Squirrel Eyes Page 6

  I wish I could tell you how Gage and DeSoto handled the situation, but I couldn't keep my mind off of Kelli and the idea that I might – with any luck at all – be speaking to her within the next twenty-four hours. This of course led to the contemplation of other acts I might soon be performing with her, which suddenly made me feel very uncomfortable about being in the same room with my mother. I considered hitting the sack, but it was only 9:30, and being terribly guilt-ridden about the loathsome and degenerate thoughts I was having at Kelli's expense, I somehow got it in my head that if I went to bed that early, my mom would think I was, you know – up to something. In her sewing room, yet. Besides, with all this TV-watching, I could see I was already in a rut after only being in town one day.

  It was late enough that Taylor would be due at work, and there wasn't really anybody else I could think of that I wanted to see (or, to be honest, anybody that I cared to have know I was in town), so I piled into Mom's boat-like Grand Marquis and went out on my own. As prone to cower in fear as I'd become, I found myself driving around the block about three times before I finally got pissed off enough at my foolishness to head for a specific destination.

  I wound up at Jiggy's Tiki Room, a swank little hipster joint downtown. Parking the car, I sat behind the wheel for some time, struggling with the urge to scram back to my mom's place. It was that miserable LA dread again – the feeling that I had no right to interact with other humans, to make them suffer my worthlessness just so I might have a beer or dinner or shop for a book.

  "God damn it!" I yelled, banging the steering wheel sharply. After glancing around to see if anyone had heard, I entered the bar.

  It was a slow night, and I couldn't decide right away if that was a good or bad thing. On the one hand, it meant fewer people who might sneer at my detestable presence, but it also meant fewer people to distract those who might sneer at my detestable presence. How does this whole self-loathing thing get started, for God's sake?

  I slunk to the back of the place and took a seat at a booth beneath a gigantic moose head, then furtively checked out the other patrons.

  Seated nearest me were a couple of guys – obviously regulars – talking Australian-rules football and sipping garishly decorated drinks the size of paint cans. At the bar, a pink-haired girl I recognized as a professional dominatrix (we hadn't been officially introduced, but I knew who she was through seeing her at parties and the like) laughed half-heartedly at a joke told by a squat, fat little fellow who would no doubt be punished later for his lousy attempts at humor. Near the front of the place, four rockabilly guys sporting DAs and wallet chains played pool and kept the jukebox fed. At the moment, it was achingly spilling forth Salome by the Old 97s: It's over now/And so are we/My blood's turned to dirt, girl/You broke every part of me....

  A waitress approached my table. She was about five-three, shapely as hell, with short dark hair and dark eyes and big, kissable lips rendered even more so by the bruise-colored lipstick she wore. I hoarsely ordered a hard lemonade.

  My eyes were riveted to the waitress as she strolled the joint, delivering drinks, emptying ashtrays, wiping up spills. At one point, she went to the end of the bar near the cash register, beneath the giant, smoldering Tiki-god, and took a seat, lighting a smoke. If a pair of lungs had ever befouled themselves in a more magnificent manner, I'd liked to have seen it. It crushed my soul when she disappeared into the back room for what seemed like hours (but in reality was probably only a fifteen-minute break).

  During her absence, I contemplated making that phone call to Kelli's sister but was spared the decision by the return of the waitress. She made her way to my table again, asking if I needed another.

  "Naw, I'm all right, thanks," I said, certain I'd embarrass myself if I drank any more.

  As I watched, enrapt, this vision of splendor walking away from my table, it suddenly hit me – I was crazed with lust. For the first time since Alison dumped me, I actually felt like having sex with someone – I know there's that whole thing with Kelli that had driven me to Albuquerque in the first place but that had attained such lofty status in my mind that it didn't even seem like sex anymore – it was something more akin to winning the Olympic gold in gymnastics or being chosen as Playmate of the Year.

  But what I wanted (and wanted with this waitress, right now, right here on my table) was a serious bout of no-holds-barred, ass-slapping, hair-pulling, buttocks-biting fucking, the kind that leaves you drenched in sweat and shaking like you just squat-pressed 350 pounds.

  Just as suddenly, I realized that the whole idea made me feel guilty as hell, and I hadn't a clue as to why. I finished my lemonade, threw a couple bucks on the table, and went home.

  10

  I woke up early (for me, anyway) the next morning, riding on about three hours of sleep – a snooze of epic length, considering the way I'd been sleeping lately. I felt pretty good for that ten-second window between muddled awakening and sudden recall of Oh yeah – this is my life.

  Mom wanted to feed me another epicurean feast of sausage and all the trimmings, but I begged off, having already eaten more since I arrived in Albuquerque than I had in the last two weeks combined. Despite what had become a familiar sense of dread, I forced myself to take a shower and sure as shit, after standing under the water for a couple of minutes, the tears began to flow. The melancholia of the freshly scrubbed.

  Weeping and bathing out of the way, I decided it was time to make that phone call – which meant, of course, that I did Mom's dishes, swept the kitchen floor, poked around outside for awhile, dusted the TV screen, and watched most of an episode of Gunsmoke before I came anywhere near the phone, and even then I called my friend Nathan in LA first and asked him if I had received any exciting-looking mail (no). After suffering an excruciatingly long and fruitless attempt on my part to make some sort of conversation, Nathan tossed off a hasty "Late-for-a-meeting-gotta-go" and hung up.

  It was time to make good on this thing. Kendra's phone number, scrawled on a scrap of paper, seemed almost to throb with ominous significance.

  So why did I suddenly want, more desperately than I can possibly make clear, just to hold Alison? I didn't care anymore about sleeping with Kelli or the Tiki Waitress or that hot chick on CNN (Natalie Allen, if you're keeping score), and I didn't want to be in Albuquerque, didn't want to make this fucking phone call. The sheer hopelessness of it all, the feelings of detachment and gloom, were more profound than I'd ever experienced over the course of my many years of feeling such things. If there had ever been a time when I was broken-hearted enough to seriously consider eating that borrowed shotgun, it was at that moment. It was as if the swirling, murky cloud of self-loathing and self-pity that had obscured my vision for the last six months suddenly cleared – but only just enough to reveal how vacant my future actually was.

  My rapidly eroding ability to persuade myself that I would eventually make a living as a filmmaker suddenly broke from the cliff face and tumbled into the churning sea below, and for the first time ever, I really felt as if I had nothing – I mean, absolutely fucking nothing – to cling to. I'd spent a lifetime in this foolish pursuit of The Dream – the shit-heaped, cliche-ridden foundation that movies are built on, for Christ's sake – waiting for the music-swelling, girlfriend-smooching, crowd-pleasing Gonna-Fly-Now triumph that I was promised (promised!) as a reward for putting in all that goddamn work and faith even when it all seemed so pointless, through all the deals that suddenly, inexplicably fell through and the lies and bullshit and aggravation and periods of crushing near-defeat – and instead it had led me to the utterly terrifying and achingly lonely understanding that my whole life was completely meaningless.

  Welcome to my world, some might say, while others might reply with a not-unfounded Pull your head out of your ass and man the hell up, but bear with me on this one: my brother, asshole though he may be, provided a service – everybody has to drive a car, right? Daniel kept those cars running. The french-fry guy at McDonalds? Serves you foo
d (and if you don't think that means anything, try making your own french fries for a few weeks).

  But what the hell does the aspiring filmmaker offer society? I can tell you who wrote Shriek of the Mutilated (Ed Adlum and Ed Kelleher) or the name of the actor who played Romero in Escape From New York (Frank Doubleday) or that Dustin Hoffman was certain he blew the audition for The Graduate, and a million other tidbits of trivia – but is any of that going to make the slightest damn bit of difference in your day? Unless you've made some kind of asinine bet with a co-worker over whether or not Roddy McDowall played Cornelius in Beneath the Planet of the Apes (no, it was David Watson that time), I'm the last guy you'd want to invite to a dinner party.

  But what the fuck was the answer? I'd finally, explosively, identified the problem (it had only been heartily chewing at my ass for the last six months, after all), but now what? I felt as if I'd been endlessly driving down a deserted two-lane road only to just now discover that I'd taken a wrong turn as I left my driveway.

  It was in this near-deranged state that I dialed Kendra's number. I had rehearsed my snappy patter a million times in my head, but distracted as I was, I let my fingers do the walking without fully preparing myself. In fact, as the phone was ringing, I experienced the momentary flash of terror that accompanies the inability to remember whom one has just called.

  "Hello?" The pleasant female voice snapped me out of my stupefaction, but did nothing to restore my cool.

  "I – uh, um ..." I babbled, struggling to recall my well-rehearsed script. Then chunks of it started coming back, but unfortunately the pages were out of order. "I used to, uh – " Jesus, get a hold of yourself. "Is this Kendra?" I finally managed.

  "She's not in," the woman on the other end said, a slight tone of suspicion in her voice – and who can blame her after an opening like that? "Can I take a message?"

  Yeah, tell her I'd like to fuck her sister and thereby correct my meaningless life. Please. "Uh, yeah...." I said, once again shuffling pages in my head. "My name's Alvin, and, uh ... I used to go out with her sister Kelli ... maybe you could just ask Kendra to call me?"

  There was a stunningly long pause, during which I considered hanging up the phone and running down the street.

  Then: "Alvin?"

  Now it was my turn to hesitate. "Yeah, that's it," I said.

  "Waitaminnit – Alvin Bandy?"

  "Yeah...."

  "This is Kelli," she said, letting out a disbelieving laugh.

  Holy jumping shitcakes. I hadn't even considered the possibility of something like this happening. My script was useless now.

  "I can't believe it," she said, sounding, amazingly enough, kind of pleased. "God, it's been – "

  "Fourteen years," I interrupted; then, in an attempt to seem less like I'd been obsessing about it, added "I think – isn't that about right?"

  "Where have you been? What have you been doing?" she asked.

  There was no doubt about it: she sounded happy to hear from me. This whole thing might be easier than I thought.

  "Jeez Louise, where do I start?" I said, trying to think of the fastest way to get to the point. How do you tell a girl you haven't spoken to in a decade and a half that you need to get into her pants as soon as possible?

  "Mmm, I'll bet we both have long stories," Kelli said knowingly, as if I'd made some clever comment rather than simply blurted out the first thing that popped into my head. My courage was further bolstered by the manner in which she spoke – making it obvious she wanted to share those stories.

  I was already beginning to feel like I was on my way to a brighter future.

  11

  There wasn't an ounce of fat on her.

  After a blessedly brief spurt of further babbling on my part, Kelli and I agreed to meet for dinner. I made a rather unsubtle and stunningly awkward attempt to discover whether or not she was married ("So, I guess, uh, you can bring your husband along – if there is one," were my exact words), but much to my relief, she wasn't that, either. Fuck you, Taylor.

  I showed up way too early (a nervous habit of mine) and sat at the bar nursing a glass of root beer. Kelli, much to my chagrin, had chosen Don Vincenzo's as our meeting place. Don't get me wrong — the food and everything were fine, but it just happened to be where Alison had been working when we met. After spending twenty minutes explaining to one of her former co-workers why we were no longer an item, I was a little frazzled when Kelli walked through the door. Although she had to survey the place a couple times before she realized who I was, I recognized her instantly.

  Her face was striking – in an unusual manner, certainly, but I couldn't count the times I had jerked off while thinking about her thick, chewy lips and her almost muzzle-like snout (along with several other notable parts, of course). Her stringy blonde hair, shorter now than she used to wear it, still hung in her eyes so you could never get a good look at them; she once told me she was embarrassed by her eyes. I liked them, but they were weird as hell and I could understand her insecurity. Her irises were overlarge, making it seem as if her eyes were almost entirely a soft, glittering brown – the only white visible a tiny ring, nearly hidden by her eyelids. Stringy flecks of green and yellow were spattered across the surface, like one of those rubber superballs you get out of bubblegum machines. When we were teenagers, Taylor had once described Kelli as having squirrel eyes, sending me into a laughing, snorting frenzy. Now, looking at her standing in the restaurant's doorway – the walking embodiment (or so I hoped) of my salvation – it just made me feel ashamed.

  And, as I said, she was not fat.

  She was, however, a mom.

  When Kelli saw me – on her second pass of the room – she grinned the best grin I've ever seen in my life.

  "Alvin," she purred.

  As I left my barstool and we exchanged a long, warm hug, I momentarily forgot about Alison and how miserable I was, swept away on Kelli's smell and the way her body felt in my arms. It was difficult to believe it had been fourteen years since we'd last seen one another. We ordered food and drinks (I was sticking with root beer to avoid any alcohol-fueled mishaps) and found a table. As we settled in, Kelli folded her hands and shot me that grin again. It was the first time in more than six months that I felt like somebody was genuinely pleased to see me.

  Which is why it may be unforgivable that I felt a twinge of distress when Kelli mentioned how tough it was to find a decent sitter.

  It wasn't her hardship in finding a trustworthy teenage girl to keep on eye on the kid that got me down; if that had been the case I would've been proud of myself for my ability to empathize with a situation I knew nothing about. It was the very idea of her having a child in the first place. My mind was instantly overrun with the numerous obstacles a youngster in the mix would no doubt place before me on the path to Kelli's bed. Not that her parental status came as any kind of shock, mind you – in fact, I think I would've been more surprised to discover that she hadn't gone and pupped. I just didn't want to be bothered by this particular detail, to have my extraordinary progress in making my Grand Plan a reality slowed by some whining tyke.

  "Kendra usually watches her for me," Kelli said. "I don't go out that much, really, so it's not a big deal, but she had tickets to some concert tonight."

  "So you've got a little girl?" I asked, maintaining not only a crippled smile but a certain amount of self-loathing for feeling the way I did.

  Kelli nodded, and from the way she did it, the look on her face, I could tell how much she adored her daughter. I was the worst human being on the planet.

  "Her name's Lydia," she said. "She's six."

  I did the math in my head embarrassingly slowly. Kelli was out having babies at twenty-six while I had been a twenty-eight-year-old clerk at a video store, earning minimum wage.

  "I'm really spooky about hiring somebody I don't know to watch her. You know how it is."

  "Oh, yeah," I concurred heartily, having no fucking clue how it is at all. I began to realize, however, th
at what I had initially perceived as a six-year-old cock-blocker hadn't made a difference in Kelli's desire to see me or the fact that she was actually here with me now, even when it required extra effort on her part. I felt like I should've apologized for being an asshole, excused myself, then walked into the alley to politely finish myself off with a broken beer bottle.

  "So what'd you do?" I asked. "You didn't leave her in the car, did you?"

  "Shh," Kelli hissed. She leaned across the table, glancing around like a member of the French Resistance in a bad war movie. "I had to wrap her in duct tape so she couldn't beat on the trunk lid."

  I almost offered to lick her feet again right then and there.

  "She has a very sweet grandmother," Kelli said. "I keep some of Lydia's stuff over there so she can spend the night – if I should, you know, stay out real late."

  Despite a lifetime of being warned otherwise, I was beginning to count my proverbial chickens. There was only one thing she could've meant by stay out real late – wasn't there? With Kendra at a concert and the little girl with her grandmother, I couldn't help but feel I'd be waking up a new man in the morning.

  Kelli went on to explain that she and her daughter had moved in with Kendra when things fell apart with Lydia's dad.

  "It wasn't as if he was a wife-beating child-hater or anything dramatic like that," she insisted. "We just didn't like each other much. After three years of intense frustration, we called it quits."

  Kelli was working a pretty good job doing data processing (another subject I knew not a damn thing about – the "pretty good job" part, I mean), but still, money was tight and she had let the guy slide without having to pay any child support just to be rid of him.