“Okay, Mr. Know-it-All, who was the lead singer of the Talking Heads? You don’t know that one, do you?”
“No idea.” His knowledge of the pop music industry from the origin of rock until about 1976 was encyclopedic. After 1976 there was an abrupt drop-off, as if the world or American culture had come to an end, which you could make an argument for.
A pasty girl dressed in black lace, hair shot and teased, her fingernails lacquered black, strolled in.
“Funeral home’s down the street, Morticia,” Shelly sidemouthed at me as she passed, her shoulders giving off waves of lilac and cedar.
The goth sat, ordered Southern Comfort neat, rummaged in her purse, and glanced over at us with her spidery eyes.
These children mourning the death of the republic were beyond Shelly’s ken. “Looks like a corpse,” he whispered to me.
“That’s the idea, son.”
Shelly showed that snaggled yellow smile, all the molars in it extracted or dissolved.
The goth lit a cigarette but did not inhale. She looked at me and I wondered by her expression if she could read my mind.
“She’s looking at you, Gomez,” Shelly gruffed with a leer. “You oughta take her home. She’s probably tired of sleeping alone in the same casket.”
I thought, despite the complications and the risk, about taking her home.
“Dead girls are too easy, man,” I replied.
Shelly had a fantasy about finding a vulnerable woman on a beach or in a park and having his way with her, not a far cry from necrophilia, and he replied predictably, “That’s about the only action I can get these days.”
I sang sotto voce: “She’s a horrible corpse but she’s always a woman to me.”
In the middle of a splash Shelly gasped, inhaling beer. Choking and snorting, he slapped the bar. “God, don’t joke when I’m on the intake, babe,” he mouthed in an odd inflection like a poor immigrant yelling at his wife. “I just about dropped my prostate gland there.”
“Go ahead and drop it, babe,” I replied. “What do you need one for anyway?”
Shelly, still relishing the exchange and the novelty of a necrophilic tumble, wriggled on his stool, as if testing his prostate. “I think I felt it work loose there.” His gaze swept the floor and he tongued his Tijuana smile. “Maybe it was my epididymis.”
We were both chirping and giggling now like schoolgirls between wisecracks. I had earned my bonus on the trivia machine but lost interest in a second round. The goth with her Southern Comfort and the freaks in their snakes and green feather gossamer and Ziggy Stardust tattoos glanced over at our gigglefest with vague distaste. Soo watched us stone-faced but ready to smile if duty called. Shelly splashed the beer against his face and somehow gulped it down.
“Let’s go to Santa Anita tomorrow, babe,” I said.
“What are you talkin’ about, babe?” he chided, turning on me and speaking in the angry immigrant voice. “You wanna drive all the way up to L. A.? What do you think they got satellite for?”
“Satellite’s the Tower of Babel,” I said. “I need to smell those horses and see their flesh.”
He fingered back his oiled, side-parted hair and regarded me as the devout regards the infidel.
“Probably going to rain anyway,” I added with a shrug.
“Rain,” he whispered, narrowing his eyes, for rain is rare enough in southern California that it has meaning: it means that pace models collapse, morning lines dissolve, turf races are moved to dirt, fields shrink. It means, to the astute player, a man who might study and circle and cipher a Racing Form all night, as if it were some kind of sacred text, or more precisely because he has no other life to speak of, the possibility of opportunity.
“Tell you what,” I said. “I’ll swing by your place around ten and if you want to go, fine. If not, I’ll tell ’em your prostate fell out.”
“I don’t need a prostate to bet, do I?” he retorted, taking a slop from his tankard. “Is it a betting gland? No wonder I’m doing so lousy. Tell you what, babe, I’ll go with you.”
11.Coco Puff
AT TEN THE NEXT MORNING I PARKED IN FRONT OF SHELLY’S dark, suburban ranch-style tract home built somewhere in the middle of the twentieth century. Like Shelly, it hadn’t changed much. In our days together long ago I’d picked him up and dropped him off here countless times, but he’d never invited me inside. I’d never even been past the front gate. He routinely referred to his sadistic parents as “Nazis,” but he was so secretive and kept his life so carefully partitioned that it took me years to learn the grim details: that his mother and father dressed him in girls’ clothes, made him eat without utensils, twice killed his pets as punishment, and kept him in a cage in the garage with a bowl of water like a dog. It was a forbidding, peeling old house, the kind the kids would skip on Halloween night, the kind you’d dare your childhood friends to peek in the window of or knock on its door.
Shelly was habitually late. Untold times in the days of our youth he’d stated an intention to meet me somewhere and never shown, or he’d actually follow me from the track or the fast-food joint to some agreed-upon destination and then peel away into the night before we arrived. He suffered from a variety of maladies, malaises, manqués, and melancholias, imaginary and otherwise. He harbored so many secrets I don’t think he could keep track of them all. I asked him once why he kept so many secrets and he replied with a leer, “How do you think I survive, babe?” His appearance at my front door when I had that apartment on University Avenue two decades before, six pack in hand, was almost always unannounced. And though he might stay for several hours, pondering an elusive God or delving into mare cycles and pace configurations, he usually left abruptly,
