“That sounds very rational,” I said. “Mine are always trying to kill me. Last night it was my mother sneaking in with a pillow and putting it over my face. Night before that it was Dad chasing my sister and me around with a screwdriver.” I was kidding, but I wondered what Michael and Regina might think if they could hear this rap.
“I know it sounds a little crazy at first,” Arnie said, unperturbed, “but there are lots of things that sound nuts until you really consider them. Penis envy. Oedipal conflicts. The Shroud of Turin.”
“Sounds like horseshit to me,” I said. “You had a fight with your folks, that’s all.”
“I really believe it, though,” Arnie said pensively. “Not that they know what they’re doing; I don’t believe that at all. And do you know why?”
“Do tell,” I said.
“Because as soon as you have a kid, you know for sure that you’re going to die. When you have a kid, you see your own gravestone.”
“You know what, Arnie?”
“What?”
“I think that’s fucking gruesome” I said, and we both burst out laughing.
“I don’t mean it that way,” he said.
We pulled into the parking lot and I turned off the engine. We sat there for a moment or two.
“I told them I’d opt out of the college courses,” he said. “Told them I’d sign up for VT right across the board.”
VT was vocational training. The same sort of thing the reform-school boys get, except of course they don’t go home at night. They have what you might call a compulsory live-in programme.
“Arnie,” I began, unsure of just how to go on. The way this thing had blown up out of nothing still freaked me out. “Arnie, you’re still a minor. They have to sign your programme—”
“Sure, of course,” Arnie said. He smiled at me humourlessly, and in that cold dawn light he looked at once older and much, much younger… like a cynical baby, somehow. “They have the power to cancel my entire programme for another year, if they want to, and substitute their own. They could sign me up for Home Ec and World of Fashion, if they wanted to. The law says they can do it. But no law says they can make me pass what they pick.”
That brought it home to me—the distance he had gone, I mean. How could that old clunker of a car have come to mean so much to him so damned fast? In the following days that question kept coming at me in different ways, the way I’ve always imagined a fresh grief would. When Arnie told Michael and Regina he meant to have it, he sure hadn’t been kidding. He had gone right to that place where their expectations for him lived the most strongly, and he had done it with a ruthless expediency that surprised me. I’m not sure that lesser tactics would have worked against Regina, but that Arnie had actually been able to do it surprised me. In fact, it surprised the shit out of me. What it boiled down to was if Arnie spent his senior year in VT, college went out the window. And to Michael and Regina, that was an impossibility.
“So they just… gave up?” It was close to punch-in time, but I couldn’t let this go until I knew everything.
“Not just like that, no. I told them I’d find garage space for it and that I wouldn’t try to have it inspected or registered until I had their approval.”
“Do you think you’re going to get that?”
He flashed me a grim smile that was somehow both confident and scary. It was the smile of a bulldozer operator lowering the blade of a D-9 Cat in front of a particularly difficult stump.
“I’ll get it,” he said. “When I’m ready, I’ll get it.”
And you know what? I believed he would.
4
ARNIE GETS MARRIED
I remember the day
When I chose her over all those other junkers,
Thought I could tell
Under the coat of rust she was gold,
No clunker…
We could have had two hours of overtime that Friday evening, but we declined it. We picked up our cheques in the office and drove down to the Libertyville branch of Pittsburgh Savings and Loan and cashed them. I dumped most of mine into my savings account, put fifty into my chequeing account (just having one of those made me feel disquietingly adult—the feeling, I suppose, wears off), and held onto twenty in cash.
Arnie drew all of his in cash.
“Here,” he said, holding out a ten-spot
“No,” I said. “You hang onto it, man. You’ll need penny of it before you’re through with that clunk.”
“Take it,” he said. “I pay my debts, Dennis.”
“Keep it. Really.”
“Take it.” He held the money out inexorably.
I took it. But I made him take out the dollar he had coming back. He didn’t want to do that.
Driving across town to LeBay’s tract house, Arnie got more jittery, playing the radio too loud, beating boogie riffs first on his thighs and then on the dashboard. Foreigner came on, singing “Dirty White Boy.”
“Story of my life, Arnie my man, ! said, and he laughed too loud and too long.
He was acting like a man waiting for his wife to have a baby. At last I guessed he was scared LeBay had sold the car out from under him.
“Arnie,” I said, “stay cool. It’ll be there.”
“I’m cool, I’m cool,” he said, and offered me a large, glowing, false smile. His complexion that day was the worst I ever saw it, and I wondered (not for the first time, or the last) what it must be like to be Arnie Cunningham, trapped behind that oozing face from second to second and minute to minute and…
“Well, just stop sweating. You act like you’re going to make lemonade in your pants before we get there.”
“I’m not,” he said, and beat another quick, nervous riff on the dashboard just to show me how nervous he wasn’t. “Dirty White Boy” by Foreigner gave way to “Jukebox Heroes” by Foreigner. It was Friday afternoon, and the Block Party Weekend had started on FM-104. When I look back on that year, my senior year, it seems to me that I could measure it out in blocks of rock… and an escalating, dreamlike sense of terror.
“What exactly is it?” I asked. “What is it about this car?”
He sat looking out at Libertyville Avenue without saying anything for a long time, and then he turned off the radio with a quick snap, cutting off Foreigner in mid-flight.
“I don’t know exactly,” he said. “Maybe it’s because for the first time since I was eleven and started getting pimples, I’ve seen something even uglier than I am. Is that what you want me to say? Does that let you put it in a neat little category?”
“Hey, Arnie, come on,” I said. “This is Dennis here remember me?”
“I remember,” he said. “And we’re still friends, right?”
“Sure, last time I checked. But what has that got to do with—”
“And that means we don’t have to lie to each other, or at least I think that’s what it’s supposed to mean. So I got to tell you, maybe it’s not all jive. I know what I am. I’m ugly. I don’t make friends easily. I… alienate people somehow. I don’t mean to do it, but somehow I do. You know?”
I nodded with some reluctance. As he said, we were friends, and that meant keeping the bullshit to a bare minimum.
He nodded back, matter-of-factly. “Other people—” he said, and then added carefully, “you, for instance, Dennis don’t always understand what that means. It changes how you look at the world when you’re ugly and people laugh at you. It makes it hard to keep your sense of humour. It plugs up your sinuses. Sometimes it makes it a little hard to stay sane.”
“Well, I can dig that. But—”
“No,” he said quietly. “You can’t dig it. You might think you can, but you can’t. Not really. But you like me, Dennis—”
“I love you, man,” I said. “You know that.”