story began on a Tuesday.
For you, that is the day after Monday. For me, it is a day that, like the other six, brims with the potential for mystery, adventure, and terror.
You should not take this to mean that my life is romantic and magical. Too much mystery is merely an annoyance. Too much adventure is exhausting. And a little terror goes a long way.
Without the help of an alarm clock, I woke that Tuesday morning at five, from a dream about dead bowling-alley employees.
I never set the alarm because my internal clock is so reliable. If I wish to wake promptly at five, then before going to bed I tell myself three times that I must be awake sharply at 4:45.
While reliable, my internal alarm clock for some reason runs fifteen minutes slow. I learned this years ago and have adjusted to the problem.
The dream about the dead bowling-alley employees has troubled my sleep once or twice a month for three years. The details are not yet specific enough to act upon. I will have to wait and hope that clarification doesn’t come to me too late.
So I woke at five, sat up in bed, and said, “Spare me that I may serve,” which is the morning prayer that my Granny Sugars taught me to say when I was little.
Pearl Sugars was my mother’s mother. If she had been my father’s mother, my name would be Odd Sugars, further complicating my life.
Granny Sugars believed in bargaining with God. She called Him “that old rug merchant.”
Before every poker game, she promised God to spread His holy word or to share her good fortune with orphans in return for a few unbeatable hands. Throughout her life, winnings from card games remained a significant source of income.
Being a hard-drinking woman with numerous interests in addition to poker, Granny Sugars didn’t always spend as much time spreading God’s word as she promised Him that she would. She believed that God expected to be conned more often than not and that He would be a good sport about it.
You can con God and get away with it, Granny said, if you do so with charm and wit. If you live your life with imagination and verve, God will play along just to see what outrageously entertaining thing you’ll do next.
He’ll also cut you some slack if you’re astonishingly stupid in an amusing fashion. Granny claimed that this explains why uncountable millions of breathtakingly stupid people get along just fine in life.
Of course, in the process, you must never do harm to others in any serious way, or you’ll cease to amuse Him. Then payment comes due for the promises you didn’t keep.
In spite of drinking lumberjacks under the table, regularly winning at poker with stone-hearted psychopaths who didn’t like to lose, driving fast cars with utter contempt for the laws of physics (but never while intoxicated), and eating a diet rich in pork fat, Granny Sugars died peacefully in her sleep at the age of seventy-two. They found her with a nearly empty snifter of brandy on the nightstand, a book by her favorite novelist turned to the last page, and a smile on her face.
Judging by all available evidence, Granny and God understood each other pretty well.
Pleased to be alive that Tuesday morning, on the dark side of the dawn, I switched on my nightstand lamp and surveyed the chamber that served as my bedroom, living room, kitchen, and dining room. I never get out of bed until I know who, if anyone, is waiting for me.
If visitors either benign or malevolent had spent part of the night watching me sleep, they had not lingered for a breakfast chat. Sometimes simply getting from bed to bathroom can take the charm out of a new day.
Only Elvis was there, wearing the lei of orchids, smiling, and pointing one finger at me as if it were a cocked gun.
Although I enjoy living above this particular two-car garage, and though I find my quarters cozy, Architectural Digest will not be seeking an exclusive photo layout. If one of their glamour scouts saw my place, he’d probably note, with disdain, that the second word in the magazine’s name is not, after all, Indigestion.
The life-size cardboard figure of Elvis, part of a theater-lobby display promoting Blue Hawaii, was where I’d left it. Occasionally, it moves—or is moved—during the night.
I showered with peach-scented soap and peach shampoo, which were given to me by Stormy Llewellyn. Her real first name is Bronwen, but she thinks that makes her sound like an elf.
My real name actually is Odd.
According to my mother, this is an uncorrected birth-certificate error. Sometimes she says they intended to name me Todd. Other times she says it was Dobb, after a Czechoslovakian uncle.
My father insists that they always intended to name me Odd, although he won’t tell me why. He notes that I don’t have a Czechoslovakian uncle.
My mother vigorously asserts the existence of the uncle, though she refuses to explain why I’ve never met either him or her sister, Cymry, to whom he is supposedly married.
Although my father acknowledges the existence of Cymry, he is adamant that she has never married. He says that she is a freak, but what he means by this I don’t know, for he will say no more.
My mother becomes infuriated at the suggestion that her sister is any kind of freak. She calls Cymry a gift from God but otherwise remains uncommunicative on the subject.
I find it easier to live with the name Odd than to contest it. By the time I was old enough to realize that it was an unusual name, I had grown comfortable with it.
Stormy Llewellyn and I are more than friends. We believe that we are soul mates.
For one thing, we have a card from a carnival fortune-telling machine that says we’re destined to be together forever.
We also have matching birthmarks.
Cards and birthmarks aside, I love her intensely. I would throw myself off a high cliff for her if she asked me to jump. I would, of course, need to understand the reasoning behind her request.
Fortunately for me, Stormy is not the kind of person to ask such a thing lightly. She expects nothing of others that she herself would not do. In treacherous currents, she is kept steady by a moral anchor the size of a ship.
She once brooded for an entire day about whether to keep fifty cents that she found in the change-return slot of a pay phone. At last she mailed it to the telephone company.
Returning to the cliff for a moment, I don’t mean to imply that I’m afraid of Death. I’m just not ready to go out on a date with him.
Smelling like a peach, as Stormy likes me, not afraid of Death, having eaten a blueberry muffin, saying good-bye to Elvis with the words “Taking care of business” in a lousy imitation of his voice, I set off for work at the Pico Mundo Grille.
Although the dawn had just broken, it had already flash-fried into a hard yellow yolk on the eastern horizon.
The town of Pico Mundo is in that part of southern California where you can never forget that in spite of all the water imported by the state aqueduct system, the true condition of the territory is desert. In March we bake. In August, which this was, we broil.
The
