Crapalachia: A Biography of Place (13 page)

 

Bill got ahold of him by the neck and I got ahold of him by the legs and we tried pulling him down. Lee flipped Bill off of him. Reinaldo jumped on his back and Lee threw Reinaldo off his back as well. I was wrapped around his leg and he started walking around like I was a small child and he was my father giving me a ride. Bill jumped on his back again, but there wasn’t any use. Lee flipped Bill off his back and threw me off his leg like he was kicking off a heavy boot and then he laughed and shouted: “Come on, ya little skinny bastard. Come on, you OCD bastard.”

And we never could get him down.

We were all losers, but Lee was different. Lee was the greatest loser of us all and he could prove it because he was the owner of the backyard wrestling battle royale championship belt. He WAS our champion.

 

Then Bill looked up at the twilight time sky and told us about the Greenbrier Ghost. Then he told us how he was going to fall in love. He told us we should all try to fall in love too. He told us that love was his destiny. Then he pointed to the mountain and told us the elevation. He pointed to another mountain and told us its elevation. Then we all sat and dreamed about climbing to the top of them and looking down at the giant fucking hearts below, pumping full of blood and love. It was the destroyer of all things—this LOVE.

Of course, Bill had been in love before. One day he passed by a girl at school. She smiled at him and he thought he was in love.

That night he asked me, “You know that blonde girl at school?”

I said, “What?”

He said, “You know that blonde girl?”

I told him that really fucking narrowed it down for me. He told me that she smiled at him today and she smiled at him because she liked him.

I just shook my head and looked at him and then I told him just because a girl smiles at you doesn’t mean she likes you.

He smiled and told me I was just jealous.

 

 

That night he walked around the room and lifted his weights and flexed his muscles in the reflection from the dark window. He walked over to the mirror and rubbed his fingers through his thick red hair and said: “You know the girls like me because of my pretty red hair. They’ve all forgotten how my mother used to shave my head when I had lice.”

Then he made a muscle. I pretended not to listen to him.

Then he rubbed his hands through his hair some more and said: “You’re just jealous. You’re just jealous because you don’t have pretty red hair like me.”

Then he flexed his muscles in the mirror and took his shirt off with his big red nipples showing. I told him once again not to walk around without his shirt on. I told Bill his Bill titties looked like girl titties if you looked at them right. I told him not to show them to the blonde girl or she might have to question her sexuality.

 

 

The next morning he woke up and sat at his desk. He started copying something into a notebook. I walked towards him and looked over his shoulder. I saw a
W W W
and then another
W
—all lined up in a row. He was writing
W
’s?

I said: “What are you doing?”

Bill said: “I’m practicing my
W
’s.”

I said: “Why the hell are you practicing
W
’s?”

Bill said girls like guys with good penmanship.

 

 

The next day he wrote a poem. It took him hours. That evening he wanted me to read the poem he wrote. He handed me the poem and I read it.

I read: “Oh my love/my darling. I hunger for your touch a long, lonely time.”

 

At first it seemed familiar, but I kept reading. “And time goes by so slowly and time can do so much.”

It was “Unchained Melody.”

I said, “It’s ‘Unchained Melody.’”

Bill said, “No it’s not.”

I said, “Yes it is. You just wrote down the lyrics to ‘Unchained Melody.’ That’s not a poem, that’s just writing down lyrics.”

He said, “No I didn’t.”

But he did. Then he started humming the song and I could see that he was different. He was different because he meant these words and his eyes said, “Where to? What next?” Then his mouth said the saddest word in the world: “Tomorrow.”

 

 

 

BUT HE NEVER LOVED ANYBODY LIKE HE LOVED…

I didn’t know it then, but the poem was for her. Janette was this tall girl who lived in the apartments behind the gas station. You could see the door to her house from our bedroom window. She cleaned houses after she quit school and took care of an old woman who lived in the apartment next door. One day she made the mistake of saying hi to Bill when she passed him in the alley. She was being nice to him. She wasn’t ignoring him like everyone else and that’s all it took. Bill came in and told me Janette said hi to him. Bill told me he was finally in love. He told me that lice business was all behind him now and a girl liked him.

 

He even called up his grandpa on the telephone to tell him he was courting this girl. I sat on the bed beside the phone and listened to him talk to his 90-year-old grandfather.

“Hey, Paw,” he said. “Hey, Paw. How you doing?”

Grandpa couldn’t even hear at all so Bill started shouting at him louder.

He said, “Hey, Paw. I’m courting this girl.” He stopped. “Yeah, I’m still going to school.”

I laughed to myself at his use of the word
courting
. Bill saw that I was laughing at him. He laughed too but he kept right on talking.

So I said, “
Courting
, Bill? Are you serious? It’s no wonder you can’t get any pussy.”

 

Then I stopped laughing because I wasn’t much better off. I wasn’t getting any pussy either.

 

Then Bill looked up Janette’s mother’s last name in the phone book. I asked him if he was seriously calling her after only saying hi to her. Bill didn’t answer me. He just dialed the phone.

He waited. He said, “Hey, Janette. This is Bill.”

And then there was quiet but he kept going.

“This is Bill. You know the guy with red hair?”

“No. Red hair. That’s right.” He was quiet. “Oh, you said hi to me today.”

 

Then Naked Joe came in and asked what we were doing.

I told him Bill was calling Janette.

Naked Joe said, “What the fuck? You can’t do that.”

Joe went over and started eating a bowl of our cereal. He just laughed and said, “That’s real great for a guy who asked Fat Jimmy to suck his dick.”

I asked him if he just came over here to eat our food.

Naked Joe said he was hungry. I told him to get the hell out of here. He finished eating his bowl of cereal and then he went home.

 

She still didn’t know who Bill was. He still asked her though. “Well I was just wondering if you want to do something tomorrow?”

The voice on the other line was talking.

Then Bill said, “Yeah with me. That’s what I meant. You want to do something with me tomorrow?”

She told him she had something to do the next day. He said, “Well okay, thanks.”

He panicked.

He hung up.

It was like he was thinking about Fat Jimmy again.

He was wondering if it was true.

 

 

A few months before, Bill got so drunk Lee had to ask Fat Jimmy to help carry him up to the apartment. Fat Jimmy was a big black guy who worked across the street at 7-Eleven. Lee messed with Bill the next day and told him that he asked to suck Fat Jimmy’s dick. Lee said Bill opened his eyes and looked at Jimmy. He told us Bill said, “Fat Jimmy, you want me to suck your ding dong. I’ll suck your ding dong, Fat Jimmy.”

When Lee told us that he laughed and said, “Man it made me uncomfortable as hell coming up the stairs like that and you offering Fat Jimmy sexual favors. Here Jimmy is just trying to help you out by carrying your drunk ass up the stairs and here you’re trying to seduce him. I think it made Jimmy uncomfortable too.” Of course, Bill freaked out and started to question his sexuality.

 

 

So now Bill was asking me again: “Do you think I really asked Fat Jimmy what Lee said I asked him?”

“What do you mean?”

“Ask Fat Jimmy what Lee said I asked him about.”

 

I told him not to worry about it. We were all gay when it came down to it. Bill didn’t say anything.

 

Then the next night—he picked up the phone again.

He said, “Hey, Janette. This is Bill Crankshanks.”

There was quiet again. He kept going. He said, “Yeah this is Bill. Yeah. The guy with red hair who called you yesterday.”

Then he asked her the question again.

“You want to do something tomorrow?”

She told him the same thing as the day before. He still didn’t know what this meant.

He didn’t know this meant no.

He said, “Well what about the next day?”

It was quiet.

Then Bill said. “Oh that’s okay. What about the day after that?”

She told him that was Valentines Day.

 

So Valentines Day rolled around. Bill got this idea to get her some flowers. He was going to leave them on her door and surprise her. That evening I was going to take some books back to the library and Bill followed me down with the flowers he bought. When we got outside the wind was blowing. Leaves were blowing across the yard, and the wind was kicking up like hell. I even flipped up the collar of my jacket. Bill stood below the locust tree watching me walk away. Then he said, “Scott—do you know which door it is? I can’t tell from down here. You wanna go with me?”

I turned around with my books in my hands and said, “It’s just down there.”

Then I stood for a second…

 

Naked Joe was standing outside smoking a cigarette. He told Bill that he heard Janette was a party girl. Bill didn’t say anything. I told Joe to shut up, but he kept going. Then Joe told him that he bet he could go there tonight and get a blow job.

I told him to shut up again. Bill didn’t say anything, but just walked down the alley with his flowers. He was going to give them to her. Then I stood for a second and asked. “You want me to go with ya?”

Bill thought it over. “No. I’ll be all right.”

So I said okay and just turned around and started walking off to the library, but then I started feeling bad.

I turned around and told him to give me the flowers.

Then we turned and walked towards Janette’s. On the way down there Bill lost his nerve and decided to wait awhile.

“I think I’m just going to wait,” he said.

I told him not to be nervous. He told me he wasn’t nervous, but when I looked his hands were shaking. So I went off to the library.

 

It was an hour later when I got back that Bill finally got his nerve up and went to put the flowers on Janette’s door. Of course, by this time everybody was hanging out of Bill’s mom’s apartment chanting for him.

So Bill took off through the darkness running like a burglar up on his tiptoes across the grass. He finally set the flowers down on the door of her apartment. And then he took off running the other way without realizing he set them down on the wrong door and had rung the wrong damn doorbell. He was so nervous he put them on the wrong door.

Lee was shouting to him out the window: “No, Bill. No. It’s the wrong door.”

He couldn’t hear us though. He just thought we were cheering him on, so he ran all the way back to us.

By that time the person who lived in the wrong apartment took them inside. So Bill had to go all the way back down to the wrong apartment and ask for the flowers back.

He knocked on the door. The door opened. He was talking. Then he had the flowers again. He put them beside the right door this time. He rang the doorbell.

Then I heard Lee whisper: “Look at that crazy, beautiful bastard.”

And when Bill got back upstairs, he called Janette and asked her if she had got them.

She said thank you—she did.

 

That night he couldn’t stop smiling. He sat in his bed and we drank beer and he told me about Scotland. He told me about how he dreamed of going to those mountains, how the mountains of Scotland looked just like the mountains of home. Then he talked about his family.

 

 

There was Uncle Dan, and the old man, and Jay, and Bill’s dad Butch who never crossed bridges. If he had to go somewhere it might take him days because he never would cross a bridge. He thought bridges were bad luck.

 

Bill’s Uncle Dan was agoraphobic and manic depressive. Bill also said he was a little bit schizophrenic. That was actually a diagnosis a doctor in the army gave him. “He’s a little bit schizophrenic.”

 

This was about the time Dan decided he needed to go and save President Carter. He started hearing all of these voices telling him that President Carter was in trouble and Dan was the only one who could help him. He was the only one who could save Carter from the demons and those motherfucking devil worshippers. He gave the demons and the motherfucking devil worshippers a name. He called them Republicans.

 

Of course, Dan hadn’t been out of the house for two years before this. Two years before he parked his red Chevy beneath an oak tree. He went inside and didn’t come out again until the very moment he decided to go and save Carter. The oak tree was hundreds of years old.

This car had not been moved since Dan went inside that day so long ago. But now he came outside, started the car, which started on the fourth try, and he took off. Then after he took off, the tree which had stood for hundreds of years, fell over,
TIMBER
, and landed right where the car would have been sitting. No one got hurt, but the tree came crashing down, like it was not the roots that had kept it up, but the car. It was proof that it was good luck when the hallucinations came. It was always good luck to listen to the voices inside your head and do exactly what they said.