The phone rang even as the sound or her car faded in the distance. I had an idea this call simply could not be anyone other than that very tall friend who frightened Marie in such an unpleasant way. I picked it up and held it to my ear without saying anything.
"What it be like, broham?" Yeah, it was Lars.
"Hiya fellah." Nelson Rockefeller was still alive or had recently died, and it amused me to mock his mannerisms at times, just as it amused the giant, Nordic Lars to affect a sort of surreal Uncle Remus cum funk cum Black Panther rhetoric patois, not because he admired or abjured any of them, but because he liked the feel of the words and phrases as they slipped from his tongue. The fact that it baffled the hell out of strangers was a bonus that he had not counted on, but willingly accepted. "I dismember tellin' y'all that I be downlink on th' flyby, so I 'cided t' open channel D while I still had ma roller skates on 'stead a' catchin' ya on the flipflop."
"Damn you, slow down the jargon, I'm sober and it's hard to follow your speech." I swear I could hear his grin widen.
"Whatcha doin' manchild?" I didn't answer for a second while I tried to think my way out of getting waxed on department store house-brand liquor, then going out to start fights in biker bars with huge, frightening Lars by my side. I guess I took too long.
"If your Canuxican wench was there, you already would've told me t' bug off. So I know that for you - tonight - the thirteenth amendment - " He trailed off, unable to finish his joke, something, I imagine, about being freed.
His odd slam at Marie didn't surprise me. Having been born and raised in Toronto, he had the Anglo-Scandinavian Canadian's utter disdain for his countrymen of Gallic descent. His inventing a new word to describe the Quebecois impressed me very little. In that era, we saw banners everywhere bearing the slogan Viva la Raza, and he pulled some strange energy out of the Chicano movement. He saw someone's demanding attention for the fact that they're somehow different as utter madness. People, I guess he figured, would notice the differences on their own. It was the individual's responsibility to earn respect for themselves despite these differences. The fact that he was six foot nine, had hair the color and texture of straw, and extremely deepset eyes and concave temples reminiscent of Dr. Frankenstein's monster, may have played a role in his desired to de-emphasize differences. His ultimate insult for a while during those days, was to add the suffix -xican to the name of whatever group someone liked to say that they were a part of. Sometimes this had a humorous effect, mostly it did not, and usually it went right past its target unnoticed.
"Whatever you had planned, I am hereby applying my executive veto to it, and invoking my plenipotentiary powers to declared an emergency override to your evening's affairs. That means I got a new car and need to show it off to somebody. You'll do." I wondered if he knew what all the words he used meant or even if he cared. Looking back twenty some years later, I don't think he did either - know or care, but that it would have pleased him that sometimes, serendipitously, they fell into an order that actually made some kind of sense, even if it wasn't what he had in mind at all.
I opened my mouth, and he spoke up so suddenly that I felt for an instant that his voice was somehow coming from me.
"I'm on my way." The receiver clicked.
Well that tore it, about the only thing I could do to control my own fate was to leave before he got there. That idea made me feel like a fleeing coward. I looked at the television and felt surprise that it wasn't where I had expected it to be. Then I remembered that I didn't have a television. I shook my head. Something is very wrong I thought.
What the hell was wrong with me? Here I was remembering things that had never happened. Was I just on the phone? I felt the handset. It was warm. Okay. What was Marie wearing when she left? I remembered what she looked like, but could not - for the life of me - recall her attire, only that, as was usual, it bordered on the too conservative. She always dressed so conservatively. It gave me odd comfort that she didn't feel that she had to show off that wonderful physique; she knew she had it, the rest of the world did not need to. What was she wearing just now? When I met her?
Last week? Yesterday? I couldn't remember, but I knew that if I looked in the bedroom closet, there would be some of her things hanging in there. If I opened the hall closet four feet to my left, I would see her raincoat. What color was it? What style? I didn't know.
I took a deep breath and held it. I remembered details, just not the clothes. They were a blur, like trying to read a sign in a dream. Okay, what of Lars? Jeans and t-shirts with slogans. A green corduroy jacket that he should have thrown away two years before, except that it's so hard to find cheap clothing that fits when you're that tall. Where did I know him from? I couldn't remember ever not knowing him, although we had only been friends for about a year. I think that just then we were in the process of drifting away from each other. I decided that my recollection of him, although blurry in the details, was intact enough that I need not worry about it.
Much sooner than I expected, I heard a car screech to a halt outside. The engine raced, a car door slammed, and my front door burst open, all so close together in time that their sounds seemed to my addled mind a sort of arpeggio.
"Let's go. Let's go." He pulled me out of the chair and out the door. The next thing I knew, we were looking at each other across the roof of some beaten-up sixties musclecar.
"Catch." I saw the front door of my house slam shut out of the corner of my eye as I reached up to grab whatever he had thrown. I looked in my hand; he had tossed me my house keys. "Get in, get in."
He did me the curtesy of not smoking the tires as we pulled away from the curb. I felt myself realigning with the world.
"A pale blue sweater and a grey skirt." Did I say that out loud? I saw him looking sidelong at me through the curls of smoke around his head.
"Brother, don' y' be feelin' copacetic?" He flicked a glance at the cigarette in the corner of his mouth, then twitched his lips downward, knocking the ash off and down on to his jacket. Why didn't he let it fall on its own, I wondered. "Not that I like really be give a damn 'n all that. But if you're gonna like flip out and stuff, I'm lettin' you out here."
That got my attention. "Naw, I'm okay. Just some flu or something that's just bad enough to make it hard for me to remember things, but not bad enough that I don't care that I don't remember."
He grinned as wide as the cigarette would let him and rocked back and forth while he drove. "Ain't that somethin?" He chuckled to himself for a second. "I knew a guy," he started, "who got some kind a mushrooms or somethin' on the street that did all they was supposed to, y' know, colors 'n noises. It lasted six, ten hours. Whatever. But a coupla days later he started to - like - miss stuff. Y' know, like throw darts and miss the board. Sit down next to a chair. Turn away from noises instead of toward them. And once in a while, he'd like know stuff that he couldna' never learned. I seen an old geezer come up to him at the airport and spout some kinda animal noises at him what sounded like Armenian. He said one sentence to the old guy and he walked away smiling. I axed him what language that was and he said he didn't know. We think he was remembering stuff that happened to other people, an maybe stuff what hadn't happened yet."
"What a load of crap. Did you make that up on the spot just now?" The story should have bothered the hell out of me, but I was calm now. And sure that somehow he had made it up to get my goat and had just been lucky that it was so close to the mark. He rolled his eyes. "what you be tryin t' do t' me, woman?" He loved to quote lyrics from blues tunes. I recognized that line as something from Leadbelly.
"God's honest truth brotha man." He looked at me, then quickly back to the road. "The guy did get better, a couple months later it was like none of this ever happened. In fact, he don't remember it at all, but everybody what knows him remembers. You met him at least once: Flynn, the guy that's got the big ol' purple birthmark on his forearm." I knew who he was talking about, but never heard the story before. I dismissed it.
The last red sliver of the sun's disk disappeared in the haze out over the Pacific as we pulled under the little open-air structure in front of the Surfside Diner. The place had been there since the middle Fifties, at least, but I seriously doubt that any of its current regulars remembers the car hop service. It still had the look, but no waitresses on roller skates. We went inside.
I don't know what we ordered, but I do remember that we ate a lot. We always ate a lot, especially when I was weight training. He was tall and wide across the shoulders, and - usually - lean as a pike. He was as voracious as those vicious fishes, too. Six nine and it would surprise me if it turned out that he weighed over two hundred pounds. I avoided seeing him anything but completely dressed, I was afraid that I would see him swimming perhaps and his body would be as stringy and pathetic as a wet cat, and I did not want to think of him that way.
He leaned across the table toward me.
"You know..." I could tell that he was getting caught up in something that excited him, because he was becoming more coherent and precise in his speech. He was one person whose accent went away and whose diction improved as he grew enthused or intoxicated.
"I was talking to Elvis the other day.." Oh Lord, I thought, another tall tale. He would tell me stories about his adventures and conversations with famous people of the present and the past. For the most part, they were entertaining, and we both acted as though these were factual reports. I never contradicted him, but I never quoted him either. As far as I know, he never told these stories to anyone else. What strikes me as odd now is that when he'd talk about hanging around with Elvis - which a lot of folks now do as a joke - Elvis was still performing in Las Vegas. He also had a theory about the JFK assassination I've heard from no one else: Kennedy was already dead - or nearly so, it doesn't really matter - when the motorcade started in Dallas that day. He was drugged or run by remote control until the point where his head exploded - as it was rigged to do from the inside, this being to hide evidence of the real conspiracy, the details of which Lars did not know.
"He told me over breakfast last week that he had gone fishing with Nostrodamus" - most of his famous and powerful friends could move through space and time by force of will - " and he explained to him about how astrology works." Ah, I thought, one of the windmills I like to tilt at the most.
"He say that all the world's problems have to do with where the stars are at. That where a star is, makes things - good or bad - happen. So Elvis goes home and thinks about it. Then last week, he calls me." Lars tapped himself on the chest.
"Anyways, he says to me that he's got it all wired. Since the very beginning of civilization, folks've been trying to get things done, to do what's right. But." He paused until I looked at him. "The damn stupid stars are in the wrong friggin' places, and they're screwing everything all up. The best laid plans, and all like that..." He smiled and lit a cigarette.
"So I'm seeing where it is that he's going, so I hold up my hand and say, 'so you figure that since the stars are always in the wrong places, we should just go out to them stars and rearrange 'um, then everybody's luck'll be good from then on,' and Elvis nods his head all excited and such, and he says, 'we'll pluck 'em outta the wrong spots an' stick 'em in all the 'specially good places'." I think I made a throat clearing noise.
"Anyways, I look him in the eye and I says, 'Elvis when you gonna learn not to meddle in things when you don't really understand them? Remember when you freed the slaves and didn't see the job all the way through?'
He looked embarrassed. 'And when you told that old pharaoh that the way to eliminate his unemployment problem was to start public works projects? And the stupid bastard had all them folks build pyramids instead of irrigation systems?' "I still feel guilty about that one.'"
"He told me that he'd think about it some more and he would tell me if he was gonna go through with it. Then he told me he was late for something, he had to go write some plays before Bacon beat him to it, I think he said."
I stared at him over our empty plates. "And. . .?"
"I was looking at the paper this morning and I think he's already started. I mean, what happened to the constellation Nixon the Pederast? And where'd the summer solstice constellation the Gabor Sisters go? And what's with this Moonchildren stuff? What the hell is that noise?"