Killing Time in Crystal City Read online

  “What’re you, sensitive or somethin’? Thin skin like that, my man, and you won’t last a week livin’ on these streets.”

  “What?” I say, indignant and helping prove his point. “I’m not homeless.”

  “Ahhh . . . !” he blurt-laughs and points at me while turning around to perform for his pals. Now I have to be his straight man, and Jesus, I wish Stacey were here already. “You hear the way Prince Fancypants here says that word, ‘homeless’? Like he swallowed a fat creamy maggot or somethin’.”

  I don’t help my case further by gagging slightly at the thought. More laughter.

  “Okay, so what’re you doing here alone slinkin’ around our beach like you’re some kind of freak? You some kinda freak, boy?”

  It seems right away like this is the kind of thing a guy’s got to quash immediately or live with forever.

  “I’m no kinda freak, and I wasn’t slinkin’. I just like the ocean, is that a crime?”

  Now Mickey looks for the first time as if I’ve truly puzzled him. He points out toward the horizon. “You mean, that? You really are lost, ain’t ya. That ain’t the ocean, junior, that’s the ocean’s backwash.”

  I do wonder how many of these stomach-churning analogies he’s got in his bag of tricks, but I do not want to test it out.

  “It’s not so bad,” I say, looking away from him and out toward the unloved bay. “It just needs a little more appreciation, that’s all.”

  “Did I say we don’t appreciate it, ass funnel?”

  I guess I can’t help testing it.

  “No, I suppose you didn’t, but—”

  “That’s right, I didn’t. We do appreciate it. In fact, we appreciate it enough that we don’t let just any scrote-face freak think he can trespass on our beach without permission or authorization or paying of proper respects . . .”

  More than at any time since I slammed the door on my old house and my old everything, I feel at this moment like I am where I do not belong.

  Which is exactly where I want to be. Which is exactly what I came for.

  “I’m with Stacey,” I say with a shaky unconvincing bravado, “and Molly. Remember? So, I’m not—”

  “Oh, what, Jesus’s baby sister? Try finding somebody who hasn’t been with that little wombat.”

  “What?” I say, too startled, too obvious. “Come on now, that’s kinda—”

  “That other one, though, the tall one, she might be worth a go. You tappin’ that?”

  “What?” I repeat that same unwise surprise, but this time I catch it and try to improve on it. “Ah, I think that’s the kind of thing a gentleman doesn’t talk about.”

  “You kiddin’ me? Half the reason the gentleman even does it is so he can talk about it.”

  If I get any farther back on my heels in this conversation, I’ll be on my elbows.

  “Stacey’s a friend,” I say. I like the sound as it rolls out of me. Where is she?

  “Right, fine, whatever, you don’t really know me or any of the other guys and so you don’t want to share your booty. That’s cool. Maybe after we get to know each other better and we’re all buds and brothers, you’ll share the booty around like good friends do.”

  Am I supposed to answer that? Was there even a question in there?

  Mickey stares at me like I’m something unidentifiable that the backwash washed up. My lack of responsiveness eventually gets to him and he fills the void.

  “You smoke?” he says, reaching into his fat-dead-guy shirt pocket and pulling out a joint about the size of my middle finger.

  “Sure I smoke, time to time.”

  Time to time meaning one time when I was a freshman and got a proximity wasting on the bus, and once two years later when four guys from the football team got ahold of me late on a dark November afternoon after we all had detention. They surrounded me and blew me a shotgun high when I politely declined a more sociable one. That was also on a bus. Buses made me woozy for weeks after that.

  But this time, I won’t be forced or accidentalized, because that stuff doesn’t happen to Kiki.

  “Here ya go, my man,” says the man. So the same guy who hit me with the Frisbee on my first time to Crystal Beach, and again on my second, is now hitting me with the biggest joint I have ever been able to see and smell and partake of of my own free will. Surely this represents progress.

  “So, how you know that li’l freak Molly?” Mickey asks as he gives up the smoke.

  I answer quickly, before actually smoking anything, because I’m not sure I’ll be able afterward. “I don’t know her, know her. We just met, really. At the bus station.”

  “Uh-hooo,” he says. He is joined now by a couple of his pals, attracted instantly by the smoke. They waste no time joining in the hooting of me. I take a pull on the joint, cautiously. “So,” he adds, laughing. “You one of them freaks.”

  The accusation, whatever it is, shocks me even before the smoke does. I try to protest and defend my honor and process the smoke all at once. With limited success, it must be said.

  “Wait, what, no-ho—,” I say, and I dissolve in a spasm of fit-coughing that jerks me forward, hard and repeatedly, as if I am being tased and given a tracheotomy simultaneously. The guys are having a hell of a time with my show, as they should, until Mickey finally takes it seriously enough to come over and start slapping my back with one hand and shoving something like Gatorade under my nose with the other.

  I throw back the Gatorade, and throw it right back up again.

  The gang could hardly be enjoying me more. I’ve never been such a big hit.

  It’s several minutes before I can rejoin the conversation. The other guys have continued without me, kept on smoking and drinking and so are well oiled for my return.

  “What’s your name, anyway, dude?” Howard asks.

  “Kiki Vandeweghe,” I say proudly with my new hard rasp of a smokehouse voice.

  “Whoa,” Mickey says. “That’s a hot shit of a name.”

  “It’s Dutch,” I say, sitting back on a log now because standing seems kind of complicated. “Both my parents are Dutch. They sent me here to go to school. Boarding school in New York. Then Exeter.”

  I was thinking that was one of my best bits. A little stoned, I was thinking it was can’t-miss. I was thinking erroneously.

  “I said it was a cool name,” Mickey says. “Shut up and don’t ruin it, huh?”

  “Sorry,” I say.

  “Don’t be sayin’ ‘sorry.’ You sound like a weenie. You don’t want to be weenying around here, trust me.”

  “Right. Right.”

  “Anyway, this is Howard, and this is Tailbone. He’s called Tailbone because he’s just above asshole, but not by much.”

  “Shut up with that shit already,” Tailbone says, taking the Frisbee and biffing Mickey across the head with it. “You know that’s not why. It’s because of all the tail that I—”

  “Kiki Vandeweghe is not interested in your sad little fantasy life,” Mickey says.

  Well, actually, stoned Kiki is pretty interested in it.

  “What kind of freak are you talking about?” I ask. “With the Molly thing, I mean.”

  Howard cuts in. “You know, man. The fishin’-for-holy-trolls-online type. It’s all, ‘Nice Christian girl looking to meet nice Christian fella. Meet me at the bus station for prayer meeting and possibly some born-again ass-pumping.’”

  “Oh God,” I say.

  “Yeah,” Howard says, pointing at me, “she says that a lot. Screams it, in fact. That’s why she’s the Godfucker.”

  I can’t stand the fact that this sounds so harrowing and unreal to me even as these guys fall all over the place laughing. Is this stuff funny? Is this what counts for comedy out here? This is somebody’s life being ridiculed to hell, or, to . . . wherever. A perfectly nice little somebody a
s far as I can tell. I have to believe the weed is doing the laughing for them because nobody could find this kind of stuff funny, could they?

  So why am I laughing along as heartily as any of them?

  It’s the drug. It has to be. It cannot be me, because I am better than this. I am, aren’t I?

  • • •

  “Your friends ain’t comin’,” Mickey says after around forty minutes lying in the sand, watching the sun melt away the clouds, and waiting.

  “How do you know?” I say.

  “Because I know every damn thing,” he says convincingly.

  “It’s true,” Howard adds, “he does.”

  “Oh,” I say. “Damn.”

  “Don’t take it personal,” Tailbone says. “Everything’s fast-moving parts around here, ’cause it’s gotta be. You say you’re supposed to meet someone somewhere, sometime, and maybe they got arrested or dead or married or somethin’ and you could just never know what really went down. Never see ’em again and you’re none the wiser as to why.”

  “So you never think it’s about you, or you go nuts,” Mickey says.

  “Except,” Howard says, “in your case it probably is you.”

  “Yeah, it’s you,” adds Tailbone.

  “Nice guys,” I say.

  That must be the right response because Howard lets out a whoop of victory.

  “We are nice guys,” Mickey adds. “And we’re your friends now, right? You can never have enough friends out here. Everything is temporary. That’s the reality that you have to deal with. You want your numbers for when you need people behind you. You’ll see your girls again, I’m sure. But because you seem like an all-right dude you also have us. We got your back, and doesn’t it feel like you’re a very lucky dude indeed?”

  It does. It very much does.

  So much so that if I dare try to express how foolishly lucky and happy this does make me, it will be a creepshow and probably earn me a beating.

  “Cool,” I say, because that’s me being cool. “Now, sign my cast, will you?”

  “Of course,” Mickey says, and the three of them come bumping up a little uncomfortably close.

  I feel kind of slick as I pull out my new flashy Montblanc pen. And even though it takes a whole lot more scratching than my cheapo marker does to make a decent mark on a cast, this is now my writing instrument of choice.

  “Whoa-ho,” Mickey says, turning the beautiful lacquered thing all around, examining the gold tip really close, holding it to the brightening sky. “This is a gorgeous little piece of work, Mr. Kiki.” He grins at me and starts scraping his signature into the plaster. “That’s real gold too, bitch.”

  “Thanks,” I say proudly, like I made it myself or something.

  He passes it on to Howard, who grunts as he attempts to make his mark.

  “You’re a man who likes quality stuff,” Mickey says.

  “Sure,” I say, though not really sure.

  “That’s a nice watch, too.”

  “Yeah?” I say, looking at it anew. “It’s okay, yeah. I got it for . . . yeah, it’s all right. Nothing special, really.”

  Mickey smiles at me in a cheesy way that I don’t get, but I figure a smile is a smile these days whether I quite understand it or not and so I return-smile back at him.

  “This thing sucks,” Tailbone barks, shoving the pen back at me. “I need something else if you want my signature.”

  I take back the Montblanc and pull the stubby marker out of my other pocket. Mickey and I shake our heads and shrug at silly, clueless Tailbone, who does not understand finer things like we do.

  JASPER JEALOUS

  He gave you a present?” Jasper asked when he saw my new laptop.

  “I wouldn’t call it a present, exactly.”

  “No, of course you wouldn’t. A normal person, with sense and gratitude and no persecution complex, however, would call it a present. And a pretty fine one at that. Especially considering you were essentially rewarded for skulking around his house and spying on him in a particularly icky manner.”

  We were walking along the abandoned tracks on our way home from school for the last time this year. There was one day of the term left, but it was a Friday, and thus fell outside of Jasper’s walking schedule. He had by now dimmed some of the shine off my presentation, though not off the computer itself, which gleamed.

  “I was not skulking,” I said, slipping the thing back into my backpack. “And any ickiness involved was down to him, not me. I think maybe that’s why he didn’t say a word about it. Not one word.”

  “You win again. Like always.”

  “Uh-huh. And, shut up. Like always.”

  We had reached the turnoff, where he would head down his street and I would continue on to my place.

  “So,” he said, “what you up to now?”

  “Nothing,” I said, shrugging.

  “Wanna do something?” he asked.

  “Sure,” I said. “Want to come over? I can show you all the cool stuff my new computer can do.”

  “Sure, happy to come. But can I play on your father’s machine instead? That way by tomorrow he’ll have to buy me one too.”

  “Um, he’s just starting to remember how to have one son, so maybe we won’t overload him just yet.”

  “Okay, but we’ll work me in eventually. Anyway, on the subject of you two getting back into some kind of groove, what’s the summer looking like?”

  We had reached sight of my house by now, and I noticed someone unfamiliar on the porch.

  “I have no idea,” I said, focusing on the person, a woman. “But it’s what I’ve been looking forward to. With him off for the summer just like me, I figure this is going to be our time. It has to be, doesn’t it? I’m sure we’ll start talking about it today or tomorrow.”

  “This is good,” he said. “Very promising.”

  We reached the steps of the house and the woman turned to us as we mounted them.

  “Hello,” she said pleasantly.

  “Can I help you?” I asked.

  “Well, yes. I was supposed to meet somebody here, maybe that would be your father?”

  “Maybe that would be,” I said cautiously. I wasn’t sure whether the situation called for me to be happy for him, conflicted over the next step in the whole moving on progression, or what. She was quite pretty, though, and polite, so I was leaning in the direction of giving my approval.

  “He should be here soon,” I said. “Can I ask what this is about?”

  “Oh, of course,” she said, “I’m sorry, I should have said. I’m Michelle Simon. I’m renting the house for the summer?” She did that thing of making the last statement sound like a question when I obviously didn’t recognize her name. But it was no question.

  “Hi, Michelle,” Jasper said, taking her hanging hand when it became apparent I wasn’t up to the job. “I’m Jasper, and this is Kevin. He lives here.”

  “Well, not as of next week,” she said lightheartedly, even poking me in the ribs. She thought it would be a fun moment for both of us, since she was looking forward to cozying up in our house while my dad and I were surely off on some wonderful adventure that we would both remember for the rest of our lives.

  WHAT’S YOUR FREAKERY

  I wake up to poking.

  “Hey,” says the smart, small voice with the bubble in the throat. “What are you doing here?” She’s poking me with the toe of her shoe as I roll over in her direction and see that it’s light out. I have definitely been sleeping. My left side is clammy cold, from the sand, which has melded with the drool stream leaking from the left corner of my mouth to form a kind of sand-castle paste that sticks as I get my face upright.

  It takes me many seconds of being upright and listening to my special slurping surf to get it all together and answer Molly’s question sufficiently.
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  “I was waiting for you,” I say.

  “Oh, get out,” she says, grinning. “You were never.”

  It comes clearer to me every second. “Yes, I was.”

  “You were waiting for Stacey, maybe.”

  “I was waiting for both of you,” I say, and start to scan the beach for clues.

  The night has passed, and the day has come. The only conscious residents of Crystal Beach right now are myself and Molly, though there are plenty of bodies splayed around, which may or may not still possess heartbeats and souls. If they ever possessed souls. There is a nice soft-glow peach of a sunrise peaking its fuzzy head above the horizon and making Crystal’s backwash backwater look as magical as any real-world beach.

  My summer holiday paradise.

  I remember waiting. When Mickey and the boys decided to head out for adventures elsewhere and I declined the invitation because I was sure the girls would be here momentarily. I remember the sun getting stronger through the afternoon and into the evening, and the greenflies skewering and lancing me until I hollered, and then Mickey returning with quarts of malt liquor and even bigger spliffs and apples and tortilla chips, and they really were my friends, these guys.

  “That’s sweet of you,” Molly says, and she appears to get far more overcome about it than necessary. She has to wipe both of her big eyes with both of her little hands. It makes me uneasy enough that I reach out and take both of those small hands in my medium-size ones. Her cast is about ten times as dirty as mine, and it smells a little.

  “So, where is Stacey?” I ask.

  “Back at the hostel, I guess,” she says.

  “Shouldn’t you be there with her?”

  She inhales deeply, snuffles.

  “I was late. Curfew. Locked out. I had someplace to be. And then I didn’t. It happens sometimes.”

  “Couldn’t you call Stacey to let you in?”

  “Oh, I couldn’t wake her. And I wouldn’t want to get her in trouble. It was my fault, so it’s my problem. I know the rules—be out of the building between eight a.m. and eight p.m. except on days when they’re working you. And ten thirty lockout.”