NOS4A2 A Novel

SPICY MENACE

1990





Sugarcreek, Pennsylvania


THE AD WAS ON ONE OF THE LAST PAGES OF SPICY MENACE, THE August 1949 issue, the cover of which depicted a screaming nude frozen in a block of ice (She gave him the cold shoulder . . . so he gave her the big chill!). It was just a single column, below a much larger advertisement for Adola Brassieres (Oomphasize your figure!). Bing Partridge noticed it only after a long, considering look at the lady in the Adola ad, a woman with pale, creamy mommy tits, supported by a bra with cone-shaped cups and a metallic sheen. Her eyes were closed, and her lips were parted slightly, so she looked like she was asleep and dreaming sweet dreams, and Bing had been imagining waking her with a kiss.

“Bing and Adola, sitting in a tree,” Bing crooned, “F-U-C-K-I-N-Geeee.”

Bing was in his quiet place in the basement, with his pants down and his ass on the dusty concrete. His free hand was more or less where you would imagine it, but he was not particularly busy yet. He had been grazing his way through the issue, looking for the best parts, when he found it, a small block of print, in the lower left corner of the page. A snowman in a top hat gestured with one crooked arm at a line of type, framed by snowflakes.

Bing liked the ads in the back of the pulps: ads for tin lockers filled with toy soldiers (Re-create the thrill of Verdun!), ads for vintage World War II equipment (Bayonets! Rifles! Gasmasks!), ads for books that would tell you how to make women want you (Teach Her to Say, “I LOVE YOU!!”). He often clipped out order forms and sent in pocket change or grimy dollar bills, in an attempt to acquire ant farms and metal detectors. He wanted, with all his heart, to Amaze His Friends! and Astonish His Relatives!—and never mind that his friends were the three feebs who worked under him in the janitorial crew at NorChemPharm and that his only direct relatives had returned to the soil, in the cemetery behind the New American Faith Tabernacle. Bing had never once considered that his father’s collection of soft-core pulps—mildewing in a cardboard box down in Bing’s quiet room—were older than he was and that most of the corporations he was sending money to had long since ceased to exist.

But his feelings as he read, then reread the advertisement about this place Christmasland were an emotional response of a different order. His uncircumcised and vaguely yeasty-smelling penis went limp in his left hand, forgotten. His soul was a steeple in which all the bells had begun to clash at once.

He had no idea where or what Christmasland was, had never heard of it. And yet he instantly felt he had wanted to go there all his life . . . to walk its cobblestone streets, stroll beneath its leaning candy-cane lampposts, and to watch the children screaming as they were swept around and around on the reindeer carousel.

“What would you do for a lifetime pass to a place where every morning is Christmas morning?!” the advertisement shouted.

Bing had forty-two Christmases under his belt, but when he thought of Christmas morning, only one mattered, and that one stood for all the rest. In this memory of Christmas, his mother slid sugar cookies shaped like Christmas trees out of the oven, so the whole house took on their vanilla fragrance. It was years before John Partridge would catch a framing nail in the frontal lobe, and that morning he sat on the floor with Bing, watching intently as Bing tore open his gifts. Bing remembered the last present best: a large box that contained a big rubber gasmask and a dented helmet, rust showing where the paint was chipped away.

“You’re looking at the gear that kept me alive in Korea,” his father said. “It’s yours now. That gasmask you’re holding, there’s three yellowmen in the dirt that’s the last thing they ever saw.”

Bing pulled the gasmask on and stared out through the clear plastic lenses at his father. With the gasmask on, he saw the living room as a little world trapped inside a gum-ball machine. His father set the helmet on top of Bing’s noggin, then saluted. Bing solemnly saluted back.

“So you’re the one,” his father said to him. “The little soldier that all the men are talking about. Mr. Unstoppable. Private Take-No-Shit. Is that right?”

“Private Take-No-Shit reporting for duty, sir, yes, sir,” Bing said.

His mother laughed her brittle, nervous laughter and said, “John, your language. On Christmas morning. It isn’t right. This is the day we welcome our Savior to this earth.”

“Mothers,” John Partridge said to his son after Bing’s mother had left them with sugar cookies and gone back to the kitchen for cocoa. “They’ll keep you sucking at the tit your whole life if you let them. Of course, when you think about it . . . what’s wrong with that?” And winked.

And outside, the snow came down in big goose-feather flakes, and they stayed home together all day, and Bing wore his helmet and gasmask and played war, and he shot his father over and over, and John Partridge died again and again, falling out of his easy chair in front of the TV. Once Bing killed his mother, too, and she obediently crossed her eyes and went boneless and stayed dead for most of a commercial break. She didn’t wake up until he removed his gasmask to kiss her forehead. Then she smiled and said, God bless you, little Bing Partridge. I love you more than anything.

What would he do to feel like that every day? To feel like it was Christmas morning and there was a real Korean War gasmask waiting for him under the tree? To see his mother slowly open her eyes once again and say, I love you more than anything? The question, really, was what would he not do?

He shuffled three steps toward the door before he got around to yanking his pants back up.

His mother had taken on some secretarial chores for the church after her husband couldn’t work anymore, and her Olivetti electric typewriter was still in the closet in the hall. The O was gone, but he knew he could use the number 0 to cover for it. Bing rolled a sheet of paper in and began to write:

Dear XXXXX respected Christmasland XXXX 0wners,

I am resp0nding t0 y0ur ad in Spicy Menace Magazine. W0uld I like t0 w0rk in Christmasland? Y0U BET! I have 18 years 0f empl0yment at N0rChemPharm in Sugarcreek, Pennsylvania, and f0r 12 I have been XXXX a fl00r manager f0r the cust0dial team. My duties include the care and shipping 0f many c0mpressed gases such as 0xygen, hydr0gen, helium, and sev0flurane. Guess h0w many accidents 0n my watch? N0NE!

What w0uld I d0 t0 have Christmas every day? Wh0 d0 I have t0 KILL, ha-ha-ha!! There is n0 nasty j0b I have n0t d0ne f0r N0rChemPharm. I have cleaned t0ilets packed full and fl0wing 0ver with XXXXX y0u-kn0w-what, m0pped pee-pee 0ff walls, and p0is0ned rats by the dirty d0zen. Are y0u l00king f0r s0me0ne wh0 isn’t afraid t0 get his hands dirty? Well y0ur search is 0ver!

I am just the man y0u are l00king f0r: a g0-getter wh0 l0ves children and wh0 isn’t afraid 0f adventure. I d0 n0t want much except a g00d place t0 w0rk. A security j0b w0uld suit me fine. T0 be straight with y0u, 0nce up0n a time I h0ped t0 serve my pr0ud nati0n in unif0rm, like my dad did in the K0rean war, but s0me y0uthful indiscreti0ns and a bit 0f sad family tr0uble prevented me. 0h well! N0 c0mplaints! Believe me, if I c0uld wear the unif0rm 0f Christmasland security, I w0uld c0nsider it just as h0n0rable! I am a c0llect0r 0f authentic military mem0rabilia. I have my 0wn gun and I kn0w h0w t0 use it.

In cl0sing, I h0pe y0u will c0ntact me at the bel0w address. I am l0yal t0 a fault and w0uld DIE f0r this special 0pp0rtunity. There is N0THING I am n0t ready t0 d0 t0 earn a place am0ng the Christmasland staff.

XXXXX Seas0n’s Greetings!

Bing Partridge

BING PARTRIDGE

25 BL0CH LANE

SUGARCREEK, PENNSYLVANIA 16323

He rolled the sheet out of the typewriter and read it over, lips moving. The effort of concentration had left his lumpy, potato-shaped body humid with sweat. It seemed to him that he had stated the facts about himself with clarity and authority. He worried that it was a mistake to mention “youthful indiscretions” or “sad family trouble” but in the end decided they would probably find out about his parents whether he said anything or not and that it was better to be coolly up-front about it than look like he was hiding something. It was all a long time ago, and in the years since he had been released from the Youth Center—a.k.a. the Bin—he had been a model worker, had not missed a single day at NorChemPharm.

He folded the letter, then looked in the front closet for an envelope. He found instead a box of unused Christmas cards. A boy and a girl, in fuzzy long underwear, were peeking around a corner, staring in wide-eyed wonder at Santy Claus, standing in the gloom before their Christmas tree. The seat of the girl’s pajamas was partly unbuttoned to show one plump cheek of her ass. John Partridge had sometimes said that Bing couldn’t pour water out of a boot with instructions written on the heel, and maybe it was true, but he still knew a good thing when he saw it. This letter was slipped into a Christmas card and the card into an envelope decorated with holly leaves and shiny cranberries.

Before he put it into the mailbox at the end of the street, he kissed it, as a priest might bend his head and kiss the Bible.


THE NEXT DAY HE WAS WAITING BY THE MAILBOX AT TWO-THIRTY WHEN the mailman proceeded up the street in his funny little white truck. The foil flowers in Bing’s front yard spun lazily, making a barely audible whir.

“Bing,” the mailman said. “Aren’t you supposed to be at work?”

“Night shift,” Bing said.

“Is a war starting?” the mailman said, nodding at Bing’s clothes.

Bing had on his mustard-colored fatigues, what he wore when he wanted to feel lucky.

“If there is, I’ll be ready for it,” Bing told him.

There was nothing from Christmasland. But of course how could there be? He had only sent his card the day before.


THERE WAS NOTHING THE NEXT DAY EITHER.


OR THE DAY AFTER.


ON MONDAY HE WAS SURE SOMETHING WOULD COME AND WAS OUT on his front step a half hour before the postman’s usual time. Black and ugly thunderheads towered over the crest of the hill, behind the steeple of the New American Faith Tabernacle. Muffled thunder detonated two miles away and eighteen thousand feet up. It was not a noise so much as a vibration, one that went to Bing’s core, that shook his bones in their sediment of fat. His foil flowers spun hysterically, sounding for all the world like a pack of kids on bicycles, racing downhill and out of control.

The rumbles and crashes made Bing profoundly uneasy. It had been unbearably hot and thundery the day the nail gun went off (that was how he thought of it—not as the day he shot his father but as the day the gun went off). His father had felt the barrel pressing against his left temple and looked sidelong at Bing, standing over him. He took a sip of his beer and smacked his lips and said, “I’d be scared if I thought you had the balls.”

After he pulled the trigger, Bing sat with the old man and listened to the rain rattle off the roof of the garage, while John Partridge sprawled on the floor, one foot twitching and a urine stain spreading across the front of his pants. Bing had sat until his mother entered the garage and began to scream. Then it had been her turn—although not for the nail gun.

Now Bing stood in his yard and watched the clouds mount up in the sky over the church at the top of the hill, where his mother had worked all the last days of her life . . . the church he had attended faithfully, every Sunday, since before he could even walk or speak. One of his first words had been “looya!”—which was the closest he could come to pronouncing “hallelujah.” His mother had called him Looya for years after.

No one worshipped there now. Pastor Mitchell had run off with the funds and a married woman, and the property had been seized by the bank. On Sunday mornings the only penitents in the New American Faith Tabernacle were the pigeons that lived in the rafters. The place frightened Bing a little now—its emptiness frightened him. He imagined that it despised him for abandoning it and abandoning God, that sometimes it leaned forward off its foundations to glare at him with its stained-glass eyes. There were days—days like this—when the woods were full of the lunatic shrilling of summer insects and the air wobbled with liquid heat, and that church seemed to loom.

Thunder hammered at the afternoon.

“Rain, rain, go away,” Bing whispered to himself. “Come again some other day.”

The first warm drop of rain spattered against his forehead. Other drops followed, burning bright in the sunshine that slanted in from the yawning blue sky to the west. It felt almost as hot as a spray of blood.

The mail was late, and by the time it came, Bing was soaking wet and huddling under the shingle overhang at his front door. He ran through the downpour for the box. As he reached it, a twig of lightning stroked out of the clouds and fell with a crash somewhere behind the church. Bing shrieked as the world flashed bluewhiteblue, sure he was about to be lanced through, was about to burn alive, touched by the finger of God for giving his father the nail gun and for what he had done afterward to his mother on the kitchen floor.

There was a bill from the utility company and a flyer announcing a new mattress store and nothing else.


NINE HOURS LATER BING CAME AWAKE IN HIS BED TO THE TREMULOUS sound of violins and then a man singing in a voice as smooth and creamy as vanilla cake frosting. It was his namesake, Bing Crosby. Mr. Crosby was dreaming of a white Christmas, just like the ones he used to know.

Bing pulled the blankets close to his chin, listening intently. Mingled with the song was the gentle scratch of a needle on vinyl.

He slid out of his bed and crept to the door. The floor was cold under his bare feet.

Bing’s parents were dancing in the living room. His father had his back to him and was dressed in his mustard-colored fatigues. His mother rested her head on John’s shoulder, her eyes shut, her mouth open, as if she were dancing in her sleep.

The presents waited under the squat, homely, tinsel-smothered tree: three big green dented tanks of sevoflurane, decorated with crimson bows.

His parents turned in their slow circle, and as they did, Bing saw that his father was wearing a gasmask and his mother was naked. She really was asleep, too. Her feet dragged across the boards. His father clutched her around the waist, his gloved hands on the curve of her white buttocks. His mother’s bare white can was as luminous as a celestial object, as pale as the moon.

“Dad?” Bing asked.

His father kept dancing, turning away, and taking Bing’s mother with him.

“COME ON DOWN, BING!” cried a deep, booming voice, a voice so loud that the china chattered in the armoire. Bing lurched in surprise, his heart misfiring in his chest. The needle on the record jumped, came back down close to the end of the song. “COME ON DOWN! LOOKS LIKE CHRISTMAS CAME EARLY THIS YEAR, DOESN’T IT! HO, HO, HO!”

A part of Bing wanted to run back to his room and slam the door. He wanted to cover his eyes and his ears at the same time but couldn’t find the willpower to do either. He quailed at the thought of taking another step, yet his feet carried him forward, past the tree and the tanks of sevoflurane, past his father and mother, down the hall, and to the front door. It swung open even before he put his hand on the knob.

The foil flowers in his yard spun softly in the winter night. He had one foil flower for every year he had worked at NorChemPharm, gifts for the custodial staff, bestowed at the annual holiday party.

Christmasland waited beyond the yard. The Sleighcoaster rumbled and crashed, and the children in the karts screamed and lifted their hands to the frozen night. The great Ferris wheel, the Arctic Eye, revolved against a backdrop of unfamiliar stars. All the candles were lit in a Christmas tree as tall as a ten-story building and as wide across as Bing’s own house.

“MERRY GODDAMN CHRISTMAS, BING, YOU CRAZY THING!” hollered that great booming voice, and when Bing looked into the sky, he saw that the moon had a face. A single bulging bloodshot eye gaped from that starved skullface, a landscape of crater and bone. It grinned. “BING, YOU CRAZY MOTHERF*ckER, ARE YOU READY FOR THE RIDE OF YOUR LIFE?!?”

Bing sat up in bed, his heart pistoning in his chest—waking for real this time. He was so slicked with sweat that his G.I. Joe pajamas were sticking to his skin. He noticed, distantly, that his cock was so hard it hurt, poking through the front of his pants.

He gasped, as if he had not awoken but surfaced, after a long time underwater.

His room was full of the cool, pale, bone-colored light of a faceless moon.

Bing had been swallowing air for almost half a minute before he realized he could still hear “White Christmas.” The song had followed him right out of his dream. It came from a long way off and seemed to be getting fainter by the moment, and he knew if he didn’t get up to look, it would soon be gone, and tomorrow he would believe he had imagined it. He rose and walked on unsteady legs to the window, for a look into the yard.

An old car, at the end of the block, was easing away. A black Rolls-Royce with sideboards and chrome fixtures. Its taillights flashed red in the night and illuminated the license plate: NOS4A2. Then it turned the corner and disappeared, taking the joyful noise of Christmas with it.