Cherry (35 page)

But you dodge and wheedle and hand-wring to avoid the one college entry task you absolutely must undertake: the college essay, a document so dreaded that you repeatedly lose application forms
from every school—some more than twice. Each time you send off for a new form, you picture some malevolent clerk who actually keeps track of your requests, citing each incident in your file with the note—
Poor organizer!

Finally you tire of the effort toward virtue, and thus you wake one Saturday to your rat’s nest of hair in the smudgy bathroom mirror—in response to which you think, Fuck it, I’m going to the beach. Next thing you know, you’re standing in wet sand under nail-headed stars having smoked some head-fogging hash. (In the absence of a hash pipe, somebody heated wide knife blades in the fire, pressing them together over little thumbnail nuggets of hash so smoke rises from the crossed blades in a hissing fury that you all lean over and snuff down like wolves.)

You feel vaguely guilty the day you set off for the TM initiation Lecia calls Nirvana-rama. But that hash was Your Absolute Last Time with Unprescribed Chemicals. It’s fall of senior year, the last year of your long sentence in this spirit-frying inferno. The day is blue-skyed and sparkling, since in the night a freak cold snap brought an ice storm that sheathed backyard foliage with hard rime.

You’d imagined that some reverence would infuse the ritual, but the doe-eyed college boy who inducts you has set an unlikely stage with the altar he’s created—a batik bedspread draped over what looks like a TV tray. It’s there you lay your mother’s check along with a snap-frozen azalea withering to black and a handful of Uncle Ben’s Instant Rice—both of which seem inordinately paltry and last-minute as holy offerings go. But when the instructor starts chanting mumbo jumbo with his eyes rolled up in his head, you gaze around the room half embarrassed for him. (As an adult, it will stun you that most bizarre encounters with virtual strangers from this period could have ended by your simply leaving, walking away—an option you exercised by running off from various relationships but that never occurred to you in real time.) You don’t feel like a bodhisattva. You feel like a chump.

Still, you give meditation a go for nearly a week, morning and night for ten or so minutes (you were supposed to do fifteen or twenty). But enlightenment is coming at such a snail’s pace, and your senior year is
stretching out so long before you that soon you’re gobbling down a black molly pre–SAT testing because you need a little boost. Then you’re blowing a little boo to take the edge off, and etcetera.

By now, the streets of Leechfield are closely patrolled for unwary teens holding dope. So every time you drive under an overpass and see (surprise!) some cop car like a low-lying cobra waiting to strike at your tripping or otherwise medicated self, your own brief jail stint flashes bright inside to kickstart cardiac overdrive. You wind up eating perfectly good joints while uttering prayers that you’re certain no Great Spirit of the Cosmos would venerate with attention. (Later you’ll decide that desperate, self-serving prayers must surely predominate, and that foxhole spirituality is perhaps the only kind anyone gets.)

Though your romantic travails are scant, a few stray heads steer you to concerts or through dope parties.

Then Doonie introduces you to a catlike guitarist everybody calls Little Hendrix for the laid-back, willowy moves he carves out with his body onstage and for the Fender Stratocaster he can play (already, at eighteen) with his teeth. He inserts your name in enough rock songs at the strip mall’s Battle of the Bands (which he of course wins) that you find yourself standing backstage any time he warms up for or jams with some headliner like Johnny or Edgar Winter. You master the disaffected, I’m-with-the-band pose that makes it extremely easy to picture yourself—resplendent in Edwardian hippie regalia—on the cover of
Rolling Stone.

About that romance little will survive, for you both stayed fairly bleary from the abundant drugs his hangers-on doled out. You will remember he bathed in some herbal stuff that sparked fantasies of Eden and resulted in a game for making love in the shower that you would ever after call Tropical Rain Forest. When he swayed above you in bed, that same fragrance made a small curtained room that held your two faces.

You even transfer illegally to his school—the crosstown rival high where Doonie also goes. You just lie to the registrar that your family has moved, and so your checkered records are mailed from Leechfield.
Within a month of carpooling with Doonie and Little Hendrix every day, blowing joints with his entourage in the parking lot at seven
A.M.
, he goes back to his college girlfriend. She looks like Olivia Hussey in
Romeo and Juliet,
drives a white Mercury Cougar, and has her own apartment in Austin. Bummer.

Little Hendrix’s baby sister, who worshiped the ex-girlfriend, even dropped a dime on you at the registrar’s, ratting you out about your parents’ true address, so you were ignominiously sent packing. Back to your old high school. Your old self. Double-dog Bummer.

Y
OUR CRUSH ON LITTLE HENDRIX
fades out in a whiff of smoke and sulfur, but he blesses you with a lingering thirst for good blues.

That’s how one legendary night you travel to Effie’s Go-Go, a black juke joint in the bowels of Beaumont behind the shipyards where no underage girl of any color should be granted admission. You drive there flaming so luminously on orange sunshine that dark trees on the roadside seem to rear back to let you pass, and your bare arms and hands glow in the car’s hull like fine marble.

You go with the new kid in town—a boy maybe higher than you—and with his putative girlfriend, Ann. Let’s call him Augustus Maurice Schuck—a curlicued moniker no less astonishing than his real name or the self behind it. Augustus is a tall and chubby-cheeked, flamboyantly gay creature (albeit not yet officially uncloseted) with brown corkscrew ringlets that are a white man’s answer to a Jheri-Kurl.

Augustus strode into drama class the first day of senior year wearing hot pants held up by flag-print suspenders. The clogs on his feet clopping like horse’s hooves caused every head to crane toward him.
He’d just moved there from Houston and shared an apartment with his mother and drag-queen brother, who carried his makeup in a metal box designed for fishing tackle, and who was more adroit than Lecia at gluing on the Bambi-esque false eyelashes popular in discos back then.

The fact that no redneck leapt on Augustus Maurice that day to beat the dogshit out of him testifies to his considerable size and to the innate splendor of his bearing. Some kind of schoolwide status instantly worked like a shield against the more common cruelties of Leechfield High toward the unorthodox. (By contrast, when Meredith wore combat boots to school her senior year, a football star rushed up to her at lunch to say, “Fuck your boots!”)

Maybe the fact that he courted the creamy-skinned Miss Ann, who was what you then called a Jesus freak, counted as a stab at heterosexuality. So the average redneck could tell himself, Well hell, he’s trying. But Miss Ann never normalized Augustus Maurice one iota, nor did his magnificence dim by a watt in her company.

His ability to travel sans butt-whipping also speaks well of the state of Texas, where attachment to personal freedom can result in tentative acceptance if not succor. A bold enough demeanor could buy certain oddballs something like prestige. In your family this was called having enough fuck-you. Augustus Maurice had scads of fuck-you, spewed fuck-you into every room he entered. This pose can also get the shit kicked out of you, but occasionally, it buys a pass.

He was the first person you ever saw whose clothing projected genuine ideology, for he was engaged in a sartorial project to overthrow the dominant social order. He could break you up just by deciding to wear a zip-up polyester jumpsuit in pea-soup green, the type favored by old war vets and pensioners. His sent an alternative message by hugging his ass so tight that you could see the rectangular label outlined on his jockey shorts, and the shoulder pads he stitched in made his upper body resemble either Joan Crawford’s or a linebacker’s.

It’s Miss Ann’s much older brother, Chick, who steers you all to Effie’s. His blues band gets booked there to warm up for the rumored appearance of Lightning Hopkins and B. B. King. (Both were reputed
to jam there en route to New Orleans from Houston—something you’ll later have cause to doubt.) Chick even gets the cover charge waived by putting your names on this I’m-with-the-Band list.

You’re hopeful that Little Hendrix will show up with the college girlfriend, Halter-Top Ho, as you call her. He’ll see you are With-the-Band, while he isn’t. Then you can flip filbert nuts at the back of his head, or shoot slobbery spit wads from your cocktail straw.

If you’d gotten to this sagging little shack even one dot or tittle less high—maybe fifteen minutes earlier—you might well have decided not to go in. You might have scoped the garbage-strewn streets skeined over with swamp gas and thought, Maybe not. But by the time you pull up, the acid rush has kicked in on overdrive, and objects are shivering inside their outlines. Just looking at Effie’s through the windshield saps every amp of thought. You just think that such a Down With It place proves how Down With It your cracker ass is.

For a long time you clutch the wheel as the engine ticks like a time bomb and stars pulse in their screw holes. It looks like a ghost town, the bare street skittered through with this urban tumbleweed of cigarette cellophanes and the odd wrapper. You have to cling to that wheel for more than a few minutes to get your bearings, for your navigational instruments are giving up only the bluntest physical truths, i.e., My feet are down; my head is up. Or, a chair is to sit. Or, right is the hand I color with.

Outside, the proportions are already going wrong. Some streetlights rise up thin as skyscrapers to the clouds; others shrink dwarflike and cowering. Nor is any line plumb. So the curb before the bar door arcs out like a stage apron, while the door itself shrinks back in forced perspective, seeming small and edgeless as a rat hole.

Augustus Maurice says, This is what I took my party dress out of mothballs for? His top lip has a natural outward curl that keeps his face in perpetual sneer.

You say, It’s a blues joint, Augustus. We’re not coming to see the Jackson Five. We’re not talking
ABC/Do-re-mi.

Miss Ann thumbs a raspy Bic lighter to study by flame the map her
brother drew. She looks up and cranes around for nonexistent street signs, ultimately saying, in a voice as chipper as the twittering of a bird, This is definitely it.

Though Miss Ann would be of virtually no use in an actual barroom altercation, her presence soothes someone tripping hard as you, for she gives off the joyous aura of that pink fairy godmother in Disney’s
Cinderella.
Also, because of her Jesus-freak status, you’re fairly sure she isn’t high, so at least one of you will (allegedly) know what’s going on.

While you’re thinking all this, in a momentary lapse of concentration, you’re all whisked across the street to the door. It’s as if your feet sprouted rollers and wheeled you there like some jet-powered robot. This happens so fast that you miss the actual travel, just arrive with your head spinning.

In reference to this, you say, breathlessly, What’s that?

Augustus says, That’s a boarded-up place that also has bars on the windows. He is dripping sarcasm in a way that transforms him into the comedian Jack Benny when he says, Now
that’s
a nice touch.

You say with some effort from your dry mouth, Least we’ll be safe. All that armor’ll keep the dragons out.

Or the dragons in, Augustus says. He tilts his head in puzzlement, for he is also tripping. He says, With us? Us with the dragons locked in—is that correct? Grammatically speaking?

You flash on diagramming sentences in sixth grade under the hawklike visage of Miss Clickety Clack. You’re thinking it’s
we
for subject,
us
for predicate. The unopened door stands before you, so tiny you imagine having to stoop to get through it.

But you pause again before going in—maybe because this is not exactly a white place. But such a motive so disturbs you that entrance is suddenly required. You now have to go in. Your pose of hands-across-the-water commands it. Besides, when you look back at the car, it sits about a thousand yards away, across a strip of desert sand. Then you notice Ann beaming serenely at the unopened door.

You remember Ann’s brother is inside. Your unlikely triad won’t exactly wander in unescorted, white-bread faces blaring. The band’s presence will buy you safe passage. Plus look at Miss Ann glow. Whatever snakebite you suffer in these wilds, she will serve as antivenom. You hallucinate butterflies to fly figure eights around her. She is your talisman against doubt, the human equivalent of a rabbit’s foot.

But once you pass through that portal and the door clicks behind you, the degree of your miscalculation is plain.

First there’s the bottle-green atmosphere, for the bar air is thick as sludge with its underscent of something rotted—old Brussels sprouts maybe.

At the back of the room, there’s a glaringly lit stage of planks, a structure you might find in a cowboy saloon. It holds a giant black woman dancing naked but for bra and panties. She’s enormously tall, well over six feet and leggy. She wears black wraparound sunglasses, the kind with the bubbled-out, amphibian surface and just a little razor-slit to peep through, as if that thin slash were all she could bear to take in of the world.

What horrifies you more than her near nudity is the unfortunate state of those underthings. The panties are grayed-out and high-waisted, from some other era, with
Tuesday
embroidered in a circle on front, though you’re fairly sure it’s Friday. The elastic’s torn from one leghole, and hangs down as if it’s lost interest in hugging to her leg. To compensate for the underwear’s lackluster cling and the fact that they’re too big for her by half, she’s pulled them up, the waistband stopping just shy of her rib cage. This deforms her proportions even further—shortening her torso and lengthening her legs till she resembles some ill-shaped spider.