A rictus for a mouth. You saw his jaw move independently of his skull. The guy was a walking X ray. “Since when can you afford a whole carton?”
“They’re Ryan’s.”
“Since when can he afford?”
“Yeah,” Eve said with mock curiosity, “I wonder how much he paid for them.”
“You mean with or without tax.” Skeletor gave a total-gum smile and you swore his skin was going to peel away. “I’d kill for a smoke right now.”
“I can’t break the packing seal. Wait’ll Ryan gets here.”
A concealed-disappointment: “Okay.”
“When’s Derivative playing?”
“Later.”
“Could you be less specific, please?”
“Later or maybe earlier.”
“And to think I used to tell people you weren’t retarded.”
“You’re developing the potential to be a real bitch.”
“I thought I was a cunt already. You said so last week.”
“Whatever. Let’s play dominoes.”
“They put away the set.”
“But it’s not eight yet.”
“Yeah, well, go tell it on the mountain.”
Skeletor leaned back on the park bench that the Fricatash supplied instead of chairs at its tables and surveyed the crowd of sixty Crayola-headed Eureka cool kids of death. No music played and so they stumbled around on their own, borrowing money from each other. The ones not too stoned to converse conversed; the others made sounds in code, using the same low register “ahhhh” to mean I’m-hungry and isn’t-she-hot and I’ve-gotta-sit-down-for-a-minute and when’s-this-gonna-start and I-read-the-news-today-oh-boy. It was the one-note language of infants that some hidden recess of the brain could translate, a sound to represent everything and nothing.
The Fricatash bar was doing brisk coffee business, as this was a northern California establishment catering to minors. The management, a middle-aged Bengali man named Ravi, expected to be visited by the cops at least twice over the course of the evening and hassled and warned about slackening his vigilance against any on-site drinking by his patrons. Nobody was getting away with anything so don’t get any ideas.
Through the crowd stumbled Ryan in his bomber jacket emblazoned on the back with a child’s iron-on koala bear patch. He squeezed in on the bench between Eve and Skeletor and promptly started laughing, hardy har har at first and then the Crack-Up, body spasming around while he bent forward and muffled his screams in his arm, his long periwinkle-blue hair hanging over the edge of the table like a waterfall. Eve and Skeletor scooted away from him.
“Hey, man.” Skeletor placed a hand on Ryan’s shaking shoulder like a priest consoling a distraught parishioner. “Can I bum a pack of cigarettes?”
But Ryan could only give little tug boat toots and shudder. His brain was being tossed around on a trampoline, and when Eve looked at him she saw five hours into the future when he would be jerking through his nightly pantomime of sleep, in a constant cold sweat despite the seventy-degree room temperature. Eve would sleep fitfully for as long as possible, but eventually, at four or five in the morning, scared of the thought of having to get up and go to work at eleven, she’d take one of the prescription sleeping pills they bought from her aunt, and his twitching would get less noticeable, and she’d sink far from the material world until the alarm clock ripped her back into it.
“Tonight, ladies and germs, we have a very big shoe for you,” said a young man with slicked-back hair doing a kind of Catskills Lodge emcee voice, an Ed Sullivan redux. He wore a pea-green thrift store suit that was too tight around the chest and high around the ankles, a Frankenstein fit that he exaggerated by holding his breath and pulling up on his belt. “I see lots of beautiful people and know you’re going to have a beautiful time. So beautiful I can’t stand it. So sunset beautiful I have a beehive in my belly.” He dropped the microphone to his side. Someone from the audience told him he was beautiful. “Could we have a rilly big round of applause for …” he let the words hang in the air, “for …” his eyebrows went up searchingly, “you’re all so beautiful,” and now there was a hush and someone threw a water bottle at him that barely missed, “I love the nightlife baby,” as the spotlight moved up and back, “people, come closer, I won’t bite and neither will,” to an assembled four-person band, “the Sloe Eyes!”
Pandemonium.
When the Sloe Eyes ended their set and left, Eve saw the guitarist for Derivative attach his guitar to an amp at the back of the Fricatash stage while the singer breaststroked in place. She got up from the table and pushed past Ryan, who had stopped laughing and now sat with his shoulders slumped forward on the bench like a boxer after losing a fight.
Eve squirmed through people and made a clearing for herself near the stage, where she waited patiently for the band to begin. Refused a swig from a bottle of soda that had been emptied and filled with gin. Just said no to drugs. Had a brief exchange with her coworker Vikram, there because he’d heard a woman he liked was coming, though she was nowhere to be seen and he was too tired to be bouncing around with kids half his age. Adjusted her bra strap that had somehow gotten flipped over.
Derivative began with its dolphin song, choruses of eeek-yiiiiik, and Eve was put in a bad mood because how can anyone honestly like to listen to such annoying piercing shit? It was the band being perverse and frustrating their fans’ expectations, which Eve admired in theory but hated in practice. She wanted them to frustrate the fans who expected something out of the ordinary like the dolphin song, not her expectation of their brilliant fifty-second threnodies.
The next song was a coy little number about a boy and a girl playing at being animals. And it got graphic real quick. “My birdie flies into your nest oh whoa oh.” Eve loved this song and forgot all about Ryan’s death on the installment plan. And the probability of Bonanza 88 going out of business. She was lost on a planet of sound and saw no reason to try to find her way back. “Try my acorn try my acorn I’ve hidden it just for you.”
Eve stepped backward and forward in time to the music. She jostled bodies and felt around for floor openings in which to put her feet and soon realized that her shirt was clinging wet in back. Nobody should have had time to sweat that badly, so she turned around to see who was responsible for her wetness and saw an old guy, in his fifties at least, dripping in an open-collared shirt. Hair pasted to the side of his head. People had moved away from him, presumably because he’d also gotten them wet, so he was surrounded by a ring of clear space. Eve couldn’t place where she’d seen him before, certainly not at the Fricatash. The man had no business being there. Not that Eve was ageist. Far from. She just didn’t think it was right for soaking wet old guys to thrust themselves into the middle of young people’s fun.
The song ended and the bassist drank an iced coffee and the drummer buried his head in his hands. Eve glanced in Ryan’s direction, saw Skeletor edge a pack of cigarettes out of the carton. A girl she recognized from McDonald’s stepped into her line of sight. Facing forward she saw the old wet guy now directly in front of her, almost stepping on her toes.
“Excuse me,” she said.
The man stepped aside and said, “Could you tell me
