The New and Improved Romie Futch Page 5

  “Totally.”

  We went out to the student parking lot to burn one in my Camaro. We relished a Yes cassette and strolled back into the prison-like building to groove on our creations. Lee’s giant painting of a red medieval castle taking off like a rocket looked kinetic as all get-out, though I told him he needed a touch of yellow to make the vapor trail truly fiery. He agreed.

  I queued my forty-minute loop of “The Ocean” and dimmed the overheads. We stood before my diorama, steeped in its otherworldliness, bewitched by the beauty of the mermaid, the oily grotesquery of the sea mutants swarming lasciviously in her midst.

  “Killer,” Lee whispered.

  “If only the creatures moved,” I said, trying to think of the right word (which was undulate, though I didn’t know it back then).

  “Surreal,” said Mrs. Breen, who’d slipped from her office to admire my creation. “Are you still thinking about majoring in art?”

  I nodded. I swallowed. We were talking about something more ethereal than my diorama, something that made my stomach knot up, something that brought the taste of pennies to the back of my throat. We were talking about the future. At that moment, I still had one. I could feel the future squirming larva-like inside my chest as Mrs. Breen admired my diorama. Alexandra Cunningham muttered the words “naïve redneck art,” but I didn’t let that bother me. Especially when Helen cut calculus and came whirring into the art studio, her permed hair bouncing in a thousand chestnut ringlets, cleavage spilling from her décolleté top like a double scoop of butter pecan. Checking out my sculpture, she smiled with pride.

  Poor Lee trembled in her presence. I didn’t begrudge him his crush and wished sincerely that he’d find his own portal to the more ineffable pleasures of life, some pretty, multifaceted female who understood his vision as Helen did mine.

  I snatched an envelope of negatives I’d developed (of Helen frolicking naked in the strange blue waters of the kaolin mine pond) and led my beloved to the darkroom. I held her hand as we leaned over the chemical trays, relishing each moment she’d emerge from the murk, my beaming muse.

  There she was, twinkling in images, emanations from my visionary brain. And there she was, standing beside me in the safe-light, her breath warming my earlobe.

  I peeled down her acid-washed jeans and unbuckled mine and we coupled on the floor in a narcissistic teenage frenzy, surrounded by images that not only immortalized her at the height of her nubile beauty but also attested to my own manly artistic genius, something that, if I played my cards right, would land me a future. I concentrated on the future to stall those initial convulsions that prick a man on toward melting oblivion. I closed my eyes and saw the future, a red, fleshy blob pupating in dark fluid like something in a mad scientist’s incubator. I saw strange organs throbbing beneath its translucent shell. Saw the future bust from its chrysalis in scattering blazes of diamond light, winged and glistening, already flitting out the window, darting off toward the horizon before I could get a good look at it.

  Helen lay on the linoleum, her face flushed. Alexandra Cunningham was pounding on the door. We scrambled into our jeans, slipped our soft porn into a manila file, and stumbled from wombish darkness into stark fluorescence. Strolling from the institutional air-conditioning into the tropical freedom of spring, we hopped into my Camaro and gunned it. The future lay dormant within us, protozoan in our cells.

  I woke up with the taste of Helen in my mouth, aware now of the highfalutin aspect of her name, the Helen of Troy allusion bestowed unknowingly by her mother, a certified medical assistant, and her father, a melancholy Monsanto sales rep who trafficked in poisons.

  O Helen, Helen, Helen!

  Sunbeam.

  Zeus’s mortal daughter.

  The face that launched a thousand ships.

  “Roman,” said a voice.

  The goofy grin of Josh materialized before my eyes. And there was Dr. Morrow, probing the mysteries of his left ear with a paper clip. And Chloe, beautiful Chloe, not as beautiful as Helen in her prime, but very pretty, with a luscious bottom and an unnerving habit of brushing against me as she performed her scientific chores.

  “Describe this paper clip,” said Dr. Morrow, thrusting forth the implement with which he’d just been picking his ear.

  “Poor paper clip,” I joked. “How rudely you have been used. Forged by Vulcan to serve some noble purpose, like securing a ream of poetry, you have been forced to retrieve detritus from this man’s ear canal.”

  Dr. Morrow smiled and muttered into his micropad mic. “Evidence of cerebral enhancement immediately apparent in verbal communication. Fanciful rhetorical tropes, if I’m not mistaken. References to what must be a mythological figure. Chloe? Did you get the data on that ref?”

  “Vulcan,” said Chloe. “Roman god of fire. Depicted as a blacksmith.”

  “Awesome,” said Josh, grinning like a lowly adolescent satyr at Pan’s loveliest nymph.

  • •

  Despite its excessive brightness, the cafeteria, with its garish orange walls, was the lowest vale in Hades—Tartarus, to be exact. Wretched shades trudged to and fro. Muttering to themselves, trembling with DTs and more sinister withdrawal spasms, they toted trays of slop. A loner by nature, I took up my usual spot at the edge of the action, thinking of Sisyphus as I watched the imprisoned souls grub up in the food line. But not all was gloom and doom. A lively crew at the table to my left was chatting about sports. I thought I heard the word serendipity pop out of one dude’s mouth, and I wondered if he was on the same BAIT track as me. I was about to break character, walk over, and initiate a convo when I spotted Irvin cruising my way, sacred fruits of Demeter piled up on his plastic tray.

  “What it is?” He sat down. “You got Cerberus, or Cerberus got you?”

  “Freaky,” I said. “I was just thinking I was in Tartarus. Every time I think I got the dog underfoot, that hellhound bastard pops another head.”

  “I feel you.” Irvin picked a green olive from his salad and set it aside. “Don’t know about you, but the flashbacks have been a bug-out to an otherwise groovy ride. Mnemosyne’s a bitch. Don’t much feel like tripping down particular memory lanes, if you copy.”

  “I copy. Being reacquainted with the glorious teenage flesh of my ex-wife is kind of like groping after Persephone in the dark.”

  “Right on. Just when you pinch her ass, she vanishes into mist.”

  “Like that SOB Tantalus, with his water and grapes. Though it’s not all bad. I’d forgotten how awesome high school art class was. I reckon I used to be a sculptor.”

  “Thought you still were. Didn’t you say you were a taxidermist?”

  “That’s a whole ’nother animal, pun intended.”

  “Why? What is sculpture?” Irvin shot me a sly, Socratic smile.

  “I don’t know. The creation of three-dimensional art forms, I guess.”

  “And what is taxidermy?”

  “The preservation of animals.”

  “Are you preserving the actual flesh-and-blood animal as it is?”

  “No, I’m basically re-creating a facsimile of the creature with molds and hide scraps and fake parts.”

  “A two-dimensional facsimile?”

  “You got me there. A three-dimensional facsimile.”

  “Same skills, man. Funkabilly, hep hop, zamrock jazz. Whatever. Never did like labels. Fusion’s the only genre that works for me on a semantic level.”

  “I reckon there’s something to that.”

  “Damn straight there is.”

  Caught up in a hermetic reverie, Irvin went to work on his salad. It occurred to me that his dreadlocks were vaguely Medusan. It occurred to me that his goatee made him look like the quintessential philosopher king. There had been a time in my life when I’d briefly considered the artistic possibilities of taxidermy, though I’d always characterized anything falling outside the naturalistic tradition as a novelty stunt, and hence, not Art with a capital A. And this dichotomy had stifled the kind of
artistic expression that might’ve saved my ass from the clutches of Bacchus.

  “Well,” said Irvin, tossing one last crouton into his mouth, “I’ll catch you on the flip side. Got to close the shades. Got an early date with Hypnos tonight. Phantasos, you trippy old head, please be kind to me during this round of slumber!”

  Irvin shook my hand. And then the gray-haired senex strolled off with his tray, leaving me alone in Tartarus, a place so low that a bronze anvil dropped from Earth would fall for nine days before reaching the cursed realm.

  • •

  “Congrats,” said Josh as he scanned my multiple-choice rhetoric test. “You killed it, dude.”

  “What was my score?”

  “Classified.” Chloe winked like a Bond villainess and then tested my BC transmitters with her fairy wand.

  “One more download, and you’ll be ready for phase two,” she said.

  “Where’s Dr. Morrow?”

  “With another subject,” said Josh, “but he’ll be here ASAP.”

  Although Dr. Morrow was often with another subject, I hadn’t yet run into anybody in the tiny waiting room of the BAIT Lab, the retro vibe of which evoked the subtly funky 1970s office of my childhood pediatrician (olive plastic chairs; pumpkin vinyl couch; macramé owls that gazed into my soul with huge wooden eyes)—an association that made me envision the ’70s incarnation of my mother with her sleek, long hair, bell-bottom jeans, and loud-print, neo-peasant blouses fabricated from petroleum products. She kept it real, never lied about what would happen in the depths of the doctor’s office.

  “Yes, you’ll get a shot today,” she’d say, “but it’ll be over quick. Just a bee sting, nothing you can’t handle.” She looked away when I got the shot, bit her bottom lip as though she could feel the needle prick. She’d take me out for a Happy Meal afterward.

  “Pure-T trash,” she’d say, “but you earned it.”

  Now, as I waited in the BAIT Lab, I got the feeling that I’d traveled, à la Fantastic Voyage, into some psychedelic chamber of a dreaming giant’s brain. In the windowless room, which had that ineffable hospital disinfectant smell, I felt the beginnings of a panic attack. I hoped that Dr. Morrow would soon appear like Hermes to reconfigure my mortal brain, and then I’d be distracted by some random memory tugged from an obscure fold of my temporal lobe.

  I recalled a game Helen and I used to play, in which we’d vow to remember a particular incident for the rest of our lives—like the time an ancient woman had appeared in the park, a tiny silky monkey perched on her shoulder, its fur iridescent in the summer sun.

  “Gremlin,” Helen whispered, taking my hand. When the woman vanished into the rose garden, we vowed to remember her and her monkey for the rest of our lives. So far, none of the set pieces had appeared, and I began to wonder if the originals were stashed in my head after all, or even copies of copies from all the forced remembering that Helen and I had done over the years, a process that I’d once seen a show about on the Discovery Channel. Now I couldn’t remember how it all worked. The room felt cold. And the hospital smell was filling my system with mild dread, the fear that my body would be cut open, that some essential organ would be removed.

  “Roman Futch,” said Dr. Morrow, looking even taller than usual. “Sorry you had to wait.”

  Chloe was back too, this time without Josh, looking like a priestess in her pale blue smock. She fiddled with her micropad.

  “How do you feel?” the doctor asked.

  “A touch of anxiety.”

  “To be expected. Any depersonalization? Derealization?”

  “A little of both, I reckon.”

  “Do you ever regard yourself from a distance, as though you are outside of your body and watching a movie of yourself?”

  “Every time I get a BAIT download.” I pointed at the hologram of my brain, which rotated in its usual spot.

  “Naturally, but otherwise?”

  “Only when dreaming.”

  “Have you had any trouble recognizing yourself in the mirror?”

  “Unfortunately not.”

  Dr. Morrow chuckled politely, a kind of fake musical cough. He regarded the floating image of my brain, studying it from several angles and typing notes.

  “Have you experienced any garbled speech, spoonerisms in particular?”

  “Like, the Lord is a shoving leopard?”

  “Exactly.”

  “Not that I can remember.”

  “Josh says you aced this morning’s test.”

  “Yes, but he was rather hazy about the numbers.”

  “I do believe we are ready to rock and roll,” Dr. Morrow said, ignoring my comment.

  Quick as Hermes, the doctor fingered his sacred tablet. And I sank, bracing myself for whatever image would materialize in the darkness.

  Two seconds later, I was at Concrete Pond, a feed warehouse transformed into a magical skating rink in 1984. I could smell corn dogs and popcorn, the limbic alchemy of polyurethane floor shellac and nylon utility carpeting. I could hear the cheesy DJ Dr. Funk, tucked mysteriously behind his window of smoked Plexiglas, calling all foxy ladies to the rink for Ladies’ Special Skate.

  I sweated adrenaline. A drop of testosterone trembled upon each of my myriad zits, the pustules themselves aflame with purple triumph. After strutting my stuff to “Mr. Roboto,” I’d been declared champion of Guys’ Special Skate. I’d ended my routine with a bold jump over the fallen toad-shaped body of Brent Stein, a clammy math whiz with a cryptic smile and Coke-bottle glasses. I’d earned not only a three-dollar snack-bar tab but also the privilege of taking the hand of the Ladies’ Skate Queen during Couples Only.

  And now Helen, aka Hell on Wheels, was gliding onto the floor for Ladies’ Special. She froze, closed her eyes, waited for the beat to rouse her from her mannequin pose. Clad in a pair of painted-on Gloria Vanderbilts, sporting a flimsy top the color of Gatorade that highlighted her incipient breasts, she pumped her narrow hips as the intoxicating bass riff of “Maneater” began. In the flashing disco light, she twirled and leapt and thrust her delicate pelvis, interspersing Solid Gold moves with elegant ballet. Embodying all that was sexy and feline, she became the quintessential man-eater.

  Dr. Funk declared Helen the Queen of Friday Night. Following the DJ’s instructions, I rolled bashfully forth, took her sweaty hand into my own sweaty hand, and led her to the proverbial dance floor. Dr. Funk dimmed the lights and slowed the strobe. He immersed the rink in a rosy glow. Round and round we rolled, hands clasped, as Lionel Richie and Diana Ross sang ecstatically of “Endless Love.” I had problems looking directly at Helen. Her profile hovered just to my left, hazy and angelic. And then the song ended.

  “Later, alligator.” Helen pivoted on her back left heel and skated away. Eviscerated with emotion, I rolled to the boys room (its door marked with a sparkly sign that read STUDS) and almost threw up. I’d eaten two hot dogs and three Butterfingers. I’d tossed back shots of Mountain Dew with sizzling jolts of Space Dust on my tongue.

  Sneering at my stupid face in the mirror, I adjusted a crunchy strand of gelled hair, took a deep breath, and went out to find Helen. What I’d say to her was anybody’s guess.

  The lights on the rink had deepened to an eerie purple black. Skeezy older guys with mustaches were milling around the video games. “Hungry Like the Wolf” was on, Simon Le Bon panting as he chased a sleek panther woman through the jungle of his desire. I spotted Helen, hunched over the Ms. Pac-Man game, caught up in a maze, eating dots. To her right, slumping with sexy ennui in black jeans and a jacket of fringed suede, his blond hair resembling the crest of a cotton-top tamarin, was Farrell Sims. Reputed to smoke weed, sip from a flask, and bang married women, he was a bad boy par excellence. He drove a Trans Am as black as Satan’s goatee. And there he was, eyeing Helen’s taut little ass. She was thirteen. He was seventeen. She was likely a virgin, while he, according to rumor, had spent the afternoon dallying with a plumber’s wife, taking bong hits while listening to Fleetwood Ma
c.

  I’d seen such movies as The Karate Kid, however, in which the Macchio men of the world prevailed over the macho—those confident assholes with pectoral muscles and fancy cars. So I maneuvered toward them. Stood on the other side of Helen. Watched her squeal as her fourth Pac-woman got melted by a ghost. And then she, without even glancing my way, rolled off with Farrell Sims.

  I watched them share a plate of nachos. Watched her mock slap him when he put his hand on her knee. Watched them roll out onto the rink for the next Couples Only, Farrell skating backward with the effortless aplomb of a pro while stooping to receive Helen’s embrace. My girl laced her slender arms around his manly neck as “Love Lifts Us Up Where We Belong” caressed them with gentle melodies. Sitting on a rink-side bench, I took in the whole sickening spectacle. After the song reached its soaring climax, eagles crying from mountain cliffs as poor wretches watched in awe from the earth below, I saw them leave together.

  I imagined him whisking her off in his Trans Am, deflowering her in some seedy parking lot. As soft porn flickered inside my skull, I watched Brent Stein skate alone, hands clasped behind his back, a look of intellectual constipation on his face as he rolled around in the gloom. I fought back tears as “Total Eclipse of the Heart” plunged me into exquisite depths of degradation and despair. Dr. Funk knew what he was doing. Now I can see him for what he was, a washed-up disco duck from the funkalicious ’70s, a demented Oz figure chuckling behind his Plexiglas screen, pulling the heartstrings of overwrought teens with the latest Top 40 schmaltz. After the final Couples Only, knowing that tortured souls skulked in the shadows, racked with envy as lovers came together in bliss, Dr. Funk always played a song of heartbroken despair.

  Feeling a total eclipse of the heart, I staggered toward the snack bar with my three-dollar prize coupon. There was Larry, awash in eerie light like the ghost bartender in The Shining. Larry, with his puffy worn face and devil-may-care feathered hair.

  “What’s yer poison?” Larry drawled, as though we were in some badass movie together.