Joe College Page 16

“Two hundred.”

  “Two hundred?”

  “Two hundred,” he repeated, replacing the container on the shelf.

  “Where?”

  “Hospitals. Big office buildings. Anywhere you got nurses or secretaries. Half the phone company eats salad for lunch.”

  Anthony pulled his display door shut, then did the same for his back and storage doors.

  “I’m telling you,” he said, climbing into his cab, “it’s the wave of the future.”

  “Two hundred salads,” I said, my incredulous voice drowned out by the sudden roar of his engine.

  Anthony waved to me as he backed out of his space, then tooted the horn for good measure as he pulled into the street and headed off to wherever it was you went to sell salad at six in the morning. I waited until he was decently out of sight before pulling a pack of Twinkies off the shelf and tearing open the wrapper. The sweaty yellow missile slid easily off its cardboard base, and I sunk my teeth into it in the spirit of scientific inquiry, tasting the spongy sweetness as if for the first time and chewing thoughtfully, like an archaeologist savoring the glories of a lost civilization.

  There was a long line at the ice house, so I left the engine running and hopped out of the cab to resume my conversation with Chuckie, who was standing outside the Chuck Wagon a couple of trucks ahead of me. A cigarette in one hand and a cup of coffee in the other, he surveyed the activity with a calm, almost proprietary air, as if he were the owner of this bustling warehouse instead of an anxious customer cooling his heels while precious minutes ticked away.

  “Hey,” he said. “Whose dick were you sucking?”

  “Pardon?”

  “You got white shit on your face.”

  “Oh that.” I wiped at my lips. “It’s just Twinkie filling.”

  “Twinkies? At six in the morning? What are you, eleven fucking years old? You gonna have Ding Dongs for lunch?”

  “I was just talking to Anthony back there. He said something that got me thinking about Twinkies, and once you start thinking about Twinkies you might as well eat one. Otherwise you’ll spend your whole day thinking about them.”

  “Kind of like jerking off,” Chuckie pointed out.

  “Kind of,” I agreed, understanding him more readily than I would have liked to admit. “Anyway, Anthony was ragging on Twinkies, how they could survive a nuclear war or something, and I hadn’t really eaten breakfast or anything—”

  Chuckie cut me off. “You sure you weren’t sucking his dick?”

  I swirled my tongue around the inside of my mouth.

  “Pretty sure. I mean, it’s hard to be a hundred percent certain about anything, right?”

  Chuckie’s expression was stern.

  “He’s a faggot, you know.”

  “Yeah, I kind of got that impression. He’s got a pretty good thing going with the salads, though.”

  “Yeah, right,” Chuckie scoffed.

  “He said he sells two hundred a day.”

  “That’s this week,” Chuckie said, shaking his head with sad amusement. “I got one word for your pal Anthony. One fucking word.”

  “What’s that?” I asked, bracing myself for the word in question.

  “Crepes,” he said. It wasn’t the word I’d expected.

  “What?”

  “Crepes,” he said again, nodding like a man in the know. “It’s just like crepes a couple of years ago. The next big thing and all that bullshit. Everybody loves crepes, right? America’s going apeshit over crepes. Cover of Time magazine and everything. You start seeing these crepe places opening up at the malls, people are buying special pans so they can make crepes for supper, you can’t wipe your ass without hearing about crepes. This one buddy of mine fell for it. He got his whole truck re-outfitted for crepes. Monsieur Crepe, that was the name of his business. Well, you wanna know where Monsieur Crepe is today?”

  “Where?”

  “Vocational school.” Chuckie laughed to himself, as if this were a particularly pathetic place for a guy who called himself Monsieur Crepe to end up. “Majoring in lawn-mower repair.”

  “Crepes were a novelty,” I said. “Salads are pretty much here to stay.”

  Chuckie had made his point and wasn’t about to get enmeshed in a broader discussion. His eyes had narrowed, and he was gazing into the distance, like a philosopher lost in thought.

  “I wonder how they do it,” he mused.

  “Who?”

  “Fags. What would possess them to put another guy’s cock in their mouth.”

  “I guess it’s a matter of taste.”

  “I guess,” he conceded. He seemed to be making a genuine effort to take the imaginative leap. “I could see maybe taking it up the ass. Maybe. But sucking another guy’s cock? What’s the point of that?”

  “You don’t have to do it if you don’t want to,” I reminded him. “Unless you go to prison or something.”

  “I don’t even understand how women do it,” he confessed.

  The conversation trailed off. I could see Chuckie still had some hard questions to work through.

  “By the way,” I said. “What’s the story with the Lunch Monsters?”

  That snapped him out of his reverie. He turned to me like I’d slapped him in the face.

  “What’s the story?” he repeated. “I’ll tell you the fucking story.”

  He yanked open the storage door of the Chuck Wagon and fished around in the pile of trash he had painstakingly accumulated over the years. It looked like the hopper of a garbage truck in there.

  “This is the fucking story with the Lunch Monsters,” he said, unwrapping a plaid dish towel to reveal a small, snub-nosed revolver, the kind police officers carried. “I don’t care if their boss is Don Corleone himself. They better not fuck with my stops.”

  I filled the ice bed and propane tank and then I was off, roaring down North Avenue toward Springville Boulevard. It was a pleasure to be driving so early in the morning, before the congestion turned everything sluggish and ugly, before school buses began stopping at railroad crossings and funeral processions began their somber crawls through major intersections, before gigantic trailers had to be backed into narrow loading docks by drivers who would have enough of a challenge navigating a shopping cart into an airplane hangar.

  The radio was on, but I wasn’t really paying attention to anything but the voice of Jack Kerouac chattering in my head, narrating the morning as if the man himself were sitting beside me in the damp-smelling cab, playing Dean to my Sal, giving the drab landscape back to me in the breathy cadences of beat rapture: The gas stations sleeping itt the heartbroken light of the wild New Jersey daybreak … The babbling American madness of the billboards … The lost parking meters crying Violation! to the empty spaces on Main Street …

  My first stop was Franklin Typographics, a huge print shop that ran three shifts. I set up near the main entrance and caught the people coming and going, the fresh-faced newcomers—the dreamy typesetters of the Garden State, smelling of sleepy love and the first cigarette of the mad romantic morning—buying coffee and danishes to take inside, the bleary-eyed nighterawlers—zombies of the third shift, heads swimming with commas and despair—blinking in pained amazement at the light of day, grabbing hot sandwiches and candy bars to fuel their dazed journeys home.

  It was all self-service; my job was to calculate prices, make small talk and change, and watch that nobody was ripping anything off. These early stops were just warm-ups, with none of the frantic hurry of factory coffee breaks, where sometimes you had to clear thirty customers in three minutes, a few of them wanting to break big bills, others paying off debts from last week, still others needing credit till payday. Every now and then so many people descended on the Roach Coach at once that the truck actually started rocking on its wheels, and it seemed for a few seconds that it was in the process of getting stripped to the bones, that there’d be nothing left of it when they got finished but four tires, a steering wheel, and a gas tank.

 
One nice thing about driving a lunch truck: people are almost always happy to see you. You’re deliverance, sustenance, a break in the monotony. With me that morning the effect was multiplied by my long absence and the fact that my father was in the hospital. It was old home week, customers I hadn’t seen since January slapping me on the back, calling out “Hey kid” and “Where the fuck you been?”, making polite inquiries about the state of my old man’s bunghole before demanding to know whether I’d finally stopped jerking off and begun applying myself to the serious business of getting into Jodie Foster’s pants, as if she and I were the only two people at Yale and destined to get together sooner or later. (Of course, as far as most of them knew, we were the only two people at Yale.) Even the guys at the Department of Public Works, whom I’d never met before, were eager to get an update on my progress with Jodie.

  “I’m working on it,” I assured them. “She can’t hold out much longer.”

  It was like climbing onto a bike for the first time after a long winter. After a few false starts and fumbles the rhythms came back to me, the names and faces, the quirks and the banter. This guy’s Walter, that one’s Pete. Jerry eats split-pea soup for breakfast. The metal painters wear white protective suits and respirators that look like they were designed to withstand an attack of poison gas. Factory workers owe money; construction workers pay cash. Wooden skids are everywhere, and rusty metal drums. Dexter at the car wash is a dead ringer for B. B. King and buys three cherry pies every morning, one for each of his remaining teeth. “Hoo Wee,” he says. “Got to be cherry. Yes sir, got to be cherry.” They let you use the bathroom at the carpenter’s school; don’t forget to wash your hands. The salesmen at Everett Chevrolet are always pissed off; the secretaries from Pearl Industries giggle among themselves. By eleven o’clock I was working the change gun like it was part of my body, adding numbers in my head while taking money from the guy on my right and trading insults with the guy on my left, pausing to scribble a sum on my IOU sheet while shouting out the price of a Milky Way to a regular who knew exactly what it cost, but was hoping I might slip up and maybe charge him a nickel less than my father did. Keeping track of so many little things at once was engrossing and even oddly exhilarating, if only in a private way, like I was putting on a circus act for my own enjoyment, juggling small talk and numbers instead of bowling pins and flaming batons.

  Without the Union Village stops to slow me down, I made all my coffee breaks with time to spare, and was unusually relaxed for the late morning downtime, which I filled by stopping for gas and making a quick trip to the bank to break a few tens and reload my depleted change gun. Lunch flew by in the same way; by one thirty I was back at the warehouse to pay my bill for the morning and loading up sandwiches for Tuesday. By two thirty I was back home in the driveway, filling the coffee urns with water from the hose. By three o’clock I was back in my room, pulling the covers down and belly flopping into bed, the workday already behind me.

  If not for a single strange encounter, I would have counted the day a complete and unqualified success. It happened in the early afternoon, after I had completed my final lunch stop. I was waiting at a red light down the road from this big construction site my father had warned me about—they were building a state-of-the-art twenty-four-hour supermarket and mini-mall on the border between Springville and Union Village—when another lunch truck pulled up even with me on my left. This was a fairly common occurrence, since we all fished in the same greasy waters. Noticing it out of the corner of my eye, I turned to give it the obligatory wave when I was struck by an odd shrinking sensation, as if the Roach Coach and I were suddenly growing smaller.

  The truck beside me was all wrong. It was too big, too shiny, out of proportion with the rest of the world. I had to tilt my head to make eye contact with the goon in the passenger seat—my first impression was of a neck with sunglasses—who smiled down at me like we were old pals, his veiny, implausibly muscled arm protruding from the open window at an uncomfortable-looking angle, as if he were signalling for some sort of complicated traffic maneuver the rest of us hadn’t been taught in driver’s ed. I barely had time to take in the preposterous tires and the amateurish Frankenstein head painted on the box before he spoke.

  “Hey chief,” he said, laboriously jerking his thumb in the direction of the construction site. “You don’t need to go there tomorrow. We’ll take care of it, okay?”

  His voice was amiable, like he was offering to do me a favor, and I almost nodded my assent before catching myself.

  “Excuse me?” I said.

  “That stop’s ours.” With another herculean effort, he pushed the sunglasses on top of his head and squinted down at me. His voice was flatter now, more matter-of-fact. “You don’t go there anymore.”

  I felt a brief flicker of fear, but it vanished as quickly as it came, leaving an unexpected sense of calm in its wake. Now that his whole face was visible, I couldn’t help noticing the acne on his cheeks and the almost alarming smallness of his head in comparison with his neck and torso. The overall effect of the mismatch was freakish and comic at the same time, as if a twelve-year-old dork had somehow succeeded in grafting his head onto the body of Mr. Universe. It must have been to the twelve-year-old that I addressed my next question.

  “You got a dentist?”

  The non sequitur seemed to annoy him.

  “Whuh?” he demanded, sticking his head a little further out the window.

  “Make an appointment,” I advised, a split second before the light changed and we parted ways. “Tell him you’re gonna be missing a whole bunch of fucking teeth.”

  The whole thing happened so fast it was almost like it hadn’t happened at all. And yet this brief exchange dominated my thoughts for hours afterward, filling me with a strange and giddy pride that nothing could dispel, not even the creeping suspicion that I’d just made a really big and really stupid mistake.

  the squidman and me

  My parents made it home from the hospital around six. They were both in the kitchen by the time I dragged myself out of bed and marched groggily downstairs, my mother crumbling a brick of ground beef into the frying pan, my father standing by the refrigerator, clutching what appeared to be an infant-sized life preserver and looking around uncertainly, as if he’d wandered into a stranger’s house by mistake.

  “Hey,” I said. “How’d it go? Was the exorcism a success?”

  “It went fine,” he said, in a tone that suggested that even a “fine” hemorrhoidectomy didn’t quite qualify as a life-enriching experience. “How’d it go for you?”

  “Okay. A little rusty at first. But tell me about the operation.”

  “Nothing much to tell,” he muttered, subjecting me to the kind of scrutiny my mother used to inflict on me when she suspected me of coming home drunk or stoned from a high school party. “You sure you’re okay?”

  “A little tired,” I conceded. “Why?”

  “Just curious. I was worried about you today.”

  I shifted my gaze to my mother. “So everything went okay? No complications or anything?”

  My mother looked up from the sizzling meat, arching her eyebrows with playful significance. She seemed oddly merry for someone who’d spent most of her day in a hospital waiting room.

  “Let’s just say that your father was not exactly a model patient.”

  He didn’t deny it. He just stood there, frowning slightly and shifting his weight from one foot to the other, holding the little tube in front of his chest and squeezing it as though it were an accordion.

  “What happened?”

  “He was a little—” My mother paused, searching for a word I had a feeling she’d already found. “I guess uncooperative is a good way of putting it.”

  “Uncooperative?”

  “Recalcitrant?” suggested my mother. “Bordering on belligerent?”

  My father didn’t protest any of these characterizations. Instead he just kept staring at me, as if I were the one who’d behaved badl
y during a minor operation.

  “Next time,” he said, “I don’t care how simple the procedure, I’m going for the general. It’s not natural to be awake when they start passing out the scalpels.”

  “What about those guys in the Civil War?” I reminded him. “Some of them were wide awake when they got their legs amputated. At most they got a shot of whisky or something to calm them down, maybe a bullet to bite on. And the surgeons back then were just using these rusty old hacksaws.”

  I moved my arm back and forth, grimacing from the effort of forcing my rusty old hacksaw blade through a stubborn mass of muscle and bone. My father raised one hand in a subdued plea for mercy.

  “Spare me, okay?”

  “By the way,” I said. “What’s with the inner tube?”

  “It’s a donut. I’m supposed to sit on it to keep the weight off my stitches.”

  “Speaking of sitting,” my mother said, steering him gently out of the room on her way to the refrigerator, “why don’t the two of you go somewhere else and let me cook in peace?”

  I followed my father into the living room, saddened to see him walking with such obvious discomfort, tiptoeing almost, his legs wide apart, shoulders hunched and arms dangling, looking like something on the far left side of one of those Ascent-of-Man charts. He stopped in the middle of the room, as if confused about what to do next.

  “Want the couch?” I asked.

  “Nah.” He dismissed the suggestion with an almost haughty air, as if he had not been in the habit of sitting down for many years now and didn’t expect to return to it anytime soon. “I’m fine right here.”

  I plopped down on the couch and smiled up at him. He returned the grin without enthusiasm, slipping his right hand into his pocket and striking as casual a pose as you could strike while holding a rubber donut.

  “So tell me,” he said, lowering his voice and glancing quickly over his shoulder before speaking. “Did those guys give you any trouble? The ones I was telling you about?”