22.
Marc came around with the girl he’d met in class. He was taking some night classes in junior college. She looked pretty good, except she was real skinny, maybe too skinny, her face a cross between Princess Diana and the girl next door – but on a sleepy day. Her blue eyes were wide and baggy, sluggish and droopy, spent. I don’t think Sean thought too much of her at first.
Dusk had come over while the new roommate, Adam Crumb, was shooting baskets on the driveway.
Dusk grabbed a beer and drank, sitting out where I was, but he drank more and faster than I did. He seemed to have something on his mind.
David showed up after Sean with a pizza and carried it into the house. Not too long after that Marc and the girl arrived.
She wore black boots, black jeans, a white t-shirt and a black sweater jacket. She had a touch too much makeup on, but very nice blue eyes, short blonde hair (very hair sprayed), and a nose ring. That really stood out, distinguishing her right off the bat.
Her name was Calyna.
Calyna stuck by Marc as Crumb shot baskets, both of them standing towards the back of the driveway, near Crumb’s crappy but reliable blue VW bug. Fat Marc and skinny Calyna looked like the number 10 together (to quote an old joke).
Sean had been pretty loose and talkative before they showed up; now he wasn’t talking much at all. We stood watching Crumb as if he was performing some outrageous spectacle instead of just shooting hoops.
Sean went into the Cavern. After a few minutes he came out with three beers, walked over, handed one to Marc and one to Calyna. She was shy. Marc wasn’t saying much, either; Sean, knowing he had to, broke the ice.
“You’ll never believe what David’s doing inside,” he announced to all of us. “He’s eating his pizza with sugar on it.”
“No!” Mark lit up.
Crumb let out a quick chortle and shook his head. “That’s disgusting,” he said.
“You have to see it,” said Sean. “I’ve never seen anything like it in my entire life.”
We all, except Crumb, walked into the Cavern. David was on the couch, facing the TV, eating jovially. He had a medium sized pizza, a quarter eaten out of the box, and one slice on a plate. The sugar shaker was next to the plate with the silver spout open.
“Oh my God!” Marc exclaimed.
“That’s… different,” replied Calyna, and, because of the strangeness of the moment, not sounding like a newcomer.
Marc looked back at her and smiled.
“That’s the most disgusting thing I’ve ever seen in my life,” Marc said.
Marc and Sean laughed. But David didn’t mind, nor did he budge. He smacked his greasy fingers, grabbed the slice and ate some more of the sugar pizza, eyes forward on the television at the same time.
“It’s good like this, I swear,” he said. “I know, it looks funny, but it’s really good.” David had said this without trying to convince us; he’d just said it, that’s all. For him it was a fact – pouring sugar on pizza was ‘the norm’.
“Who taught you how to do that?” Marc asked him.
“What?”
“Putting sugar on pizza.”
David thought about it a second. Then answered:
“Gale Trask. He learned it in Costa Rica…”
After enough beers we were, at least Marc and I and Calyna, feeling all right. By then the sun had dropped over the rooftops - yet another suburban night had begun…
We sat around and watched TV. Marc, Sean and I had a collection of empty bottles near David’s empty pizza box. David had eaten the entire pizza himself. He had one hell of an appetite and you’d never think it, the way he looked, wiry and “adorable”…
Calyna sat around, watched us, enjoying our bullshit. I could tell, the way her eyes went back and forth, scanning the action like a tennis match, she really tripped on our juvenilely mundane behavior. But it wasn’t enough action for Marc just being watched, or merely entertaining a stranger, for in truth we were merely sitting around another night at the Cavern. We now had a new member, a girl at that – and he had an idea!
“I know what we’ll have to do tonight,” he said excitedly, standing up. “The cemetery! We should go to the cemetery!”
David spoke instantly to this: “Screw that. Uh uh.” He was shaking his head. “No. No way. I’m not going. You guys aren’t making me tag along on this drunken adventure. Not a chance. No, not a chance…”
“They got cops all over that place,” Sean said. “I don’t think it’d be a good idea.” Then he thought about it a second, and said: “It’s a great idea, actually. But so is robbing a bank. In other words, I don’t think we’d pull it off.”
“No way,” Marc shook his head, “they’re not actual cops at the cemetery. If anything there’ll be just some fucking security guard rent-a-cop. It will be dark enough so I bet we can sneak around without anybody seeing us. My brother used to do it all the time! And look what we haven’t dusted off…” He walked over in front of the TV and opened the cabinet where he’d (what seemed a century ago) stashed the bottle of Irish whiskey, held it out in front of him and facing it at us, he said: “We can take this and trip around the on top of the dead bodies. It’ll by foggy out too. I love the fog! Don’t you love fog, Caylina?”
“Yeah. I guess.”
“Then it’s a MUST! We MUST go to the cemetery!!!”
Sean was smirking, looking at David, who still shaking his head.
“C’mon, man,” Marc said half whining, “you’re going, David. It’ll be classic. Something to tell your grandkids one day.”
“You guys have had fifty thousand beers tonight, and it seems like a big adventure for you right now, but to me it’s just a way to get thrown out of a cemetery and into a jail. There’s no way. I’m not having anything to do with it.”
“It’ll be so great?” Marc said with the same drive in his voice. “A cemetery, even a jail cell, beats the hell outta place.”
“The Cavern,” Dusk smiled, “is a cross between both.”
“No,” David said. His arms were crossed tightly across his chest. “I refuse to go. There’s no way you guys are talking me in to going!”
“I haven’t had a thing to drink,” Calyna said to David, “and I’m going.”
“Now you gotta go,” Sean said. ”Even she’s gonna go with us, man. C’mon Dave. If a girl can do it…”
Right then, I could see, David was defeated. It was because of Calyna somehow.
“Okay,” David sighed reluctantly, “but only if I drive.”
Marc shook his head. “Nah. I think we should walk. It’s right across the railroad tracks.”
“Absolutely not,” David replied quickly. “Either I drive or I don’t go. I’m not walking to railroad tracks onto a cemetery then back onto railroad tracks. I’m not going along without a car around for a clean getaway.”
There was a moment of thoughtful, and somehow banal, silence.
“Sounds fair,” said Sean. He looked at Marc for conformation.
“All right,” Marc agreed. “Jameson drives – all of us go!”
We finished what we had left of our beers. Marc held the whiskey in a tight Linus grip with his other hand. We put our empty beer bottles with the collection. Marc looked at Calyna, then at all of us.
“Let’s hit it,” he said. “Tonight – the dead shall rise…”
When David parked the car across the street from the cemetery, we all climbed out except for him. We were parked in the same adjoining lot as Cues. Soon we were outside the car, the doors closed. David wasn’t budging from the driver’s seat.
Then, the sound of all the doors locking pricked our ears…
Marc had caught on first. He bent down and knocked on David’s window. All the windows and doors were shut, the entire car now locked. Marc didn’t need to say anything. David smiled, shaking his head.
“He got us,” said Dusk. “I think he’s gonna wait in the car. It’s predestined, man. David’s the getaway for tonight. And that’s that.”
Marc was let down, I could tell. David sat stubbornly, his eyes staring forward, his hands tight on the steering wheel.
“C’mon, let him stay,” Sean said. “And anyhow, we should hurry up and do this thing, before it’s not spontaneous anymore…”
After crossing the street we walked alongside the boulevard, cars passing us in the night. To our right was the cemetery gate, which ran the same direction of the boulevard. I’d turn around and see groups of oncoming yellow headlights and then, watching them pass, becoming fleeting red lights. Sometimes looking back I’d worry for a second that one would be a copper, but then I’d realize Marc was around - I felt safe with him – he was a tangible guardian angel.
Marc led the way rather slowly; we each walked precisely on the sliver of grass, which ran from beneath and alongside the gate. Calyna followed, Dusk behind her, then myself. Calyna stuck close to Sean. She’d even grabbed his shirt and held onto it.
Across the street further off in the distance the outside lights of Cues began to recede, covered by thick trees near a restaurant at the end of the row of shops past; my buzz had turned to a butterfly-belly sense of adventure; I almost ran into Calyna because she had stopped behind Sean, who halted behind Marc.
This was the place he decided to climb the gate. It was all guts now, no looking back. We waited for the cluster of cars to pass, till the only headlights (and backlights) were safely down the street. This was it!!!
“Let’s go,” Marc said. “Now or never…”
It wasn’t a tough gate to climb. There were two perfect horizontal bars to plant your feet, and another one on top to grab hold of. It was a partial cinch to the other side; even Calyna made it up and over without any trouble.
Deep down, although I kept it in, I was pretty drunk (all of us were except Calyna), so the eeriness of being in a cemetery at night wasn’t quite apparent.
A thin sheet of fog rolled in ahead of us. It was low to the wet, plush, foggy grass; we trudged along like bent-backed soldiers, in the same order single file as before.
Strange, lean lights cast larger headstones, each in an individual, bewitching glow, as if they had luminescence of their own – but these were further ahead. As we walked along it was pretty dark around us; we stepped childishly over grounded headstones, our only beacon was the half bitten moon, which shaded the cemetery in a pallid, silver light.
When we all got used to walking we started to loosen up and break apart from the single file line. It was at that moment a pair of headlights appeared in the distance.
“Shit!!!”
After Marc said this, sort of a warned announcement to his “troops,” none of spoke a word – instead, as if our skin were suddenly replaced with led, we all dropped to the ground.
My belly to the we grass I glanced up and saw the headlights approaching, and soon could hear the noise of the engine – but then, as I began to panic inside, the vehicle turned, slowly heading off in another direction.
“What was that?” Sean whispered
“A truck stupid ass?” Marc said in the same quiet tone.
“Who was it I meant?” Sean said.
“I don’t know,” Marc whispered.
“Maybe it was a ghost car,” said Sean.
“Don’t say that,” said Marc.
“I saw James Brolin behind the wheel…”
“Huh?”
“Nothing.”
The grass was soaking the front of my clothes. I think the sprinklers had just been on, because it was too early for dew.
“Well I’m glad you guys know what you’re doing,” said Calyna. “It’s good to know I’m along with professionals.”
By this time the headlights had receded completely. Sean got up first, brushing wet grass from his shirt.
“That was close,” Marc said, standing up as well.
He reached into his pants and grabbed out the bottle. It had not broken but by the relief on his face I think he feared it had been. He showed Sean, smiled and sighed. Marc opened it up and took a drink. His face contorted, only slightly, and he handed it to Sean, who then took a hit of the cringing Irish whiskey.
“What do we do now?” Calyna, the last to stand up from the grass, said warily.
“Walk on,” Marc answered plainly. “To feel the dead at our toes…”
On we marched. The sudden headlights had broken our cherries so we stood upright and weren’t all hunched and paranoid. We stepped over the flat gravestones like brats walking over brand new carpeting. As soon the headstones began to get fancier from the cheap ground stones. It was as if we’d just walked from the lower class suburbs into a richer neighborhood of the deceased. These “estate graves” rose up in a beautifully silver and black marble, and glistened sublimely: a neat gleam from the moonlight and the individual tomb lights combined.
Ahead there was what resembled a small building. It shone under pale yellow lights, and as we approach it took shape: a shrine of some sort, tall, around ten feet high, monolithic, made from an even more elegant silver-gray marble. Surrounding the monolith were three tall bushy trees, moon-soaked green grass grazed around the trees, and more fancy headstones like smaller, yet still great, homes around this pivotal “mansion” shrine.
This monolith was an island to itself - a showpiece – the focal point in this deceased country club. There was something else, in all this, I’d noticed: atop the more inexpensive headstones, the grounded ones we’d first trudged over after having climbed the gate, there were many flowers laid, but as the headstones got higher, fancier, and richer looking, these became less and less – some, like the tower we faced, had no flowers at all.
We stood in front of the monolith. I could not find any name on it. Marc felt it with an open hand pressed against the side.
“It’s cold,” he replied. “Cold like death.”
“Who’s buried here?” Sean said in wonderment.
“Someone important, I guess,” Marc replied.
“Hey, there’s a name,” Sean said.
“Whose?”
“Karen Carpenter… The singer of The Carpenters,” Sean said. “The one who starved to death. Died anorexic about ten years ago…”
I stood out on the grass, beneath the tallest tree, as Marc and Sean faced this monolith. I couldn’t see Caylana because were I stood was dark. She had wondered off someplace out of sight or something. I wasn’t sure.
Sean and Marc were drinking laboriously from the bottle as I gazed around the cemetery. I couldn’t see too much but I felt safe beneath the tree, cradled within the comfort of shade in the dense, cemetery darkness.
I suddenly got a feeling of solitude. True solitude. I smelt a thin mist of fog that flowed low to the grass. It smelt of salt, like salty mist from an ocean. There was a slight chill in the air. I heard soft bird chatter up in the tree, then a delicate movement of tiny branches cracking beneath…
I closed by eyes. I could faintly hear Marc’s voice, then Sean, then Marc… Till their voices, like dream-thoughts receding, crept further and further back in the cozy sofa of my brain, reclining into a deep thoughtlessness of my cradled waxen brain. It was perfect like that. Serene, content, and ghostly…
And I almost made some of the words that Marc and Sean were speaking… I sighed… I was almost in a perfect meditation when all of the sudden, like an abruptly rude change in a peaceful dream, my eyes opened up to two bright headlights growing wider and quickly approaching…
The next day, a Saturday, Dusk came over to the Cavern. It was in the hot afternoon and I was out by the pool, smoking, still feeling the previous night in our aching heads, and David, who’d slept over too, sat in the living room with Ed, staring at the dull TV. Dusk, Marc and Calyna had left the night before.
After being escorted out of the cemetery (with only a check of our ID’s and a warning by the security guard, who was, considering what he could’ve done, a pretty nice old guy) David drove us home. He had fallen asleep in the car, and Marc and Sean talked about it like it had been an unforgettable experience. But David didn’t seem to care. (He didn’t miss much anyway.)
That day Sean looked pretty hungover. He lit a cigarette and kicked it next to me, talking off his shoes, rolling up his jeans, and put his feet in the water. David sat back in a patio chair behind him.
“Oh, man,” sighed sighed exhaling. He had a spent, exhausted voice. “That was a night last night: Marc and I and that chick – Calyna, we went to his house, Marc’s pad… We all hung around drinking’ beers… She was hangin’ by Marc… Real close to him… I thought she liked him or something… I didn’t give a shit though… I mean - she wasn’t hanging on him, just with him…
“Then the phone rang and Marc got up… It was Sammi… Then Calyna came over and sat next to me… She’s all right, I guess… She isn’t ugly but… She’s decent enough I guess but… Anyway, she reached over, held my hand… I was surprised… A nice surprise at that…
“Anyway, Marc was in the kitchen… You know the deal – he was yelling at Sammi on the phone…
“Then pretty soon he’s off the phone and he sits down on that small couch… You know the one… We were, Calyna and I, on the big couch holding hands…
“Marc seemed kind of… I don’t know… confused or… empty or something… or pissed or something… I don’t know. And I didn’t really give a shit… But I wondered… I got a feeling the party was over; and I didn’t care… I was getting tired of him…
“But what happened next… Shit… You know, Marc’s a real trip… He really is a trippy guy…
“He shot her this quick glance… I couldn’t read it but… I can’t read that stuff usually, but… He gave her a look, and then he got up and walked outside… He didn’t slam the door but he closed it loud enough to where it grabbed our attention…
“Then she squeezed my hand… A quick ‘I’ll be back soon’ sort of squeeze… She got up and went outside, leaving the door open slightly… And now I’m sitting on the couch, feeling… strange…
“So in about a minute, two maybe, I get restless, you know… I got up and peak out the door… And I don’t see anything… Not yet… And so I went out, to smoke… And you know that tree in the center of the Manor…? The one on the grass surrounded by the little brick wall…? Well over there Marc was leaned on the tree… And it looked like he’d been crying or something… That kind of look like he hadn’t actually cried but that he’d BEEN crying… And she was talking to him… With her hand on his shoulder… Sort of consoling him…
“And I’m standing there, and I get this sick feeling in my gut… I mean, I’m thinking to myself: ‘What the fuck did he set me up with her for?’… And I’m full of all these stupid thoughts about this chick who looks like an ostrich; and what the fuck for…?
“Then I went back into the condo and watched TV… For about, I swear to God, maybe a half an hour or something… Maybe even longer… There’s not one single clock in that hellhole…
“So after a while she came back inside, sat next to me and kissed my cheek… then held my hand again… Marc was still outside I figured…
“I asked her… or… I forget what I said but at that time I had come to terms with whatever her and Marc had going… So I said something dumb like… ‘Do you like him?’… And she said ‘No, it’s nothing like that’… And so I asked – ‘Then what’s it like?’… And she said that he just needed to talk to her… And she kissed me… And we kissed and made out, you know…
“So then after a few minutes of that, I asked her what Marc’s problem had been… I asked her what had happened, or rather, what they talked about outside…
“And she told me that he, Marc, told her that he was afraid of us, me and her, hooking up, because he feared – get ready for this… Marc told Calyna that he feared losing me.”
David looked puzzled.
“He was afraid of losing her?” he asked, thinking he’d heard wrong.
Sean sighed through his nose, shaking his head, staring down at the swimming pool.
“No. He didn’t say that. He said he was afraid of losing me.”
David let out a: “Hmmm” under his breath, which, in its tone, seemed less aimed at Marc’s weirdness, and more relating to a possible yearning for more pizza with sugar on it.
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