I was without plan, plum out of ideas, at a loss. Even within fifteen minutes of running away from home, unmooring oneself from one’s parent, one was struck by the vastness of things, the typhoon ferocity of the world, the frailty of one’s boat. Without thinking, I hurried across the street to the BP gas station and pushed open the door to the Food Mart. It dinged a pleasant hello. The kid always working, Larson, was incarcerated in the front in his bulletproof holding pen, talking to one of his girlfriends dangling in front of his window like an air freshener. I ducked into the nearest aisle.
Well, it just so happened Hello, My Name Is LARSON was a kid Dad took to like a Surinam Cockroach to bat droppings. He was one of those unsinkable eighteen-year-olds, with a Hardy Boy face no one had anymore, all freckles and gee-whiz grin, thick brown hair that grew around his face like an urn plant and a lanky body in constant motion as if he were being operated by a ventriloquist on speed (see Chapter 2, “Charlie McCarthy,” The Puppets That Changed Our Lives, Mesh, 1958). Dad found Larson wondrous. And that was the thing with Dad: he’d teach Modes of Mediation to a thousand John Dorys he was barely able to stomach, and then he’d pay a kid for berry-flavored Tums and fall head over heels, declaring him a veritable dolphin who’d spiral through the air when you whistled. “Now that’s a promising young man,” said Dad. “I’d exchange every Happy, Sleepy and Doc to teach him. He has spark. You don’t find that often.”
“If it ain’t the girl with the dad,” announced the store intercom. “Innit past yer bedtime?”
Doused in the dead light of the Food Mart, I felt absurd. My feet hurt, I was wearing an overcooked marshmallow and my face (I could see it plainly in the reflective shelving) was decaying by the minute into an unstable mess of crusty tears and bad makeup (see “Radon-221,” Questions of Radioactivity, Johnson, 1981, p. 120). I was also festooned with one billion pine needles.
“Come on over here and say hello! Whatcha doin’ out so late?”
Reluctantly, I made my way to the cashier window. Larson was wearing jeans and a red T-shirt that read MEAN REDS, and he was grinning. And that was the thing with Larson; he was one of those people who grinned all the time. He had ticklish eyes too, which had to explain the multitude of nutty-eyed peanut-butter parfaits thawing all over his Food Mart on any given night. Even when you were standing in front of his window innocuously paying for gas, his eyes, the clear-cut color of milk chocolate or mud, had a way of oozing all over you, so you couldn’t help but have a feeling he was seeing something private about you — you stark naked, for example, or you saying humiliating things in your sleep, or worst of all, you in your favorite dumb fantasy, in which you walked a red carpet and wore a long beaded gown everyone took great pains not to step on.
“Lemme guess,” he said. “Boyfriend trouble.”
“Oh. I, uh, had a fight with my dad.” I sounded like scrunched aluminum foil.
“Yeah? Saw him the other day. Came by with his girlfriend.”
“They broke up.”
He nodded. “Hey, Diamanta, go get her a Slurpee.”
“Whut,” said Diamanta, making a sour face.
“Seventy-ounce. Any flavor. On me.”
Diamanta, in glittery pink shirt and sparkly jean miniskirt, was Pixy-stick skinny and had that wan, white parchment skin through which, in harsher lights, you could glimpse thin blue veins swimming through her arms and legs. Scowling at me, she removed her black platform boot from the bottom of the greeting card stand, turned and twinkled down the aisle.
“Sure,” Larson said, shaking his head. “Old mans. They can be tough. When I was fourteen my pops cleared out. Left me nothin’ but work boots and his subscription to People magazine, I kid you not. Two years? Did nothin’ but glance over my shoulder, look for him every place. Think I’d see him ’cross the street. Passin’ by on a bus. An I’d tail the bus one enda town to the other, thinkin’ it was him, waitin’, waitin’ like a crazy man, just for him to get out at the stop. Only when he got out, it was someone else’s old man. Wudn’t mine. Things turned out, though, what he did? Best thing ever happened to me. Wanta know why?”
I nodded.
He leaned down, hitching his elbows on the counter.
“Cuza him I kin play King Layer.”
“What flavor?” yelled Diamanta by the Slurpee machine.
“What flavor?” asked Larson. Without blinking, he recounted the names like an auctioneer overseeing a livestock sale. “Rootbeer, Blue Bubbagum, 7-Up, 7-Up Tropicale, Grapermelon, Crystallat, ’Nana Split, Code Red, Live-War—”
“Rootbeer is fine. Thanks.”
“Lady without shoes would like Rootbeer,” he said into the intercom.
“King what did you say?” I asked.
He grinned, revealing two severely crooked front teeth, one peeking out from behind the other as if it had stage fright.
“Layer. Shakespeare personage. Contrary to popular belief, person needs heartbreak an’ betrayal. Else you got no stayin’ power. Can’t play a lead for five whole acts. Can’t play two performances inna day. Can’t fashion a character arch from Point A ta Point G. Can’t get through the denewment, create a convincin’ through line — all that stuff. See whut I’m sayin’? Person’s gotta get banged up. Gotta get jerked around, lived in. So he’s got somethin’ to use, see. Hurts like hell. Sure. Feels bad. Not sure you wanna go on. But that gives way to what they commonly call emotive re-zone-ance. An emotive rezonance makes it impossible fer people to take their eyes offa you, when yer onstage. Ever turned round in a good movie and seen the faces? Pretty intense. Diamanta?”
“Ain’t coming out right,” she cried.
“Turn off the machine, put it back on and try again.”
“Where’s the switch at?”
“On the side. Red.”
“Looks all nasty,” she said.
I stared up at him. Dad was right. There was something riveting about the kid. It was his outdated earnestness, the way his eyebrows did the polka when he talked and his mountain accent, which made the words jut out like pointy, slippery rocks on which he might get hurt. It was also the thousands of copper freckles dusting him head to toe as if he’d been dipped in glue, then in fine, penny-iridescent confetti.
“See,” he said, leaning in and widening his eyes, “ya ain’t felt pain, you kin only play yerself. And that ain’t gonna move people. Maybe yer good for toothpaste, hemorrhoid commercials and such. But that’s it. You’ll never be a legend in yer own time. Ain’t that what ya wanna be?”
Diamanta shoved the gigantic Slurpee into my hands and resumed her droop by the greeting cards.
“Now,” Larson said, slapping his hands together, “ya got to tell us what yer name is.”
“Blue.”
“Got to tell us. Blue. Came to my doorstep tonight in yer hour a’ need. Whud we do now?”
I looked from Larson to Diamanta, back to Larson again.
“What do you mean?” I asked.
He shrugged. “Ya turned up here ona dark stormy night. At”—he glanced at his watch—“2:06.” He peered at my feet and nodded. “No shoes. Swut they call dramatic action. Swut happens in the beginnin’ of a scene.”
He stared at me, his face grave as any photo of Sun Yat-sen.
“Gotta tell us if we’re in a comedy or a mellow drama or a whodidit or what they call a theater of the absurd. Ya just can’t leave us standin’ on stage with no dialogue.”