CHAPTER THIRTEEN
AFEW NIGHTS AFTER BINGO’S CELEBRATED RETURN FROM SAN Francisco, some record company executive in Boston called to say he was having a party. I’d met him casually a couple of times. He was the older brother of some guy I went to school with at Andover. Bingo knew him through a stepbrother he’d shared a room with at Upper Canada College. With the big shiny presence of Peregrine Lowell uppermost in everyone’s minds, Bingo and I could get into anything—concerts, book launches, opening nights, parties.
“There’s going to be all kinds of people here,” he told Bingo over the phone. He was so loud, I could hear him from across the room. “Not just musicians, but writers, artists, journalists, editors, lawyers . . . There’s going to be lots of great conversation . . . you’ll enjoy it.”
“Hey, Coll, he says there’s going to be great conversation,” Bingo said in a clumsy attempt to get me to go with him.
Jesus, who did the guy think he was talking to? Sartre? I was flipping mindlessly through the pages of Spin magazine.
“Come on, Collie, let’s go,” Bingo was begging me. “Stevie Nicks might show up.”
“Oh, now who’s asking for a favor? Maybe I’ll just tell you to go pound salt the way you told me the other night on the beach when I asked you to slow down. And let’s not forget the way you left me to fend for myself at the Falcon’s party.”
“Can’t you take a joke? Come on. Let’s go.”
“Why is it so important that I go? Why don’t you go by yourself?” I asked him.
“Let’s go together,” he said. “It’ll be fun. I’m just gonna bug you till you say yes.”
What the hell? It occurred to me I had nothing better to do.
We got there, we were barely inside the door, and right away Bingo was ensnared by some woman with an enhanced prey drive—women of all ages went crazy for him, for reasons that generally eluded me. So there he was, trapped in a corner with an overweight feminist writer in her twenties, signaling me with his eyes to come rescue him.
His braless pursuer was wearing overalls and a pair of rubber boots, an outfit that I previously thought existed only in the minds of sitcom writers. She had a thick torso, and her hair was coarsely chopped off above the ears, with tiny bangs that formed a sparse, workmanlike hedge across her forehead, the centerpiece of a familiar banal landscape.
“The premenopausal power helmet,” Pop called it.
“It’s f*cking torture to have to look at her, Collie,” Bingo whined during a rare reprieve.
“Man, you’re just like Pop,” I said. “Anyway, you can handle her. You’re the expert with women.”
“You handle her.”
“What’s wrong, Bing? Not enjoying the great conversation on offer? If you’ll excuse me, I think I’ll plumb the psychic depths of the redhead in the corner.”
I was enjoying the mess he’d got himself into and left him to his own devices while I continued fighting with a music critic who’d flown in from California, who said Mick Jagger was the best front man of all time. I was arguing for the sake of arguing on behalf of Robert Plant.
We were right in the middle of it when she walked in. Her name doesn’t matter. Believe me, you know her name, just another cinched waistline and diverting décolletage at the heart of a scandal. A twenty-eight-year-old juvenile delinquent, onetime beauty queen, wicked drunk, reluctant former heroin addict, she was a convicted drug dealer, desiccated groupie, and tawdry professional girlfriend.
She was out of jail after serving eighteen months in medium-security for her part in the drug-related death of the son of an internationally renowned rock singer. He was young, maybe eighteen or nineteen. She liked them young.
“Ooh, don’t tell me, let me guess, cold hands, warm heart,” she cooed, making a beeline for Bing, taking his hand in hers, undoing the top button of her blouse, holding his hand in her hand, and laying her other hand on top of his hand for just a moment longer than was necessary or even polite, long enough to cue his faulty wiring. He leaned into me for support. I could feel his knees buckle as we both watched her hip-check the feminist writer, who retaliated by loudly proclaiming her contempt for the cliché appeal of a cheap woman with a long neck and a short skirt.
The target of her scorn laughed. She knew. I knew. I knew more than she did. But Bingo didn’t have a clue. She had him and was aroused by his adolescent collaboration. It wasn’t complicated. She was a pro, able to open an artery without detection.
We left the party with her around midnight. What was I thinking? I was just going along with this thing, partly because of inertia and partly because it let me indulge all my worst thoughts about my brother. One half of me wanted to bear witness, the other half of me thought this was a journey he shouldn’t make alone.
I played chauffeur as Bingo clambered into the back next to her, and they were whispering and giggling and carrying on while I was trying to figure out how I could bring the evening to an early end.
Fifteen minutes later, we pulled up in front of a decaying, sunken low-rise whose only exterior illumination came from a streetlight. The front lawn was scuffed bare and littered with ripped and shredded green garbage bags whose rancid contents spilled out onto the sidewalk. A dry wind lifted the open end of one of the garbage bags. Rodent eyes stared out blindly from inside the bag. A poinsettia in a red plastic container sat on a downstairs window ledge.
The lobby’s interior was covered in graffiti, the walls were pockmarked, and the linoleum floor, orange and brown, was heaving.
“What apartment are you in?” I asked her.
“The third floor, apartment 306,” she said as we approached the elevator.
The doors struggled open to reveal an older guy—he had to be sixty—fondling a young girl—she may have been eighteen.
“You going up?” he growled. No teeth.
“We’ll take the stairs,” I said, eyeing the circle of vomit in the corner of the elevator.
“Holy shit,” I exclaimed, repulsed, as Bingo, captivated as a kid at the zoo, neatly navigated a pair of denim cutoffs abandoned on the bottom steps of the staircase.
Her place smelled of cat, the air stale as the indiscriminate crackle of TV noise. She asked us inside. I started to refuse, I’d had enough, but Bingo overruled me. I glared at him, but he just glared back, unmoved.
I was watching from a broken La-Z-Boy as she rooted through her cupboards, a consumptive gravel-voiced raconteur in a micro leather skirt.
“It was too bad. He was a nice guy,” she said insincerely about her notorious conviction, offering me a coffee, which I declined with thanks. Cracked CorningWare.
Bingo, on the sofa across from me, eagerly accepted what I rejected. I watched disapprovingly as he casually added spoonful after heaping spoonful of sugar to his cup.
“Don’t get too comfortable. We’re out of here in five,” I whispered as she left the living room to go into the bedroom. He made a face at me. I rolled my eyes in exasperation.
“F*ck off, Collie,” he said quietly but good-naturedly as she came back into the room and sat beside him. She was right next to him. Their shoulders were touching. She kicked off her shoe and rested her stocking foot on his running shoe. He was humming offhandedly. Singing softly to himself.
I recognized it. He was singing “Beat Out Da Rhythm on a Drum.” Pop had been singing that song for years. She didn’t notice. She was too busy simulating intercourse. He caught my eye. He was so pleased with himself, he might as well have been tingling. She started playing with his hair, winding it through her fingers as if it were long grass and she were an evening breeze. She was sending ripples through the long grass and out into the room.
He grinned over at me. He kept singing, full of mischief . . . I ignored him. He loved that.
“I admit I was an enthusiastic recruit,” she was acknowledging huskily, referring to her choice of work, knowing that to say no was to risk a lifetime behind a cash register.
“Initially, I slept with the guys in the band, who were happy to supply me with dope, then when they got bored with me, our roles were reversed. If I wanted to remain part of the entourage, I had to supply them. So that’s what I did.” She shrugged.
“How old were you?” I was asking all the questions.
“Sixteen. In retrospect, I think that I was a stupid, selfish girl, looking for trouble, craving a way of life I hadn’t earned but felt some entitlement to.” She had obviously availed herself of counseling in the Big House.
“I was mixed up, but they . . .” She inhaled lightly, exhaled deeply. “They were evil.”
I didn’t respond. I was thinking. I glanced over at Bingo. She ran her finger crudely along his pant leg, from his knee to the top of his inner thigh. “Just like you—”
“Let’s go, Bing,” I interrupted as he sank deeper into the fraying foam back of the sofa. “It’s late.” I reached for his arm, grabbed, and pulled him forward to emphasize my point.
“Hey,” she interjected, pulling him back down, abruptly beseeching Bingo, who was preparing to argue with me. “Can you loan me a hundred bucks? I’ll pay you back. I just really need it—like yesterday.”
Bing looked mildly surprised and hesitated before answering. She had nothing to worry about. All anybody had to do to get money from Bing was ask for it. She reached for her drink, impatiently crushing a cigarette into the puddle of coffee pooled in the bottom of her cup, and lashed out. “What do I have to do?” she demanded angrily, looking at him. “F*ck you, is that it? You want me to blow you? ’Cause that’s no problem.”
He caught his breath, the way you do when someone comes up behind you and shoves cold hands under your sweater. Then he looked at me and laughed. A real teenage boy’s guffaw, it had no nuance. No secrets, either, at least not from me.
I stood up, fingering the car keys in my pocket, their jingle a reassuring signal.
“Why don’t you go on ahead, Collie?” Bingo said, grinning up at me.
“No, we’re leaving.” I had this tight smile on my face.
“No thanks. I’m all right.” He turned away as she leered at him.
“Bingo . . . you can’t be serious. . . .” I shifted my weight from one foot to the other, my arms extended in a gesture of disbelief.
“Beat it, Coll.”
My first instinct was to knock him out, but I struggled for indifference, and almost instantly it enfolded me like a warm blanket.
“Fine,” I said, flush with self-satisfaction, convinced this was the last time I’d see him, and good riddance. “I really don’t give a shit how this love story ends.”
“So long, Coll.” He waved me away, the door closing on the sound of her boozy laughter.
By the time I got to the lobby, I knew I was going to hell if I didn’t go back for him. He was in way over his head. While I can’t say my first instinct wasn’t to let him get his ass kicked, fortunately I’m the prince of second thoughts.
I took the stairs, took two steps at once, gripped by a sudden bad feeling, afraid for him in a way that made my insides shake; I reached her apartment in record time, thumped on the door with my fists, my heart banging away in my throat. By now I was almost hyperventilating, thinking I was going to find him fried on the floor from an overdose of her and whatever she was peddling. I was hollering for her to open up or I’d break the door down—pretty corny stuff, but I wasn’t kidding.
Finally, the door opened a crack, I shoved my foot inside, shouldered her aside, and dragged him the hell out of there; she was screaming at me, whacked me on the head with a carton of milk she grabbed from the coffee table, sour milk spraying my hair, my face, the front and back of my shirt. He put up a fight, mildly swearing and digging in his heels, but it wasn’t that much of a fight.
On the way home, I was at the wheel and he was sitting slumped in the front seat next to me, silent and staring out the window. I kept looking over at him, willing him to say something. I like to know where I am. I always want to know what the other guy is thinking, and I couldn’t get a read on him. Finally, I kicked him in the ankle just to get his attention.
“Collie.”
“Yeah?”
“You’re an a*shole.”
“You’re welcome.”
“Next time, wait ten minutes before barging in. . . .”
“Oh, here we go. . . . What do you mean, next time? I’m not a goddamn St. Bernard, Bingo.”
“Yeah, you are. I knew you’d come back for me.”
“Well, you knew more than I did, then.”
“Yeah, yeah . . .”
“Yeah, yeah, is right. I’m serious.”
He wasn’t listening. He leaned over and licked my cheek, like one of the old lady’s big, slobbery mutts. I was covered in sour milk and spit.
“Jesus Christ.” I used my jacket to wipe my face, grabbing for him, nailing him in the upper part of his leg, all the good it did. He was laughing.
I started laughing, too. We were laughing, and we could see no end in sight to the hilarity.