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Fifty
Scootie lay in a haphazard clump, trying to hinge his jaws
back together with a perpendicular yawn. A single woodshaving had attached
itself to the inside of his mouth, and he had to whack his head against the
side of the tank to knock it loose.
“Can you imagine every single meal being such a trauma?”
asked Juliana. “I’d lose weight for sure.” She watched the softball-size lump
making its way down Scootie’s body.
“Maybe so,” said Scootie. “But you’d only have to eat once a
week.”
“Really?”
“Yeah,” said Audrey. “He can even go two or three if you’re
on vacation. Makes him a little snippy...”
“You know,” said Juliana. “I knew a man once who had a
friend with one of these, and it got out one night and strangled the kid next
door.”
Audrey broke out laughing. “Oh God. Do you know how many
times I’ve heard that? ‘My uncle’s next-door neighbor...’ ‘This kid who went to
school with my cousin...’ ‘...got into the crib and swallowed the baby whole!’
Hee!”
“Oh,” said Juliana. She was feeling a little defensive to
begin with, and this wasn’t helping. “So you mean, none of these stories are
true?”
“Not a single one, is my guess. And even if there’s a mishap
here or there, it’s nothing compared to how often some kid gets their face
chewed off by a dog. There’s just something morbidly fascinating about snakes,
so we make up stories. We’re all a little hung up on Tarzan movies and the old
Adam and Eve con job. Want some potato skins?”
“Yeah, try one,” said Scootie. “’Sgot parmesan cheese, and
garlic.”
Juliana adjusted her vision from Scootie to the toothless
grin of his namesake. If only the rat hadn’t been so cute...
“I, uh, I’ll try some a little later.”
“Okay,” said Audrey. “But don’t wait too long. You’re going
to need a lot of stamina tonight. I’ll be right back with some juice.”
Juliana watched Audrey tap down the stairs, then spoke to
Scootie in low tones. “What’s she got up her sleeve?”
Scootie shook his head. “I really have no idea.” In truth,
he did, having noticed the depleted state of Audrey’s store, but he didn’t want
to spoil her fun. She returned with glasses of mango nectar.
“Thanks,” said Juliana. She lifted a potato skin and tried a
bite.
“So you’re not in the captain’s mansion,” said Scootie.
Audrey smiled. “Roger is ensconced with his mother and
stepfather for a week of family bonding.”
“So, what? We’re sleeping in the loft?”
“Who said anything about sleeping?” said Audrey.
The mystery escalated when Audrey ushered them into Roger’s
four-wheel-drive and headed straight for the mansion. When she got to the
driveway, however, she bore right, and kept going for half a mile, pulling in
at a dirt lot bordered by undergrowth.
“Come on down,” said Audrey, holding a jungle-size
flashlight. They followed her to the corner of the lot, where she split the
bushes onto a narrow trail. “It’s a little treacherous,” she called back.
“Watch out for low branches.”
The trail emerged on a clearing of palmetto fronds, sweeping
the hillsides like limp broomheads. Around a bend, they climbed a band of small
boulders and landed on sand, a small
cove bracketed by overhangs of pockmarked rock. At the midpoint, Scootie could
make out a jumble of shapes, like sculptures in a dark gallery.
It didn’t stay dark for long. Katie McGregor sent a pyramid
of logs into broad orange flames (with help from one or two buckets of lighter
fluid). The light revealed just about every percussion instrument known to
mankind, plus a Deadhead-looking young man, smiling through a beard and
two-foot dreadlocks.
“Juliana, this is Katie McGregor, my assistant manager and
best pal, and this is Sal, Katie’s pal and bedmate.”
“Hi,” said Juliana, shaking their hands. “Nice to meet you.”
Katie, a little overawed at the evening’s grand romantic overtones, squirmed her
feet in the sand, rattling the jingle bells tied to her ankles.
“Well, that said, you may now leave us, troops.” Audrey
handed Katie the keys to the four-wheel-drive. “And thanks for helping us out.”
“Eight o’clock?” asked Katie.
“Eight o’clock.”
They slid away with a flashlight, then Audrey took Juliana’s
hand and led her to the other side of the fire. “I’ve got a few other friends
I’d like you to meet.”
Scootie followed, and watched as Audrey gave names to the
animals of her kingdom, and demonstrated their playing. She finished by handing
Juliana a cabasa and spelling out the night’s activities. It was Scootie’s job
to man the large membranophones – a trio of congas, the ceramic djembe, the
Japanese taiko – and lay down the basic rhythms. She and Juliana were free to
wander a shopper’s paradise, picking up smaller instruments – frame drums,
rattles, gourds, bullroarers – and adding to the mix. They were allowed breaks
for water, for working out sore appendages, and for exchanging instruments – but
preferably one player at a time, lest the beat be allowed to die. The object
was to produce an unending string of sound from the present time – a little
after midnight – to sunrise, which arrived about six o’clock.
“Now. All that said – are you up for it?” asked Audrey.
“Do I have a choice?” asked Juliana.
“Smart girl,” said Audrey.
The everlasting hum of body against instrument, instrument
against air, contained too many small niches for Scootie to recall. Some he
would have to reassign to dreams. Four exceptional moments, however, managed to
leave a mark, and he would return to them later whenever the opinion-infested
path they were destined to trod got him down.
The first was the discovery of Juliana’s innate rhythmic
sensibilities. For the first two hours, he stuck to the straight-ahead drive of
four/four, but eventually he got bored and had to shed a few articles of his
musical clothing. He began with a 7/8 (which always reminded him of Jewish folk
dances), delved into the triplicate of waltzes (rarely associated with
drum-jams) then spun off into a circular string of syncopations that he must
have picked up from some Indian tabla recording (the changes were so random, in
fact, that he couldn’t even assign numbers to it). At each of these turnoffs,
he would catch Juliana tilting her head quizzically, hands running a stall on
her instrument-of-the-moment till she could sort out the new pattern and begin
punching in accents. He was thrilled by the flash of recognition, the thoughts
rising from hands to head. She was, in short, a natural.
Moment number two arrived at about four hours. With
reddening palms and Jell-O forearms, Scootie swore off the hard edges of the
djembe and relaxed on the tumba, largest of the congas. He thumped a beat in the
soft center while slapping the sausage links of his free hand against his
jeans, praying for resuscitation.
This is crazy, he
thought – and not the “oh, ain’t we nuts” jocular kind of crazy. Literal mental
dysfunction. If there were local authorities within their sound waves, they
would drag them off in a second, before they wore off one of their limbs. But
then he had no choice, did he? If he were ever to attain the silver bracelet
charms that make life worth living, it would be with this flame-kissed goddess,
shaking and slapping international trinkets before him. His reward came at
sunrise, and it required only that he ignore the pain, and lay down a beat.
At moment number three, Scootie found the crescent moon
rimming their southern overhang like the point of a can-opener. The other
crescent was Juliana’s smile, as she snapped two blondewood sticks together in
rapid divided beats, then flipped them over to reveal their marshmallow tips.
Timpani mallets. And wasn’t that something, sweating from her brow on a
forty-degree morning/night, halfway to walking pneumonia, drum cancer or some
other rhythmic disease, but still thinking of him, of his tortured hands. He
took the mallets and rang them down on his congas, eliciting a tropical chime
like steel drums, the round handles rubbing smoothly in the pocket of his
palms. Juliana strolled back to the fire, down to coals, blue snake-tongue
flames flicking out here and there, then lifted an orchestral triangle and
dropped a shower of tinkerbells into his hair.
Vision number four. The three of them had spoken no words
for an hour, but knew, the way that jazz players know each other’s riffs, that
the sun was approaching. The Apollo-worship began in earnest, the gauging of
eyes to eastern shades of blue – the kind of blue that Renoir swirled around
his wife’s parasol, that Matisse set
into tall glass panels, that Warhol set around prints of Campbell’s Soup cans.
Any of these would do.
When it finally arrived, pulling baby blue sheets over the
ceiling, Scootie set his ruined thumbs into a samba. Audrey motioned Juliana to
a sack of objects near the boulders, and they returned with Indonesian chimes
on their forearms, Peruvian sheep’s-hooves around their ankles. They pulled
their feet into a skip around the fire, then, suitably warmed up, stamped their
feet and shook their arms with a miraculous physicality (the final giveout
before the long-awaited rest).
Drawn up by this view of the city limits, Scooite beat his
flapjack palms in a happy generic dance over his congas. He spied the first
buzz of sunlight striking the ocean and accelerated to the tempo of “Don’t
Wanna Be Your Adolf, Baby.” Audrey skipped by, smiling deliriously, having
dropped her Irish sweater somewhere. A little later, she cackled by with no T-shirt,
her breasts barely contained by a black lace bra. Scootie retained enough
native anxiety to hope that none of this was inspired by female competition,
then found Juliana cavorting his way, topless, breasts bobbing as she lifted
her face to the lightening sky and howled.
As Scootie raced the tempo into speed metal, more and more
laundry fell to the sand, and the two of them finally abandoned ship, stripping
their bells and racing to the waves, where they slapped Alaska-cold water all
over each other. Scootie raised his arms over the congas, let his palms fall
with one final exclamation point, then strung a trail of clothing across the
beach as he ran to join them.
“Pretty neat trick,” said Scootie, flopping back on Miguel
Barran’s bed. “How did you manage this?”
Juliana smiled and stashed an informational plaque under the
mattress. “I’m the president of the board, sonny. For all the shit I put up
with, I deserve an occasional historical-site roll in the hay. Besides, I think
I owe you one. If you hadn’t figured it out, I was the one who slipped Aggie
that anonymous tip.”
“And granted her enough local-history brownie points to last
the length of her forced retirement,” said Scootie.
Juliana straddled him, holding her fists like sledgehammers.
“Are we even on guilt yet? Can I bop you on the head for that comment? Please
say yes.”
Scootie managed a sit-up and planted a kiss on Juliana’s
snarling lips. “I have for you a token of my esteem – a diploma of sorts – but
first, some final questions. Are you eternally, helplessly drawn to me, like a
Greek sailor to sirens, like a Republican to country clubs, like a teenager to
the kind of his music his parents can’t stand?”
Juliana smiled sweetly. “Yes.”
“Are you ready to support the proposition that two people
can share wildly disparate worlds, no matter the differences in their
upbringings and social standings – provided a bond of core values like petting
cute dogs on public sidewalks and never leaving the movie theater until the end
of the credits?”
She placed a hand on Scootie’s chest like a faith healer and
shouted, “Amen!”
“Lastly,” said Scootie. “Do you pledge, here before the
sacred woodcarvings of Miguel Barran, that you will never, ever conspire to
deprive Scootie Jones of his position as publicist and manager of the rock band
which shall henceforth be known as Gelatinous Bubba, nor any other positions of
gainful employment which he should henceforth fake his way into?”
“Hands off,” said Juliana, and crossed her heart.
“All right, then.” He fished in his pocket and pulled out a
pair of rawhide loops, each of them strung through a New York City subway
token.
“Scootie!” She pulled one over her head and studied the
double ring of nickel and brass.
Scootie ran a drum-callused hand along the side of her face.
“Thirty-Fourth and Broadway, Juli. From here, we can go anywhere you want.”
“How about Houston?” she said.
“Houston?”
“Yes. I have tickets for tomorrow morning. We’re driving
from there to Galveston, where we will meet Jackie Simmer at a restaurant
called the Balinese Room. We will sit on a terrace overlooking the Gulf of
Mexico, eat oysters on the half-shell, then adjourn to the beach for a sloppy
messy dessert of papayas.”
“Really!”
Juliana nodded vigorously. “Yes. Papayas.”
Overcome with boyish glee, Scootie took the top button of
Juliana’s blouse between his teeth, ripped it out, then twisted sideways to
spit it like a watermelon seed. It landed on the nightstand, next to a charcoal
sketch of Harlan Fetzle.
Photo: the author and the inspiration for Scootie, Jr., "Simic."Photo by Hilary Schalit, Willow Glen Resident.
