The Summer of Apartment X Page 2

  After that, Brian was wide awake and lifting weights until, presumably, he grew tired enough to fall back asleep, the bar still inches above his Adam’s apple and the weights propped on two tiny tables with spindly legs, one on each side of his prison-surplus bed.

  Miraculously, Brian and Richard found work within two days. Brian took the first job offered him — cleaning parking lots and maintaining cooking apparatus at a fast food outlet that specialized in square hamburgers with holes in the middle. “Mike’s” was a holdout against the McDonald’s and Burger Kings and prided itself in having the most broken-down tables and chairs in the entire resort town. On Sundays, Mike gave you a free fifth burger for every four you bought. Brian’s job had to do with picking up trash from the parking lot, sweeping more trash out into the parking lot from the inside, and hovering around a massive aging french fryer that demanded constant attention if it was to be restrained from setting fire to the establishment. He was also the man in charge of excess grease around the burger pit. The pay was, of course, minimum wage, and he was expected to work seven days a week for the first three weeks because Mike himself was on vacation in Monaco; he was reportedly related to royalty. Brian was not allowed to eat any unsold burgers or fries because Mike had a contract with the city jail to provide excess goods. But he was permitted to keep any unopened plastic packets of ketchup, relish and mustard left on the tables. Just as long as he promised not to resell them to any competitors.

  Richard landed a job as a lifeguard at a city beach, an impressive stroke of fortune; one of the young Turks on staff had been arrested for selling marijuana while on duty and summarily dismissed. Richard went out and bought mirrored sunglasses and the ingredients necessary for his own brand of el cheapo sun-tanning lotion: baby oil (later to replaced with safflower oil, sunflower oil, peanut oil, and finally Mazola), iodine and Old Spice aftershave. I never learned where he picked up this formula, but he brewed up a gallon at a time and drained the bottle at an alarming rate. The whole apartment had an aroma that alternately reminded me of a hospital emergency room, a Greek restaurant and the men’s cologne section at Sears. Richard was cocky about his new job and I was jealous, knowing he would be in the watchful eyes of thousands of beach girls if his skin didn’t fall off from daily applications of Richard’s Roaster.

  While Monday evening saw Brian and Richard celebrating their success, I wallowed in self-pity for having failed to establish the beginning of even a short career as a boardwalk dart-toss barker, a waiter, an assistant athletic director in the town recreation program for mentally handicapped boys, a pump jockey at a Gulf station or a bag boy at the Super-Rite. We walked the boards that night, Richard lusting after every third pair of legs we saw and Brian taking special interest in all the girls who sat eating ice cream cones on wooden benches. “That one’s not really that bad if you come right down to it,” he would say, pointing out a teenage girl with plaid pants, a bowl haircut and a cream-coated sunburned nose. I was convinced that I was the gentle and noble one here, aside from Brian’s willingness to pay homage to the wallflowers of the world. Richard, I was sure, was an accomplice of the devil. He mixed his passion with his ego, throwing in a touch of brazen arrogance as if he were synthesizing an even more bizarre tanning ointment.

  Finally, on the third day I landed a job as an afternoon and evening usher at the Queen Movie Theatre, an over-the-hill establishment that showed mainly B films from any era disreputable enough to have produced them. The clientele consisted mostly of teenagers who threw garbage in the aisles and, well, adults who threw garbage in the aisles. It was my job to walk up and down the tilting walkway asking people to be quiet or to put out their cigarettes. This was to be done after I collected tickets for each showing of an impossibly blurred version of a Bruce Lee film or an updated version of a beach blanket movie. I was quite amazed to learn what the other Hollywood was still turning out. There were films I had never heard of with young Annette Funicellos bursting at the brassiere and monster flicks detailing the invasion of every North American city with a population over 50,000.

  Patrons occasionally dumped their drinks on the theatre floor, and it was also part of my job to mop up the mess before the next movie began. “We aim to please,” was the motto on the shelf in the box office, a booth filled with the intoxicating presence of Melanie Vachel. Every breathing male who entered this kingdom of cinematic torture was attracted to Melanie, and like all the others, I was transfixed by her wooden bracelets, her soft brown eyes, her sad but sincere expression, and her delicate fingers that handed over tickets and change as if they were setting tiny birds free.

  The mystique of a young woman inside a booth of glass, a sad but beautiful young creature selling tickets to horror films and miscast love movies, was more than most men could hope for, and it was probably responsible for filling quite a few seats every night. In fact, I got the job by wandering into the Queen on that rainy Tuesday night in a desperate attempt to avoid hanging out with Richard, whose bloated ego had expanded beyond his tiny bedroom and taken over much of the breathing space in the rat hole. I sat through a subtitled Japanese film in which a creature resembling a giant palmetto bug was overrunning a Tokyo suburb. A young and beautiful lady scientist made up to look non-Oriental had been spared death by the bug in a chance encounter, and when an earthquake took the life of the monster, she wept into her test tubes. I was overwhelmed by her sadness. The film somehow worked for me — it was the saddest, most tragic thing I had ever seen. The scientist reminded me of the girl whose eyes had met mine at the ticket booth. She, too, looked like a person who had lost something so significant that her sadness would surround her for a lifetime.

  I wanted to stay for the second showing. What did I have to go home to? Brian curling fifty pounders or eating his dinner of white bread, mustard, ketchup and relish? Or worse yet, Richard splashing on his ointment. Or still worse, what if Richard had brought home one of his admirers from the beach, lost and lonely, looking for a harbour from the gathering storms and finding herself in the grip of a mirror-eyed lifeguard whose skin was turning purplish brown?

  But the middle-aged guy with the red flashlight said I had to leave. I smelled booze on his breath. He seemed unsteady, even here in this theatre of lost, lonesome souls. He should have been my brother.

  Instead, he said one word, “Out!,” as if I was taking up valuable space.

  He was having equilibrium problems, and as I stood up to leave, he leaned forward over a seat and threw up on a fifteen-year-old kid with a Beach Boys t-shirt and long peroxide-blond hair.

  The kid was speechless at first, focusing in the dim light on the screen-printed likeness of Brian, Dennis, Carl, Mike and Al with vomit all over their guitars. Then he turned to the audience and said, “Look what that sucker did!” Before he could let out a swipe, the usher had been ushered by other forces into unconsciousness, and I caught him before he hit the thinly carpeted concrete aisle. The house lights dimmed and the movie music came up loud and wavy. It was clearly a night of monsters, and as I helped the drunk usher up the aisle to the waiting manager, I began to see light at the end of the long dark corridor.

  I got the job starting then and there. But I would have to suffer through at least one evening with a red jacket, tight black pants and ancient cummerbund, slightly wet and smelling of vomit and sweet vermouth.

  The girl in the ticket office watched sadly as the former employee was shown to the door, and she gave me a warm but tragic smile that made the earth open up and swallow all the world’s monsters, real and imagined.

  The Proper Equipment

  The movies re-invented me, conjured me back to life. A life of possibility. All things were conceivable now that I would be working at the Queen. I would talk to the sad-eyed girl of the cash register. I would earn some money. I would fall in love. As I walked back through the drizzle of the shore town night, I actually felt my eyes tear up. I could face the Black Hole, Brian and Ric
hard — anything. I had already agreed to be paid below minimum wage. Who cared? I would see endless fragments of tedious trashy films over and over, night after night, never seeing a single story all the way through, only glimpsing and never fully comprehending the plot. Now and then I would catch a view of an Oriental young woman scientist crying over a dead monster.

  But there would be a chance to meet the ticket taker, the one named Melanie Vachel. Melanie. Like sad, sweet Melanie in Gone with the Wind. Like Melanie, the singer whose voice cracked when she sang a song about world peace. Like all the Melanies of the world.

  I had to wait for someone to finish in the shower before I could go in. It was very dark and wet. Not good showering weather. I sat by a broken picket fence, and soon a shadowy male opened the wood slat door and evaporated into the misty night, finding his way back to some apartment above us in the vast alphabetical labyrinth of 307½ Hibiscus. One of the night showerers.

  With the shower vacant and entrance to home permitted, I realized that the smell of the now-unemployed usher’s vomit still clung to me like revenge. I stripped off my clothes and hooked the door. The water was lukewarm but satisfying. It mixed with the drizzle from above as I piled my uniform at my feet and let the shower free us from puke. The shower meant many things to many tenants, as I would soon learn. I had become a night showerer, a night launderer, indoctrinated into the dark clan that passed through these doors night after night. I was alive, in love, living at 307½ Hibiscus in the most depressing living space this side of a nightmare. I was the happiest man on earth.

  I walked in, dripping, naked, carrying a pile of soggy clothes. Brian was asleep, wedged up against the wall, his barbells lengthwise beside him in the bed. He had one arm propped straight up the wall, a finger pointing toward heaven and a crumbling ceiling with little dark stalactites of mouldy plaster. The refrigerator was oddly silent, but there were other tunes. A sound of bodies thrashing about in Richard’s room. The bastard was beginning his summer campaign. Lust in the ruins. His door was not fully closed, the frame warped beyond repair. A candle was lit inside. I could hear sloppy kissing, giggling. Richard was whispering; he must have had his hand up the girl’s blouse because every few minutes I’d hear his partner say, “Stop calling them boobs!,” but there was no rhythmic jouncing of springs. Richard was maybe sliding into second, but I was certain it wasn’t his night for a home run. I opened the refrigerator. There stood a very expensive-looking bottle of French wine. With a cork yet. I pulled the cork and took a swig. No surprises here. I checked behind the toilet and found the partially depleted jug of $3.99-a-gallon Paisano wine. One of Richard’s tactics was to find empty, expensive wine bottles in trash cans outside restaurants, then fill them up with the cheap stuff. He didn’t miss a trick.

  “Hey, Dick, what’s this wine doing behind the toilet?” I didn’t have to yell, but I was pretending I was on the other side of the house.

  “Screwez-vous, garçon.” Clearly the Frenchness of the whole evening had gotten to him. I didn’t say another word. Clothes were being buttoned. You can sense things like that in a dark room at midnight. I turned in for the evening and lay awake, first hearing the gallant Richard kiss his mademoiselle goodnight while attempting to sandwich her between himself and the now-yodelling refrigerator, then lying awake as Richard began for the first of many nights to dismantle his MG engine in an effort to rebuild it. Tonight he was taking out the spark plugs.

  More showers took place, and Brian started to moan in his sleep, “What do you mean I’m not good enough? For you? Hah!” I wondered if it was his mother or his father speaking in his dream, or simply him. I suddenly wished that Brian and I had learned to communicate. Even before moving in together, he was always just there, something less than real. He appeared to be such a simple person. Uncomplicated. But underneath he was probably holding down more sorrow than I could imagine. I thought again of the defeat in the slouched-over, vomiting usher and the convincingly real tears in the eyes of the bereft monster scientist, but I kept coming back to Melanie Vachel. For a long time, I tried to figure out what it was I saw in her. Then I nailed it down. I was certain for once that here was a person with the capacity to love me for who I was. This is what had been totally lacking in any girl that I had ever been attracted to. None possessed the capacity to love back. I imagined that, like me, Melanie had fallen in love many times but had never been loved back.

  In the morning, when I woke up to the dim rumour of another day in the hole, I felt things crawling all over me. I snapped back the sheet to see maybe a hundred spiders racing like bumper cars about my legs and crotch. Jumping out of bed, I smashed into the dangling light bulb, then thrashed at it. It bounced into the wall and shattered. A note on the back of the door suggested: “Intrusion into the private affairs of others is a violation of human decency. Sincerely, Mrs. Vanderbilt.”

  When I opened my door I found Richard at the hotplate frying eggs. “Touché.”

  “Touché.”

  “Have some aborted chickens with me?”

  “Sure. Truce.”

  “Truce.” We were not the type to keep a feud going. Besides, I knew it would be a long summer. I hoped it would be a long summer. I sat down to a pair of rubbery eggs, glazed in grease and spiced beyond recognition with garlic salt. Richard believed in garlic salt, grease and overcooking. These were his guiding principles of cookery, and he stuck to them without fail.

  “I came that close, Freddy boy, that close.” Richard pinched some spilled garlic salt between his thumb and forefinger to show me how close. And smiled like the devil.

  By Friday I had actually conversed with sad-eyed Melanie, and on the weekend I walked her home. “I hate walking home alone after work,” she had confessed to me.

  “You don’t feel safe?”

  “It’s not that. It’s just that people out on the street at night look so unhappy. Lonely people break my heart. I wish I could comfort them.”

  It was becoming clear: I would have to confess soon that among the lonely people of the world, I was right up there with your top ten loners. Oh, lonesome me, as Neil Young had sung.

  “Everybody needs someone to care for them. When I’m older, I want to work with starving children in Third World countries.”

  I really think she meant it, although the way she said Third World countries made me think that these were vague, symbolic places, that she didn’t really know too much about true poverty and suffering. If she could only come back with me to my tiny, dark tenement, I was certain that she would think it, too, was a Third World country and I a deprived refugee in need of her care. “All the lonely people, where do they all come from?” she said beneath a silvery mercury streetlight.

  “‘Eleanor Rigby.’”

  “Excuse me?”

  “The song. You were quoting the song, right?”

  “I was? Oh, I didn’t know that. Who did it?”

  She wasn’t kidding. This worried me. Had she been living her life that far inside the imagined Third World of her heart? Had she been standing behind that glass wall night after night, gathering up the sorrow of the desperate movie-goers and handing back the change and tickets so long that she had lost contact with what the rest of us knew to be the real world of commercial pop music? She stopped walking in the middle of the block for no apparent reason.

  “Is this where you live?”

  “No.” She had her head bent slightly. Something was wrong. I stood silent for a moment, wondering at her long brown hair, her mousy sweater that couldn’t conceal a beautiful body, her knee-length plaid skirt. And white socks. She was wearing white socks.

  “Is something wrong?”

  “Everything. That’s why I want to hold on to you.”

  So I gathered up all of her sadness in my arms, and as she turned her eyes up into the night, I kissed her right there on the semi-deserted shore town street in front of a unisex boutique,
a unisex hairstyling shop, a reportedly gay bar and a storefront advertising topless tarot card readings with a flashing “By Appointment Only” sign. She curled up like a warm cloud in my arms, and I knew for certain that I had found the girl who could love back. When she began to explore the inside of my cheek with her tongue, I was convinced our relationship was to be more than platonic, that I was, in her eyes, not just a convenient Third World country but a refuge. Yet I wasn’t about to take advantage of the situation. It wasn’t the night to introduce her to the master bedroom of the Black Hole. (Richard had bought a tape measure and discovered my room had a whopping twenty-six square inches more floor space more than the other two.)

  I walked Melanie to her summer residence, a boarding house for women only with a white porch, a white statue of Dorothea Dix and white wicker furnture on the porch. It looked like a place where suburbanites would farm out grandmothers for a summer and was called “The Laurels,” not for any obvious reason. We kissed again near the white concrete statue of Dorothea Dix. When she left me, Melanie smiled for the first time. It was as if she had difficulty putting her face into it, as if she hadn’t had much practice. I had made her smile, me, a hero in an otherwise uncaring universe.