“Break out the Jelly Roll, squeeze!”
“Damn it, woman,” Basil said. “How many times do I have to tell you not to call me that in public?”
Lucille squinted. “This is public?”
WE’D MET HICKORY AT A PARTY IN THE CITY. TO get inside, you had to take an ancient lift, the kind with a platform behind a metal door that wouldn’t budge without a couple of trolls to heave on some old chain. They even had a bellhop, in a red-velvet monkey suit and pillbox hat with a strap. For eyebrows the kid had little steel barbells, five or six per side, and for teeth real fangs, straight-up Lestat. And if that weren’t enough, he was running Maori-style ink on his chin, and every patch of his face but that was goofy with shiny dust.
Before us lay a massive room, probably two- or three-hundred yards long and half as wide, chockful with every type of gork in the book. Guys with bunless chaps ran around the place smacking each other with crops. Chicks, too, more than half of them decked out like Catwoman, scampered about with nipple clamps and whips and chains, wreaking all manner of hell. There were go-go dancers in bubbles and cages, Rastafaris, homeboys, deathrockers and mods, rockabilly kids, swingers and punks, not to mention your basic Haight Street hipsters. Jumbotrons swayed from the ceilings flashing clever retromercials, and thrift-store TVs lined the walls fuzzy with chickens in the slaughterhouse and Japanimation and big-time sex acts, the whole of it swamped in banks of chemical fog. Some heavy-duty industrial house provided the coup de grâce for this late-night get down, pumping so hard you could feel it from the marrow in your bones to the depths of your aching nards. The four of us snagged some drinks and split, the two traitors one way, Dinky and I the next.
We stumbled on our girl in some sort of cave, everyone but her stupid with dope. In her tight corduroys and glittering boots, she sat among thirty or forty crackpot fiends sucking fingers, faces, toes, whatever their mouths could hold. But what stung most was the guy beside her, an image to the T of my old toad in a picture I’d seen when he was a Hare Krishna. He had fierce blue eyes and a queue from his head, all the way down his back. He was even wearing bamboo thongs. Soon, however, he slipped off, and I forgot him and was glad. Jerks by the droves kept trying to get their paws on Hickory, but she sat among them cool as a queen, there, as she’d said, “to take in all the footage.” We never asked her name, and she never said. It was Dinky laid the moniker down. “You look like a Hickory girl if ever we’ve seen one,” he told her, to which she said, “Hickory dickory dock, the mouse ran up the clock.” All the while her face lay before us unreadable as Chinese kanji. I remember staring at her for a preposterously long time, asking myself just who in hell this willow was, with the ovate eyes and strong white teeth, and me like a doofus trying to smile.
So I’d known what I wanted before the game had begun. The problem was, having so much to want, I had to choose.
“What’s your name?” I said. “Your real name.”
No one but Dinky would’ve expected that. Neither Basil nor Lucille had ever known Hickory wasn’t Hickory. The day we introduced her, it was Hickory, meet Basil and Lucille. Their faces didn’t quite know what to do.
“I’ve always wondered,” Hickory said, “why none of you have asked.”
“It can’t be more fucked up than Hickory,” Basil said.
“Elmira Pugsley?” Hickory said.
“It’s different,” Lucille said. “That’s for sure.”
“It’s after my granny. But since the point here’s to be totally honest — and I’m a totally honest gal — the full name’s Elmira Beatrice Pugsley.”
Basil clicked his tongue. “Poor, poor girl,” he said.
“No wonder you go around letting everyone call you Hickory,” Lucille said.
Dinky burbled from the couch. “We don’t think that’s very nice, now do we?”
“Who asked you to wake up, hey moron?” Basil said.
“The middle name,” Hickory went on, “that was my father’s doing. They were farmer hippies.”
“You,” I said, “come from hippies?”
Hickory smiled. “I spent the first ten years of my life on a commune up in Oregon. We had beehives and everything. Organic bees. Organic everything.”
“Poor, poor girl,” Basil said.
Hickory put her chin in her palm and looked us over. When she stopped at me I knew what she wanted, but then she passed to Basil. “You, tough guy. Which will it be?”
“Toss a mop on the floor,” I said at Basil’s show of squirming. “See which way it flops.”
Even as I said this it struck me just how much we didn’t care what Basil did. We knew — or at least I knew, or thought I knew — that either way he turned wouldn’t change a thing. How could he choose when he had no choice, the difference between a Truth or Dare having collapsed beneath their emptiness? For Basil, to be honest meant to be daring. And however strangely, however sadly, daring was as close as Basil ever got to truth. The notions had become two mirrors reflecting only themselves.
“Goddamn it,” Basil said. “Shit. Truth.”
“Oh dear yes, quite lovely indeed,” Hickory said in this high-society debutante voice. “Now. What’s the most shameful thing you’ve ever done — sexually, I mean?” Basil looked blank, so Hickory said, “Of course I mean shameful in the traditional sense, the suburban sense.”
“I can tell you that,” Lucille said. “It happened only last week, when he greased me up like a Thanksgiving turkey and tried to—”
“I already heard that story,” I said. Lucille turned with gaping eyes. “He told me everything,” I said.
“Everything?” she said.
Basil cleared his throat. “When I was a kid,” he said, “I had a stuffed monkey.”
“How old are we talking?” Hickory said.
“Twelve or thirteen, I guess. My dad had given it to me before he took off. Anyways, it had this hole in its crotch. It started out little, but kept getting bigger.” Basil had been slouching forward as he talked. Now he planted his hands on the floor, as if the telling were over.
“What kind of story is that?” I said.
Basil’s face was flushing now. “There’s more,” he said.
“Come, come,” Hickory said.
“One day I was in the closet.”
“Yes?”
“With the monkey.”
“Yes?”
“And I was looking at pornos, you know, and, I don’t know, there it was.” Here Basil paused with great melodrama, worse than a creep on the tube.
“Out with it!” I shouted.
“So I fucked it.”
“Really?” Lucille said, her face lit up.
“That’s not all,” Basil said.
“There’s more,” I said. “There’s always more with this guy.”
“See, when I finished, I wanted to hide the bastard, but I couldn’t think of any place where my ma wouldn’t find it. There was also another lady and her kid living with us in this house. You can see why I had to destroy the facts. So I got out a big old garbage bag, one of those super heavy-duty Glad bags, and stuffed the monkey in there. Then I jumped on my moped and drove out to the mall. They had all those dumpsters in the alley behind the Mervyns there. Thing is, I didn’t just chuck it in there. I buried it. Dug through old tampons and shit, and chicken bones and diapers and soup cans, all that repugnant shit, and crammed that little fucker down at the very, very bottom, and then I covered it all back up.”
“You interred it,” Hickory said. “As in a mausoleum.” Now she circled our faces with a look that said I’m going to tell you all what this really means. “Some people would say that was very symbolic.”