there to sit on the grass. I want that peace … maybe I’ll only get it when I die. I think about that a lot when I am driving. Don’t worry. It’s only a thought. Anyway, I couldn’t stay at home after Dad was gone because of the depression there … the wondering of Mom. So, I hitched out to California … I did a lot that would shock my friends from church … things like hopping a freight train and sun-bathing with the hobos on top of the car … taking my clothes off. I still don’t know where that sort of thing is at. How can making love be wrong … be a sin, when it feels good? I don’t know … I am not sure. I have to do more studying. But it really doesn’t matter because I haven’t wanted to make love since I was raped here … in the woods … when I was walking Bo just a week after I got back from the coast … and Mom stopped worrying about my safety when I was back under her roof. I didn’t tell her about the rape, or about when that Negro attacked me down in Northeast. Why worry her?”
“In a way, I’m glad you can’t talk. You just lie there and listen. Sometimes, I get you without your board on purpose. I can’t talk to anyone else for very long before they cut me off, interrupt me, stop listening. But you keep listening … making your noises. Maybe you have no choice … maybe I’m trapping you. But you really listen … really understand.”
I was just enjoying lying there, feeling her breasts under my head, feeling the warmth being with her … the three beers that we shared made my body relax … limply cuddled up against her. This was what I always wanted … or the start of it at least … just being with a girl in that warmth without the wheelchair, board and pointer getting in the way. Carol was holding my head, rocking it back and forth. Just watching the rain fall on the windshield, making an ever-changing pattern. Silence. The monolog had stopped.
Everything should have been in a peace. It was close to that. There was a sadness hanging around us. After a little while, Carol pushed me up and started the car to head back to the store. It was about two and D.C. was asleep, with no cars on the streets even though it was a Friday night. For a big city, D.C. went to bed early and bored. But Before and After had another hour to go. Moe’s rationalization for the insane weekend hours was that during the summer, the Peking next door had a sidewalk café which would attract buyers into the wee hours. But it was still winter. The real reason for the year round vigil was that the lonely people who rarely bought anything kept trickling in, needing a place to be for a while. Moe waited for them. And he was waiting for us. So was Suzy. I had almost forgotten about her. She came back into my mind when we started back. Again, I kept flipping from wishing she would be gone so I could do whatever was going to happen with Carol that night … flipping to wanting Suzy to still be there so I could talk to her, soften the way. Suzy was there, sitting on Moe’s lap.
“Well, I hope you birds had as good a date as me and Sexy Suzy did,” Moe said, patting Suzy’s knee like Santa Claus. “The best Chinese dinner I’ve ever ate. And notice her new outfit … She is ready for spring. Her old rags were on the verge of becoming indecent.”
“D.C. is a bad influence,” I said. “This chick took me to a dark park and got me drunk … well, just a little floating. I’m just an innocent country boy who’s gotten drunk only once in my life before.”
I wasn’t really drunk … only a little hot … and had to piss bad. Moe went back to clear off the mattress, and Carol followed him to go to the throne too. I was alone with Suzy standing in front of me, staring down for a long time. I felt like saying sorry, but didn’t … instead, I said, “Don’t let me hurt you. I don’t want to. Do you believe that?”
“Yes. It’s alright. I understand,” Suzy pointed out on the board.
The mattress was ready now, and Moe came to carry me back for the piss. As I was pissing, Moe said, “After you left, Suzy was one lonely creature. She started crying. But with my usual amusing tact, I explained to her that you are like me. We can’t be tied down to one person … one chick. The time always comes when we have to move on, when things get stale. Love ‘em and leave ‘em is our motto. But it isn’t as heartless as it sounds. It always hurts when it’s time to move on, especially when the girl gets it into her pretty head that she wants to marry you and gets hurt because she is trying to hold on to you.”
“I went out with a chick from Peru a few months back … a nice kid. But I also was sleeping with a teacher. Both got mad that I was seeing the other one. Carman was supposed to go back to Peru in June. But when the time came, she decided to stay. I had to set her straight … told her that if I was the reason for her staying, she had better go home … and I personally sent her on the plane. But today, I got a letter from her saying she is thinking of coming back … Now I have to write her, waking her up to reality. That is one of the hardest things for me to do. I don’t want to hurt her, but I want my freedom. With Debbie, I have an understanding. She knows I sleep with other chicks and she doesn’t care … much. Anyway, I showed Suzy that you were like me and she seemed to accept it. Are you done pissing?”
I was and he took the piss can away and zipped me up. I was thankful that Moe explained things to Suzy. Maybe it had been right for me to go with Carol after all. But Moe was wrong. I wasn’t like him.
I don’t believe in free love … not really … even though I sometimes pretended to myself that I did. I used to believe in it when I was living at home going to college, just reading about things like free love. It sounded like a way to escape the trap of a rigid marriage that my folks had spent their life in … a way not for me, but for other people. I thought that I wouldn’t have to worry about such a thing as a marriage trap. But free love sounded like a promise to me. If a girl believed in free love, just maybe, she would be free enough to love me.
When I moved in with Louise, I moved from reading to watching … moved into a hip soap opera. I played the role of advisor, the listener and the watcher … which wasn’t a very active role. But I was involved in the emotions and the pains of the usual pattern of a love affair … the beginning, when out of pride, fear or doubt, the two just circle around each other, not being sure what the other is thinking, feeling, wanting. Maybe one takes a retreat, trying to deny the thing, trying to make believe the other one doesn’t even exist, at least ugly, not worthy of loving. He comes to me with a thousand reasons why he shouldn’t, will not, get involved with her. She comes to me in pain, worry and doubt with stories about how he is ignoring her or worse. I feel everything that both of them feel … even the times when I wished the girl would see me instead. I usually know how a drama will end even in this first act. Then something happens to bring them together. The girl comes to me, her big brother, to tell me of the romantic burst and about life in paradise. I feel this, too. But under this, there are still doubts and fears. I just wait until they come to surface. She comes back to me again, telling me what a bastard he really is, or how she is strangely attracted to some other guy. In a short time, everything is shattered and both are cut, even when they will not admit it, saying they are free again. I could see which ones were just gusts of wind, and which ones could lead to what everyone is looking for ... if the two stay together through the shattering … through the feeling trapped.
I saw Louise and Helen going from one affair to another. They would go through cycles from depression to romance to depression again. It was exciting and glamorous living around people like that back in Santa Fe, like living in a romantic novel.
But it was also depressing because I saw how Louise would go into a man looking for someone stronger than she was. She would find someone, but when she started melting into that new strength, she would feel that she was losing a part of herself and felt trapped. Then she would withdraw, usually attacking the guy’s strength, making it crumble … which was not hard to do because she usually got involved with the ones who had one flaw … She could have healed that flaw if she would stay with it. But when she discovered the flaw, it was after feeling like she had lost herself. The melting into another person. That was what I wanted. I knew it. I wondered why most people don’t know that is what they really wanted.
Carol came in from the bathroom and lied down on the floor next to me. After a while, I looked up and saw Suzy standing in the doorway. Like a spirit whom only I could see. Carol, unaware of Suzy, was holding my head in her arms. After standing there for a while, Suzy floated off.
“I am debating whether I should stay here tonight … sleep on the floor … or go home,” Carol said. “Would it be alright with Moe?”
I grunted yes.
“I don’t think I will. I don’t feel comfortable here. People might think … Moe might think that we are going to make love. I don’t really care what he thinks … He has a dirty mind. Maybe I could bring you home overnight sometime. But I can’t stay tonight.”
When Moe was about to close, Carol got up and slipped out the door. Buzzy had come in and was starting to undress as Moe was turning off the front light. When Moe came back to get me ready for bed, Suzy followed. She just stood in the doorway watching the undressing rites. She was probably going to sleep on the car seats as she always did when she stayed overnight. But no, when Moe covered me with the sheet, she took off her shoes and socks and got under the sheet with me. Moe just smiled knowingly and, turned out the light and wished us a good night.
She was so close to me on the single mattress that I could feel her warmth under her clothes, feel her breath on my bare back. It was like we were riding a motorcycle … her sitting behind me. I twisted my arm backwards, gently touching her, making sure she was still there. I tried to be gentle. Thought I was. But no matter what I did, I heard the silent ouch! I soon stopped touching her. I didn’t want to break the fragile doll.
Suzy was right a long time ago; making love would shatter her … at least while she was still in her world … at least with me. I didn’t dare to even hug her. I just lay there, enjoying just being with her … waiting for sleep.
As I waited, I watched the blotches of colors on the screen of vibrating white dots. The blotches were like what you see when the flashbulb goes off or when you turn away from the sun. Except these blotches were different colors. Some were round, like cells seen through a microscope; some looked like long balloons. Some flashed off and on, moving across the screen and some just stayed on, moving across the screen like stars cross the night’s sky.
I didn’t know what the blotches were. I didn’t wonder about them because they always had been there. I saw them even in the day, but I saw them clearer in the darkness. I never told anyone about what I saw because it didn’t seem important. But when I was a kid, I called the vibrating white dots atoms or air. People and books said that atoms and air were invisible which meant either I saw what I wasn’t supposed to be able to see or I just had picked the wrong word for what I saw.
Now, I was just floating in blackness. The walls and the floor had disappeared, revealing a vast space, perhaps a space without limits. Even with Suzy’s body lightly touching mine and with Buzzy lying just a couple of inches from her on the floor, I was absolutely alone. Floating in empty space, I was all that existed. But I felt as if I were falling downward … whichever direction downward was. Falling many millions of miles. Falling down into something unreal. When I landed, it would hurt bad, maybe even kill me. I felt like this when I was a kid. Then I felt so small and alone in the vast blackness, I tried to get my head under the covers, into my own cozy world. But now I just relaxed into the falling. Finally, I went to sleep. When I woke up in the morning, I was in the process of landing. My shoulder had hit the earth, but my legs were still in the air, coming down. I scrambled to grab ahold of something so I wouldn’t fall over the cliff behind me. But as I eased back, fearing empty space, I felt Suzy sleeping quietly beside me.
I rolled over onto my back so I could watch her sleeping. In falling, I had kicked off the sheet, useless in the heat of the store. I looked down at my naked body, and then at her, wondering how she looked under her clothes. Slowly, she woke up. At first, there was fear and pain. But soon she remembered where she was and who I was. She relaxed then. For a long while, she just looked at my body, not knowing what to do with it. Please don’t think you have to do anything … but please do something with me … love me.
She gingerly put her hand on my chest. It moved up, stroking my face. A cool hand. Then she moved it downward over by body. It was so soothing, but also so frustrating. I wanted to feel something strong, forceful, from her … my body wanted to feel warm pressure. But Suzy could just give me the light cool wind of a ghost.
I wanted to hug her. But I knew that if I so much as touched her, the China doll would shatter. Suzy needed someone who could gently hold her. My body couldn’t be that gentle. So, I had to lie there, keeping my arms by my side, just accepting whatever she gave me. Soon she got up and went into the bathroom.
Buzzy opened his eyes and said with a devilish grin, “My, my! All night I was tempted to put my hands on that sweet little ass! They wouldn’t believe this if it was in a movie or something. I thought about offering to take Suzy off your hands so you could get it on with Carol … just trying to be helpful. I talked with her for a while after you guys were out. But she was so freaky that I had to go back to Bimbo’s to get another drink. She’d take anyone to the funny farm with her … anyone who’d get involved with her. I couldn’t touch her with a ten-foot pole … well, maybe just her ass! Probably frigid too.”
I stopped Buzzy from saying anything more by rolling off the mattress and onto him, playfully wrestling with him. He cried to Moe that the crippled fag was attacking him. Moe just gave out a grunt from the other side of the wall of shirts. Suzy came out again and looked down at me, her head cocked seriously. I caught hold of her leg under her pants and wouldn’t let go until she smiled.
Would anyone hug her gently, warmly … hug her as a woman … bringing her out of her world of painful seriousness? The smile was only the first step. Maybe I could take her onto the next step … making her feel something intensely, deep inside her … either love or hate … make her laugh a gutsy belly laugh or scream … not a weak smile or light rain tears. I couldn’t give her what she really needed … someone else had to take over … someone with a gentle body. I would take her where I could … and then? She made a phone call, standing over me, talking in a tone so quiet that I could hardly hear her.
“Is Philip there? OK … Philip? I tried … Please don’t hang up … sorry … I was going to meet you last night, but something came up … I know … but I had to stay here … I’m at the store … Could we meet someplace now? Not at the store … please! I will walk to the drugstore three blocks down from here. I will start walking now.”
I had goosebumps when she hung up the phone. With one last look at me, she was gone, getting Moe to unlock the door for her. What was she? Some kind of spy?
“They would never believe this if it was a scene in a movie,” Buzzy said, getting dressed. “Well, aren’t you the writer? Write a film. This could be the love scene. What time is it? Wonder if I could talk someone into taking me to the Ingmar Bergman Festival. Maybe JT. I’ll just give him a ring. I dig Bergman’s films. Ever see The Seventh Seal? Great, wasn’t it? Full of symbolism. It’s better than just hanging out … Hello … JT? This is Buzzy. What’s happening … Had a party, huh? Wish I had known. A slow night at Bimbos. Who was there? … How about Philip? … No shit? Hep, huh? He has been looking yellow. Guess that blows his medical exam for the Merchant Marines. Wish I’d hear about me. What are you doing today? … How about picking me up at the store and going to see a flick? … Come off it. You know how hard it is hitching in the city in the rain … Fuck you, cheapskate!”
Buzzy slammed down the phone, even though he wasn’t really mad, and putting on his brown leather jacket, he walked out into the rain. Moe was getting me dressed when the phone rang.
“Before and After … Hold the line. I will switch you to the owner,” Moe said, then putting down the phone quietly, he raced out to the front, up the tower’s steps to the other set of phones, caught his breath and calmly said into the phone, “Can I help you? Our accounting department takes care of all our store finances. I would turn you over to our accountant, but unfortunately, he is on a week’s vacation. I am sorry that you have been waiting for a month to get paid. How much do we owe … $2,000? Is that all? I am sure Mr. Turners will straighten it out when he returns … Thank you for your patience.”
As he finished dressing me, he mumbles, “You’ll have to wait your turn … wait until I pay off the other $24,000.”
Moe had a hard time maintaining the fiction that the store was making it, especially with all of those bills waiting for us each afternoon. Moe once said he needed to make one hundred every day just to break even. I couldn’t see how he could make more than sixty dollars … but then, I wasn’t a businessman. Moe wasn’t either. He kept the store open on wits alone. I couldn’t figure out why he wanted to keep it open … he was fated to be forced to close. But by using his wits, he made an adventure out of his trap … like the exile who decides to rob from the rich and give to the poor. It is more fun that way. The noble bandit is still trapped on the outside of society and will still get caught in the end … but there is something noble about carving a Z on the pompous, smug, Governor’s fat ass. Moe was trapped on the sinking ship … but as long as he could outsmart the big clothing manufacturers, making fun at them, he was on top of everything, even when he was going down. John came in that afternoon to get to know me better.