Shot at the title
by Billy O'Callaghan
[ fiction - september 10 ]
Spivey Bidenbaüer found his Damascus moment on the bus to work one summer morning. He always travelled by bus because rush-hour frightened him, the idea of so many angry people getting angrier by the minute, and all the while armed with such a deadly weapon. The bus was easier, more convenient. And also, the bus tended to attract all sorts, so you had to be something truly special in order to stand out from the crowd.
Mazzolini boarded at Seneca, two stops on, then settled in the seat just in front and spent roughly the next half-mile or so faced stoically forward before allowing his curiosity to take over. Then he turned, and stared.
At first, Spivey pretended not to notice. He had a newspaper going, more for the sense of normality that it provided than for any real interest in the news, and even when he felt himself being observed he kept fast to the story of a little girl who, while slumbering away a lazy Saturday afternoon in a neighbour's garden hammock, had had her toes gnawed off by two escaped greyhounds. You really couldn't make some of this stuff up. And Pacoima, for some unfathomable reason, seemed to get first pick of the very weirdest 'truths'. If it wasn't toe-eating greyhounds then it was the great granny giving unexpected birth to Siamese twins or the parrot whose owner claimed was the reincarnation of Maria Callas. He read the piece about the little girl, then decided that two or three solid minutes of exploring the snapping points of his patience was more than enough.
"Why not just go ahead and help yourself to a Polaroid," he said, but his annoyance proved as momentary as a breaking wave. He looked up from the folded newspaper and found that destiny, that thing that he'd been running from all his life, had finally come to collect.
Mazzolini ran a travelling freak show. "Hardly the sort of career that every mother wants for her son," he told Spivey, shrugging his padded shoulders in a gesture of complete empathy. "But what can I say? You have to go with your gifts." He wore a zebra-patterned zoot suit and burgundy-coloured stovepipe hat even on his days off, boasted a permanent gap-toothed grin, and spoke a lot about what was important and what was not. He himself was Canadian-born, he said, twisting the waxed handlebars of a long drooping moustache in some imagined time to the words. He had grown up in some small, cold town in the mountains, and his ancestry was a succulent melting pot of Irish, French and Scots, spiced with delicate infusions of Ojibwa and Cree. At least as far as he knew, he had no Italian ancestry at all. His real name - that is, his original name - was Tim Scoop, and he understood better than anyone the multiple how's and why's of people and their natural need to conform. Believe it or not, he said, he too had tried to live a staid existence, at least for a while. He had served his time behind the counter of a grocery store, suffering all the tedium that such work implied. Chief among his duties back then was the task of measuring out pound and half-pound weights of tea, coffee, sugar and salt while the customers looked on, watching for a sleight-of-hand thumb on the scales or any such devious trick that might con them out of even a single ounce. In that town, there was just no honest way to get rich and a little quick handiwork was expected. The plain-speaking truth, though, was that he hadn't really blossomed as a man until the day he pulled on the stereotypical pizza-pie Italian accent, bouncing between overwrought and bellicose, elongating almost every word with an utterly redundant letter 'A'. And he'd been at it so long now, he said, he was not at all sure that he could speak any other way.
Of course, everyone thought that he'd cracked the pot, which was more than part of the reason that he had finally picked up his bear traps and skedaddled. And the name? Well, that was something he had added to his collection while on the road, don't you know. Actually, it came to him right out of the deaths notices the very first day he hit Chicago: Salvatore Mazzolini, beloved son of blah, blah, blah. As soon as he read it, in a week-old newspaper that he found stuffed through the rungs of the park bench on which he had chosen to spend at least one night and quite possibly more than one, he knew that he had scored the last piece of colour necessary to defining himself in the eyes of the watching world. "Who you are doesn't matter," he said, swaggering with pride at the self-perceived brilliance of such a motto and liking it so much that he decided that it bore repeating. "It's who you are meant to be that counts. And I'm prepared to bet a baby seal against a bag of parsnips that people like to stare at you, mister," he added, considering Spivey up and down. "My advice, take it on board if you want, is to let them look. But charge them for the privilege. Through both nostrils, if you possibly can."
It was difficult not to like the sound of that. Over the next three and a half miles, they discussed life on the road, the showman trying to sell an idea that had already been bought and paid for. "I can make you the Elvis Presley of the freakshow circuit," he said. His pitted eyes were sharp as nails, still able back then to survive without glasses or the rainbow-coloured contacts that he would utilise to such good effect in years to come. "Oh yes, I can see it now. A little make-up, some added hair. We'll work on your posture, teach you how to really use the gifts that God has given you. How about, 'The Singing Kong'?"
"Wasn't Kong a giant?" Spivey said, pulling a face that came up with new definitions of ugly. "Plus, I can't sing worth a lick."
The answer to that was a fluttering of one hand's worth of fingers, a gesture casual to the point of throwaway but which seemed to set colours to shimmering all around them.
"Don't worry a curl on your contorted little head about that, my friend. There will be all the time in the world for knocking the corners off our problems. I do think though that the ape angle is worth exploring. If that gets the okay from you, that is. Nothing matters more to me than the wellbeing and peace of mind of my freaks. You have my solemn word as an officer and a gent on that. It's just that there is a lot of flexibility down that road, I think. Apes on bicycles, talking apes, apes doing stand-up or maybe even a spot of opera. Tell me, Spiv, you're not afraid of heights, are you?"
Spivey felt himself totter on a precipice. He took a breath, steadied himself. "It's Spivey, not Spiv," he said, hoping that he was not about to make the biggest mistake of his life. "Pronounce the I like an I."
"Oh, please, my humblest apologies," said Mazzolini, and again he pulled on that smile that was open clear through front and centre due to the absence of at least one upper tooth and perhaps even more than one. "From this moment on, Spivey it is and ever shall be, Spivey with the 'I' full-bodied and intact." His tongue flicked snakelike past the toothless gap. "And about the heights?"
"Heights? Well, no. I guess I'm okay with heights. As long as they don't go too high, of course."
The smile tugged at its own corners and if the silence that followed lingered a beat too long then that was easily enough ignored, given the circumstances. "We'll talk," said Mazzolini.
A hand thrust forward and held itself out there until Spivey understood the implication and ceded to a shake. Then the stovepipe hat came down, revealing a centre-parting that on anyone else would have looked like a mortal lock on baldness, and the same freed hand fumbled deep into the upturned cavern and eventually re-emerged with a small but finely embossed goldenrod card.
"You won't regret a single fart's worth of your life from here on in, my friend. And that's twenty four carrots worth of a guarantee. I'll make you bigger than Jesus, just you wait and see."
Then, without waiting for the bus to stop, without even a proper goodbye, he was out of the seat and clambering up along the aisle, his legs spooling in all directions, his elevated Spanish boot-heels stamp-tapping in desperate search of even a semblance of balance. Spivey sat back and watched him go, watched as he crouched over the driver, perhaps with a deft little top-pocket bribe, before descending the few steps and plunging out through the accordion-style door. From the roadside, he straightened himself up and raised a hand to wave, the way a street mime might when replicating a window-cleaning act.
Spivey nodded and raised his own hand in return, but he didn't bother with any of that wax-on, wax-off business. And in hardly the span of a breath, the bus was on its way once more and past, and Mazzolini was somehow nothing more than a memory and a name well etched on a three-by-two inch piece of yellow card. Again, the thought rose to the surface, the idea that he had reached the sheer verge of a very great and hideous mistake. But if there was fear in such an idea then it proved easy enough to quell, dominated as it was by the bone-wrenching quiver of excitement. Besides, even if this great and shining opportunity really was a tragedy waiting to happen then it would have to be something truly stupendous in its enormity in order to top some of the blunders that he had not merely suffered in his life but had actually courted.
"Think about this?" Mindy said, that night after they had crawled into bed. They'd tried making love but he had given up halfway through in favour of the Times crossword.
Mindy was his live-in, his common-law. They'd been skirting around the fringes of the dance floor for going on two years now, each trying to decide if this might be something worth saving, each also vaguely on the lookout for something better.
The scene of their initial meeting consisted of a makeshift bar and a squatters' loft space crammed with row after row of grey plastic high school chairs. He'd heard mention that the best way, the only way, to pass a Friday or Saturday night in this town was to spend small on those fringe theatre productions. Bus it down to the seedier parts of town, take a breath and follow the bullshit trail. And after kicking away two or three hours on watching troupes of cheerful amateurs painting themselves blue and trying to chug down some pretty nasty vats of existentialist tripe, cheering just for something to do whenever the so-called performance was punctuated by the seemingly impromptu invasion of a juggling moron or two, it was always back to someone's pad, a heaving pack of forty squeezing down the fire escapes, onto the street and across town. Losing people on the way, gaining strays. The drink was always cheap and rough-diamond, pick-a-colour carbolic wine funded from the passed hat, but the big attraction, for him and for most, was the women. Eighteen to forty, flyaway types who had renamed themselves after flowers or constellations, they talked a lot of air and were always open to suggestion. Nothing seemed to offend, and who could dream of asking more than that? Mindy was not exactly the leftovers, but after handsome swarmed to pretty, it was a case of quickest on the draw.
After a few weeks, it was somehow taken for granted that they were together. They never discussed details, but apparently actions spoke louder than screams. She was mid-sized, with thick upper arms and a roundness of shoulder that took curves out of the equation, though naked she was not bad. No Barbarella but he of all people could hardly afford to be picky.
Actually, they were pretty good together, at least initially. Being with someone helped his self-esteem no end, but it also helped to know that she needed him too. She was not exactly pretty, she had a long plain face, delicately but precariously assembled. Somehow, without making complete sense, every detail seemed off-putting to the next. Her eyes too hooded, too widely set, the reef of her nose too narrow for the broad flare of her nostrils, her mouth a little too slatted. Everything was too something. Yet she had her moments of real beauty, and there was real skilfulness in her smile. With most things of the world she was clueless, but she had learned some lessons very well indeed.
Then, some nine months ago, the lease on her apartment expired and she had moved in with him. You could toss a coin as to which of them had suggested this new arrangement, but the setup was fine as far as it went, and her welfare cheque did help soften the cough of the rent. But being thrown together in such close proximity brought a clearer definition to their situation, and it seemed to mean something quite significant that neither of them had yet dared risk even a passion mention of a certain dirty little four-lettered word.
"Think about this?" Mindy said. She was just lying there, wide awake. That was one of the things about her that he could never understand. She hadn't bothered to slip back into her nightdress after their failed attempt at lovemaking and she kept the hem of the woollen blanket casually bunched around her waist, perhaps hoping that the sight of her exposed breasts might stir him into taking another shot at the title. Think about it? He rustled the newspaper then opened his mouth so that he could tap the butt of the pen between his teeth. What in the name of Spock did she think that he'd been doing? Things built in his mind to say, nasty, unforgivable things, but not wanting to make her cry he instead forced himself to concentrate on puzzle in his lap. He counted out the space for 7 Down, eight letters, and settled after a moment's thought on Alligator, not caring very much that he had to drop one of the l's in order to make it fit.
"I'm just saying?" she went on, from her side of the bed. "This is, like, a huge decision?"
Every sentence she had ever uttered in his company wore the inflection of a question, plunging deadweight in the middle but springing upwards, catapult-style or like a plucked fiddle string, were it rounded off. Back at the beginning, when they were still trying to figure out the unwieldy ways of approaching their initial tangles, that shit had seemed cute, endearing even, but try adding twenty-some incessantly blathering months of it to the equation and it just watch it turn Methuselah in one cut-down slice of hurry.
"You know, Mindy, not everything has to be a question," he'd once remarked, after a long night of it had become suddenly, horrifically too much for him to bear. "Can't you at least try for a bit of variety?" But it was like talking to a handful of magic beans. She bobbed and shifted a little, but that was all. He watched her gaze back at him, bite her lower lip, furrow her brow, and try without success to understand what he was talking about. A scientist might have shrugged and drawn attention to her modest eighty-four IQ rating, but Spivey was inclined to put it down to something more than mere numbers. "You mean sex?" she had said, or asked, in some effort at clarification. He would have answered if he'd been able.
This time, her comment wasn't trespassing, but the thing was, he had thought about it, all day long, in fact. And he was at least half-sure that he knew what he was doing. He was being offered the opportunity to roll some dice, to take a chance on the world. The job at Leiber & Sons brought in the bones, the Andrew's and Alexander's that helped to make ends meet, but it was dreary work that made the hours long and numbing. Surely nobody would blame him for wanting something more, some small glimmer of fulfilment, out of life.
From the bedside locker, he lifted the little goldenrod card. The memory of Mazzolini hit his mind, bright as a rip of lightning. He tossed the newspaper to the floor, slumped down onto his side and silently laughed his way into Mindy's waiting kiss. As he closed his eyes, his right hand found her breast with its flesh cool and heavy and all too familiar and the small dark nipple puckered, as it always did in anticipation, against the pad of his thumb. Left just as this, a prelude to goodbye, he sighed and let himself enjoy the many spices that she had to offer, and for once, or for the first time in a long, long time, it was nice that it could just be taken for what it truly and thoroughly was, instead of trying to make it into all the things that either or both of them seemingly expected it to be. When he was done, they held each other in the eyes-shut darkness, and he smiled against the soft flaxen down of her neck when she shifted beneath his body, kneading the last and best out of these waning moments of love.
