Hampton Heights, page 2
“How many farts do you have?” Sigmone asked.
“I’m almost done with Side A.”
“You have forty-five minutes of farts on that tape,” Mark said.
“Thirty minutes. It’s a sixty-minute tape. I got a lot at Boy Scout camp.”
Everyone nodded. It was amazing. There was no other word for it. They discussed its amazingness for a while, and then Al said, “Oh, I’ve got one. I’ve got one!”
“Get him the mike!” said Nishu, waving frantically from the front seat. By now Joel had untangled the cord. He directed Al to put the microphone directly under his butt, then hit record just before Al let loose. All six of the kids lost it.
“Oh God, it reeks,” Ryan said.
“Smells like a hodag,” said Mark.
“A what?”
“Like, a monster from the north woods,” Joel said. He’d learned about them during that mostly miserable Boy Scout camp weekend.
“Hodags are, like, made of dead cows,” Al said. “How dare you say my farts smell that bad.”
“Worse!” said Sigmone, and they all cracked up again.
The van crunched to a halt. Kevin turned to face them. “I swear to God,” he said. “You idiots having a good time?”
“Yes,” said Ryan.
“We’re here.”
“Where are we?” asked Mark.
“We’re in Hampton Heights.”
One by one they climbed from the van and stood on the pavement, hands in pockets. No one would have said aloud that the neighborhood was spooky, but it was spooky. They were standing in the parking lot of a tavern called Hampton House, and the lights of the bar gleamed in the fog. From inside came the murmur of music. Clouds obscured the moon. Half the streetlights were burned out.
“That’s Hampton there,” Sigmone said, pointing at the street sign. They knew Hampton. It went all the way east to the lake, through the parts of town where they all went to school. In those neighborhoods, the houses were nicer. Here they were small and wooden, one story, with little detached garages set at the tops of the buckling driveways.
Ryan, looking at the street sign, made a noise of surprise. “There’s a 54th Street?”
“There’s a every number street,” Sigmone said.
“My grandma lives on 83rd Street,” said Al.
“Good for your grandma,” said Joel, looking around to confirm the sickness of his burn. Al just shook his head.
Kevin, meanwhile, was pulling a sheaf of papers from under the passenger seat and smoothing them out. Nishu had stepped all over them. “Marching orders,” he said. “I’m splitting you up. You and you, you’re already getting along. You’re a pair.” Mark and Ryan high-fived. He paired Sigmone and Joel, Nishu and Al, and handed a clipboard to each duo. “Anyone ever done this before?” he asked.
“My brother did,” said Mark.
Joel perked up. “Good for—”
“Man, shut up,” Sigmone said.
Kevin eyed Mark. “Danny, is that right? He didn’t sell shit, in my memory.”
“Probably not.”
“Sort of a dick.”
“For sure.”
“Well, you can do better than him.” Kevin pulled a smoke from a pack in his shirt pocket, found a lighter, shielded the cigarette from the wind. The boys paged through the printouts on the clipboards, trying to make sense of them. Kevin puffed. “Those are master lists of everyone in the neighborhood who is not a subscriber,” he said. “Your job is to go house to house, door to door, and sell subscriptions to these people.”
“How much does it cost?” Al asked. He already had his printout pinned neatly under the clipboard’s steel clasp.
“Ten bucks for three months. But push the year, it’s a good deal—twenty-five for the year. Plus if you do the year you get a commemorive”—he stopped himself—“a commemora-tive plate.”
“What does it co-mmem-o-rate?” Ryan asked.
“I dunno,” Kevin said. “Probably the Packers.” He took a pull off the cigarette, and the smoke faded into the fog. “We can send them a bill. Or if they want they can pay now. Don’t let ’em write a check. Cash only.”
“Where’s Fairmount?” Al asked, angling his list toward the one streetlight.
“North,” said Kevin, pointing across Hampton. “About a block that way. Whoever sells the most subscriptions,” he added, “gets twenty bucks.” That got their attention. “Meet back here at the van at eight thirty. And don’t be late, or no one gets Burger King.” Sigmone raised his hand and Kevin said, “What.”
“I don’t have a watch.”
“So ask someone the time. Figure it out.”
“I’ve got a watch,” Joel said, and brandished it. To Kevin he added, “Can you lock the doors? My boom box is in there.”
Kevin looked at Nishu. “You?” But Nishu kept his backpack on. Kevin made a big show of locking the back, then tucked the keys in the wheel well. “Okay,” he said—here came the big pep talk—“go make some money.”
Ryan and Mark headed south. Sigmone and Joel turned west. Nishu and Al crossed Hampton to the north. Kevin waited a moment, then tossed his cigarette butt to the ground, where it hissed in a patch of dirty snow. Before the bartender at Hampton House could even say hello, Kevin had ordered his first beer.
Kevin
If it wasn’t for Theresa treating him like that, Kevin Kaczorowski never even would’ve looked at the woman in the bar.
The bartender was taking his sweet time pulling Kevin’s second beer. That was the way it was when you were the new guy in a neighborhood tavern. He’d been the new guy in plenty, driving kids all over the city to sell newspapers. Sometimes the bar he ended up at was lively, exciting, like sometimes the neighborhoods were lively, exciting. And sometimes he was in Hampton Heights, where no one he knew lived and where the tavern was a weird mix: black and white, old and young, everyone seeming to recognize one another but also staking out their own space.
Down at the end of the bar, the tender wiped the counter with a towel like a bartender in a TV show, talking to an older blonde in a Packers jersey. She nodded and laughed at something the bartender said, then looked down Kevin’s way. Kevin had been waving his cardboard coaster to get the guy’s attention, but shifted the move—smoothly, he thought—into a greeting to the blonde. She lifted her cocktail. Her long earrings sparkled in the beerlight. Even from here he could see how long her nails were.
He stood the coaster on its edge, flipped it back onto the bar. There was basically nothing to look at in this tavern, which resembled every other tavern in the city. A single room, square, lit by neon beer signs. Low ceilings to keep things warm. Wood-paneled walls covered in Packers and Badgers schedules. The TV was showing some cheesy horror movie, a shapeshifting monster taking men apart. A sign on the wall, above the liquor, caught his eye.
Our Credit Manager
Is Helen Waite
If You Want Credit
Go to Helen Waite
What a weird thing to put on a sign. Why would a shitty bar like this even have a credit manager?
“You need another one?” The bartender had finally sauntered over and noticed Kevin’s empty glass.
“You bet,” Kevin said. Did he ever. Theresa was sleeping with Crazy TV Barry again.
She said that Barry wasn’t like he was in his TV commercials. “He’s just a normal guy,” she said. A normal guy Kevin was sure she’d slept with last year, during their fight. A normal guy Theresa still called sometimes, just coincidentally when they weren’t getting along. A normal guy who drove an Audi. What normal guy drove an Audi?
In his commercials, for the big appliance store out on Brown Deer Road, Crazy TV Barry ranted and raved, a nonstop stream of come-ons and shrieks and gobbling noises. Everyone told him he was CRAZY to cut prices this low! He wielded a giant pair of scissors to slice big cartoony price tags in half. His competitors despaired! His customers celebrated! Sometimes the guys in white coats hauled him away to a padded room, but that’s what it takes to offer low, low prices on Amana freezers. His commercials appeared so frequently—between innings of Brewers games, during time-outs in Packers games, sometimes two or three commercials in a row during the late movie on Channel 18—that Kevin, like everyone he knew, had parts of his patter memorized. “They said I was nuts when I asked, what’s lower than zero percent financing?!” Even Crazy TV Barry’s phone number was as familiar to Kevin as his own: 466-1987. Last year it had been 466-1986. He imagined Crazy TV Barry, eyes bugging out, haranguing some poor asshole at the phone company to secure the numbers in advance. “Whaddya mean you don’t have 1996? You gotta have 1996!”
Kevin knew that Crazy TV Barry drove an Audi because this afternoon, parked kitty-corner from Theresa’s duplex, he’d watched Crazy TV Barry pull up in an Audi, deep blue and sleek as hell. He’d watched Theresa clip-clop out of her house in heels, smiling and waving at the car. She’d looked happy, at ease. Kevin tried to remember the last time she’d looked that happy to see him. When she got in the Audi, she hugged the entirely recognizable driver. His hair was combed and he wore a suit, not a straitjacket, but it was definitely him. His license plate read CRZYBRY.
He’d waited until they pulled away, then driven home, glumly flipping from ballad to ballad on the radio. It was true that things hadn’t been great. When they first got together, five years ago now—Jesus!—he was twenty-one and they went out all the time, drinking with buddies or to the bowling alley or just driving. He had money because he had a job, one that at twenty-one had seemed amazing—someone paying him just to drive newspapers around? Now she worked a lot of nights at Froedtert Hospital, so she came home tired and they were always renting a video or talking about her fucked-up family. Sometimes they had sex, depending on whether she fell asleep during the movie. His job, once a stepping stone to something else, was now just what he did. He started work at four in the morning, but he still wanted to have some fun.
But if she was so tired, what was she doing going out tonight? She had a midnight-to-eight in post-op. But there she was, dressed for dinner, more decked out than he’d seen her in a long time. When they watched movies at her place, she wore pajamas and put her hair up and they’d eat on the couch, some green salad or pesto pasta—she was on a health food kick so she hardly ever cooked burgers anymore.
When he’d finally gotten home, he’d turned the van off and then simply sat in silence. The only sound was the wind blowing outside. The forecast was for snow. In the mirror, his eyes were red. What did Crazy TV Barry have that he didn’t have? Money? A nice car? Fancy suits? Celebrity? A successful business? The list continued; he didn’t need to go on. But he’d loved Theresa for so long. He couldn’t believe she was going to dump him for a guy who appeared on TV foaming at the mouth.
When he finally snapped out of it he went inside, ate a can of ravioli. She was probably dining on steak downtown. After his shower he stood naked in the bedroom, pawing through the underwear drawer. On his dresser sat the Hampton Heights master list he’d pulled from the giant printer at work. It was slim pickings, probably, a neighborhood without too much extra money to spend. He was well behind his quota, hopelessly behind for the year, probably. Well, what was the paper gonna do? It wasn’t like there were people lining up to take this job. Were there?
Kevin was completely out of clean underwear. In the depths of his closet, he recalled, he had a pair of flannel boxers Theresa had given him for his birthday in July. “They’re warm,” she’d said. “You’ll love them this winter.” He pulled the boxers out of the gift bag and tore off the tags. They were soft and plaid, navy blue and black. They did look warm, he had to admit. He wasn’t really a boxers guy, liked his shit a little more secure, but it was gonna be a cold one tonight. He pulled them on, brushed a few pieces of navy blue fuzz out of his leg hairs, then got dressed.
Now at the bar, he felt those boxers bunching up as he shifted on his stool, trying to get comfortable. They were warm, but in the overheated tavern they were too much. He had to keep surreptitiously pulling them down through his jeans. A third beer got the bartender to deign, finally, to engage in some conversation. He thought Randy White was the answer at QB; Kevin argued in favor of the new kid, Majkowski. “We finally got a chance to put a Pole in charge,” he said. People loved Randy White, all out of keeping with his actual skill level, just because he used to be the Badgers’ quarterback. This was nuts, he explained to the bartender. Just because you were the star on the mediocre Wisconsin college team does not mean you deserved to start for the Wisconsin professional team! There are other quarterbacks out there!
“I gotta take some orders,” the guy finally said, which was maybe true. The tavern was filling up. “But you should talk to Laurie down there.” He gestured down the bar to the blonde with the jersey, who was digging through her purse. “She can argue about the Packers forever.”
“Oh yeah?” said Kevin. Talking to a random chick at a random bar had not really occurred to him. In fact, he’d never picked up a woman in a bar, never even tried to. He knew he should approach her, should start talking to her, but he felt honestly exhausted by the idea of starting at zero with a whole nother woman. She would have so many things to say! She would have so many problems she’d want to unload on him! He directed his attention to the TV instead, only to see the movie fade out and Crazy TV Barry appear. He was dangling upside down from some kind of winch, unshaven, shouting about how Santa Claus was going to spring him in time for National TV and Appliance’s Pre-Christmas Madhouse.
“You know what?” he said to the bartender. “Tell her the next one’s on me.”
He’d never tried to pick up a woman in a bar because he’d been so loyal for so long. He’d met Theresa on his twenty-first birthday, when his old high school coach had brought her along to drinks. She was Coach’s neighbor, a year older than Kevin, in nursing school. “I’ve known her since she was just a little thing!” Coach had said, and he’d liked the way she laughed, full of affection for the guy. He remembered walking with her after last call that night, not wasted but buzzed. It must have been warm—it was July. He made a joke about growing up next to Coach and she rolled her eyes, probably said something funny, she was always joking about Coach’s wandering eyes. They ended up at some elementary school in Tosa, sitting on the swings like little kids. Just talking. He barely remembered anything she’d said, he was so wrapped up in the feeling. Discovery. Like he was Indiana Jones and every new moment opened up a fresh room full of treasures.
Well, he thought bitterly. Everyone knew what happened once Indy got his hands on the treasure. Here came the giant rolling rock.
The blonde at the end of the bar had accepted her drink, and she raised it to him with a nod. He shifted uncomfortably on his stool as he nodded back. Theresa’s fucking boxer shorts! They reminded him of her every time he moved. Maybe he should go to the john and fix them, or even just take them off and go commando. He was just buzzed enough to chuckle at that idea. He had to piss anyway.
But just as he was about to stand she got up, the blonde. She didn’t approach him but walked to the far corner of the room, to the jukebox, a surprisingly fancy model considering it didn’t seem to get much use. (So far, all there’d been to listen to was boring oldies from behind the bar and the screams of men from the TV.) As she leaned up against the machine, pressing buttons to flip through the records, he had the opportunity to really check her out.
Her hair cascaded from her feather bangs down over her shoulders, obscuring the name on her home jersey. Number fifteen: Bart Starr. Her jeans were tight in the back, looking good, and she wore low heels, nothing dramatic like Theresa. She was short, but there was a lot in that little package. She had the kind of tan you didn’t see that often in December.
She plugged a quarter in, pushed some buttons. To Kevin’s disappointment, her song started slow and keyboardy. Why would you make a whole big show of your walk over to the jukebox, then pick a song this boring? Just some guy bitching over synthesizers about praying for strength or something.
But oh, then the drums kicked in.
And oh! the guitars rang out. And oh! the singer made up his mind. He wasn’t wasting no more time!
Here I go again on my own
Goin’ down the only road I’ve ever known
Kevin was slapping his legs to the beat, nodding his head. He lifted his beer in tribute to the woman who’d picked this fucking incredible song and she, leaning against the jukebox, pumped a fist in response. There was something electric in her eyes. A glint he could see from here. The whole tavern was singing now, a dozen people or more, all these people who hadn’t cared a bit about one another before, united by this song, and the bartender drummed on the counter furiously. On the final chorus, as the tavern clapped along, Kevin found he had tears in his eyes. And now he was standing at the pay phone, receiver at his ear, listening to the ring through the line. Like a drifter, he was born to walk alone.
To his surprise, Theresa answered. “It’s me,” he said. The bar was quieter now, a different song playing, but he still felt the pulse, the power, of the song in his heart.
“Where are you?” she asked. “I thought you were canvassing tonight.”
“The kids are out. I’m waiting for them to be done.” At the bar, the blonde was high-fiving everyone in sight. “We need to break up.”
He could hear the TV in her living room. Tony Danza’s voice. She must be watching Who’s the Boss? He was about to ask if she’d heard him when she said, “Why are you telling me this now? Don’t you have to pick up the kids soon?”
He turned to face the wall of the bar. What did she mean, why now? And why didn’t she sound surprised, or upset? She sounded like she was appraising him—like she’d suddenly seen something in him and was curious to know more.
