Salter’s Luck

 

Salter woke up with Lola shouting at him that there was oil fucking paint on her Jil fucking Sander.  He couldn’t at first tell if he was having a heart attack or being caught in an earthquake or both, but Lola was so up in his face that she appeared to him to have one long ice-blue eye in the middle of her forehead, a monstrous organ of inhuman beauty, a lens through which he could not see the future but through which the future could plainly see him, despising the information it gathered. 

On the street ten minutes later he said “Shit!” catching his reflection in a shop window: his t-shirt was inside out.  Never dress in terror. No wonder those Jap girls had giggled at him. He’d dressed in a rush and run out of the house without checking. The ribbing of the seams visible on the inverted black tee shirt wasn’t so bad…it looked like a fashion statement… but the “wash in cold water” tag hanging off the back of his neck was embarrassing.  In that case he headed for the park, rather than a café, and wouldn’t bother looking for a new girlfriend until he had a chance to get home and change. Never approach a woman with anything less than utter confidence. Which is how he’d ended up with Lola.  

He sat alone under a two hundred year old tree for two hours, enjoying the indirect pleasures of the Southern California sunshine…the tepid clear-milk breeze, the leaf-cut kaleidoscope spangling the yellow grass at his feet under the tree. Fucking squirrels, too. Funny about squirrels: no one seemed to appreciate what a nightmare life would easily be if squirrels decided to go militant. Make mosquitoes look like a blessing. Make mosquitoes look like gifts from God.  If rats had half the talent and energy of squirrels… 

Later, when Lola was at work, placed like a white queen at her post at Chez Guevara, luminous under the track lighting, he crept home and started work on something new rather than bothering to change his clothes and bike over to Pacific Beach in hopes of finding a true and lasting Romantic Love.  The name of this new painting was “Oil Fucking Paint on Her Jil Fucking Sander” and he got bored with it after about four hours of pointless messy work on it, slopping the cadmium red around the canvas with a palette knife like it was lead-based tomato paste…why not just eat it all and kill himself? But would it kill him, or simply fuck him up? Like he needed more of same. Eyes bulging, mouth drooling and mute. Brain-damaged. Incontinent? But here’s the thing: a similarly afflicted woman could always find a fella willing to hump her at least once.  

It was too late to make it to the beach, too early to sleep and too soon to call Lola at work to see if she was still in hate with him. He grabbed the phone, nevertheless, with red paint glamourizing his hands and punched the number with a relatively paintless thumb. 

“Chez Guevara, can you please hold?” 

“Yes ma’am.” 

Brief pause of recognition and then the “hold” click.  He’d half-hoped to get Jem, who could always be counted on to flirt with him a bit before handing it over to Lola, thus proving his worth to Lola. Jem…he remembered that it was short for “Jemima”…what kind of parents named a girl that? He could never have a girlfriend named Jemima. Names were important to him…a bad name was worse than bad breath. He’d backed out of something once with a model named Santana…you couldn’t even abbreviate that hiply…what would he have called her around the house? Santa. 

He caught himself nodding to the black black jazz they treated him to while he waited for Lola to release him from the tasteful limbo of  “hold”. A CD burned from an authentic and scratchy old 78. He couldn’t help visualizing a synchronized chorus line of Al Jolsons in shoe polish, dwindling towards infinity, strumming banjos and grinning like skulls while being buggered by an equal infinity of Satchmos. Black black jazz for a white white restaurant. Friendly racism. Does any Ethnic Group valued chiefly for the quality of its suffering stand a chance? 

When Lola got back on the line, Salter was relieved to find that she was half-whispering conspiratorially in the phone to him, so he knew he probably wasn’t in danger of Fargo in bed that night. Fargo; Siberia; name your frigid wasteland. Relations were normalized and he so badly needed the existence-confirming sensation to be had between Lola’s legs, the cool oyster of her involuntary grip. 

“Get this,” she hissed, “rich fucker just dropped $42,000.00 on a dinner for five.” She pronounced “fucker” fokker. Otherwise her speech was thoroughly Americanized, which is to say ornamented with luridly nasal banalities. ”I don’t know why but the servers thought he’s going to stiff them so each one goes spits in his butternut squash soup.” She waited for Salter’s gasp, clucking her tongue. Then the punch line. “Eight thousand dollar tip.” 

She got home at one looking eight feet tall in her heels and goldish dress and her hair a platinum blade. He was watching television like a good boy when she clomped into the bedroom, waving hello but not speaking, as though speaking was a form of touching and she wasn’t in the mood, but he got a bobbing erection the instant he saw her.  

She unsheathed herself standing, her breasts and then hair lifting and falling as the dress went up and off and she clomped into the bathroom in her heels and nothing but and she brushed and flossed and dabbed her makeup off and proceeded to snore and smell of soap on her side of the bed within thirty minutes of walking in the front door, all with nary a word, nor nary a gesture to Salter to come and partake and partake and come. He wouldn’t even have minded the usual: missionary position and get it over with. No touching the tits, don’t mess up my hair and keep that finger away from my rectum. 

He was sitting there knees-up beside her, treated to a view of her tawny back and pale damp wing of hair, clutching the remote, gritting his teeth like a Russian serf on a block of ice, cursing his humiliating neediness. O wretched man that craveth a fuck! Tears began laminating his eyes. 

Robbie The Robot warped and blurred, swimming in it. Salter was ostensibly watching “Forbidden Planet” (Walter Pigeon, Patrick O’Neal, and Ann Francis) with the sound off and strained to make sense of the movie through the seawater filter of his grief…the lion-like monster,  visible only as raw energy, was howling like a banshee and trying to claw through the protective force field around the ship. A crew member…a hero with a lone blaster…was seized and ripped apart. Ann Francis with her buttery hair and the spanking sarcasm of her dotted pout startled a recognition in him for she was his genuine Sexual Ideal and correctly pegged the futility of his sex life to her unavailability.  He needed a 50’s-type nubile tomboy lacquered siren in his life. He really needed this. It was no joke. He was crying. 

So Salter had thought that the day had fixed itself but he’d been wrong. Lola was obviously still mad at him, or simply tired of it all and had retracted into her morally unassailable cocoon of sleep, the hard shell of I need my rest that a girlfriend who pays for everything by having the only job in the household claims as her terrible Right.  He snuffed the television and the reading lamp on his side of the futon and stood up out of bed.  

He suddenly saw himself running across the bedroom from an impossibly distant corner, axe hefted over his head, bringing the blade down with a scream of regret to cut his frustrating girlfriend in two, but the very cartoon of it horrified him and made him sorry and love her all that much more, exacerbating his desire, which frustrated him further, which re-ignited his anger, which again made him see himself running across the bedroom from an impossibly distant corner with an axe hefted over his head, bringing the blade down with a scream of regret…to cut himself in two. 

He staggered miserably into the living room with his unrequited hardon. He milked himself, kneeling, across the gleaming black pumps with arched backs like onyx cats stacked in a diptych of sadism and sexual snobbery under the coat hooks by the door. He squirted three long draughts of solder-colored semen into her two hundred dollar heels, gasping, steadying himself with a hand on the sleeve of a coat (that anomalous coat) which stood there like a priest with his back to Salter’s indiscretion. Not the first time he’d fucked her shoes. Afterwards, as he crouched there, postmodern shoe rapist, still burning with a richly satisfying orgasm, he thought of this exchange: 

Lola: “Honey, I hate to break it to you, but as a painter you have no talent whatsoever. Not that’s visible, I mean.” 

Salter (with a shrug): “So?”   

That had been six months ago…she’d dropped that A-bomb on him six months ago…what was left? What was next? What horrors to come? Everything (one thing he’d learned)…everything escalates. Hunger, porno, Vietnam. She’d be punching and kicking him next. Stabbing him in bed while he slept. Putting her weight on a pillow mashed over his face. Scissoring off his… 

In the kitchen, in a drawer, looking for those very scissors with which to cut open a bag of chips so as not to waken Queen Lola opening it, he happened across an old name tag of hers from innocent days extinct, from just three years ago, at the “Yacht Club”. That four-dollar-an-hour job she’d had when they first got there.   

He looked at the name on the name tag. Where had she evaporated to? That sweet girl with a heavy accent who had been grateful just to be there, in America, and work a shitty job with chubby Mexican teenagers for colleagues in order to support him. Where had she gone to? Salter held the tag up to the light. He wanted to kiss it. He wanted to die.  

L. Beedo.  

He ate the chips. Quietly. Fifteen minutes later he was dressed and out on Fifth Avenue, pushed along by a sultry breeze that the heads of the palm trees were applauding. The avenue was tawdry and worn in daylight…as sunfucked and urinous as any street in Tijuana (a four hour walk from his door)…but at night the same stretch was mild and crisp and luminous, burnished by the smart scuff of Yuppie footwear, ablaze with Tiki torches of dirty gold or neon glyphs of organ-pink and money-green, and scented by Gay cologne and charcoal braziers. He felt lightfooted and better-looking in the dark and he walked at an optimistic clip, looking for something to buy, or for something to happen to him, or a convenient combination of the two.  

He walked by the Tea Leaf and Rockit Records and the boarded-up and tramp-infested deco-era Bijou; then the Starbucks on the corner, the Rite Aid parking lot across the street. Along which he did a left towards Sixth Avenue up Robinson. Then a right towards the park. 

What really hit him as he sailed along was the sheer number of people…couples…who seemed to be happy. Was the world, or was it not, a place of either terror or boredom that changed only briefly, at the very end, for the very old, into a place of terrified boredom? But there they were, the dozens, the hundreds, holding hands and swinging their arms in that triumphalist goose-step of love, babbling giddy goo-goo to each other. Salter had to wonder how abnormal he was. Had it been him all of these years? Him and not them; her; It? His problem and not The World’s? 

Standing at the corner of Sixth Avenue and Upas, Salter near-swooned as his mind came that close to accepting the notion that the Misery he once considered merely typical of Life (or systemic) was in fact just his own and his own fucking fault, not even necessary, just the result of faulty thinking and consequently bad choices that could be blamed on nobody else. But he was saved from this devastating epiphany by a pink convertible that was honking like a drunken straggler from an Italian wedding caravan at the traffic light across from him.  

Salter was wary. Me? he pantomimed and the car honked a delirious yes.

The pink convertible was some kind of vintage car…Salter didn’t know from vintage cars… with white tires and a lot of chrome and what sounded like the salvaged motor from a B-52 roaring under the hood. The car looked like a birthday cake. Piloted by a white-haired gent in a Commodore’s cap (Salter didn’t know from Commodore’s Caps but that’s how he would have described it to the police) and beside the gent in the convertible was a white-gloved woman in matching white shoulder-length hair, presumably the gent’s better half or lady-friend or however the old put it these days. 

“I said,” said the duffer when Salter had scurried out into the street to lean over the convertible to hear him, “Would you like a ride young man?”

The duffer gunned the motor for emphasis. Or to pressure him. Salter was 30, and the old gent was 66, so, arithmetically speaking, the offer of a ride in the gent’s car was no different than if their respective ages had been 5 and 41.  

An ancient alarm in Salter’s skull (finally activated; ringing in a thick skin of dust) went off and just as quickly sputtered quiet and Salter got in the car, jumping (and banging his elbow in the process) in back as the light changed. It was the naïve belief that a man with a woman is never as dangerous as a man alone that contributed to Salter’s decision.   

The old guy twisted sideways to face Salter as he drove, saying, “This is the only city in the world that it makes sense to own a convertible in. Others are too damned dangerous or rainy. Are you from the area?”

He was talking like a man in a gale. He was a white-haired ringer for the actor Don Ameche. Salter was, in fact, tempted to ask the old guy if he was related (or even Ameche himself) but instead merely limited himself to responding directly to Don’s query.

They drove as far as Robinson and did a swaggering u-turn so wide that they nearly took the door handle off a parked car on the other side of the four lane road and headed back the way Salter had been walking when they picked him up.  With his eyes on the road again, Don Ameche smiled in the rearview mirror.

“We’re practically neighbors then. We do this every Friday night…” he inserted a pause to indicate his companion, whose hair bestirred itself indolently like a tattered white flag on a berthed yacht…whose teeth were aimed at him in the simplest smile… “We see something new every time.”

He added, “For example, I’ll bet you didn’t know that there’s a banana tree in the yard of that bungalow on the corner of Robinson and Third Avenue.” 

“No,” said Salter, surprised, “I didn’t.” 

“Delicious. Stolen fruit tastes better in an open convertible at night, you know. And you probably weren’t aware of the fact that there’s a full-sized statue of the comedian Jonathan Winters in the backyard of a place up there on Point Loma. On a six foot plinth. A prop from the movie ‘The Loved One.’ We saw that when it first came out, at the old Bijou.” He thought a moment, searching his brain. “Evelyn Waugh.” 

“Really?” Salter had never heard of either the movie or the comedian or Evelyn Waugh. He wasn’t even sure about the word ‘plinth.’  

“Awful lot of movie people down here,” concluded Salter’s genial host. They were idling at a red light at the corner ofLaurel and Sixth. To the left was Balboa Park and its orderly arrangement of sky-scraping palms attended by a vassalage of shorter pines lurking in low darkness. The old woman was touching up her lipstick and her drawstringed mouth was alternately pouting and grinning at Salter in the rearview and Salter was thinking: what have we here? A crucial detail was all wrong, of course: the combined age of the two was a good deal more than one hundred; but otherwise things seemed to be shaping up into one of Salter’s hoariest fantasies come true.

Rich couple picks up a young stud. They all drive to a deserted stretch of the beach. A towel is laid out on the sand. The millionaire with his arm around the young stud’s shoulder: I love my wife but I’m impotent…please…I don’t know how to ask this, but could you…would you? She hasn’t had one in years. ..

“Vincent Price had a house over there, back a-ways, in Mission hills, overlooking the Airport. Lindberg Field. I always had a problem calling it ‘Lindberg Field,’ you know. I guess I’m showing my age, but I can never hear the name ‘Lindberg’ without remembering one of those awful ‘Lindberg Baby’ jokes.” 

He assumed a perfect deadpan and turned with his right arm along the top of the seat and looked at Salter and cleared his throat theatrically and said, “Say, what do you call a…a, uh…oh, wait a minute. That’s not how it goes! Dammit! I’m useless! I just thought of one the other day…” 

A classic specimen of one of those old-time couples, thought Salter: the man doing all the talking; the woman just smiling…beaming, really…mostly at the man himself, oblivious to outsiders, while the man, her ‘hero,’ talks. Salter tried to remember. There was another example. It rang a bell. But he couldn’t…who? Who. It would drive him crazy if he couldn’t remember where he’d seen it before. That look on her face.

And then: yes : those Reagans. Salter tried his hand at small talk.   

“So, you two are married, then?” 

Don was still idling at the intersection of Sixth and Laurel, despite the long-ago fact of the light going green. Was he still trying to remember a Lindberg Baby joke? The traffic light blinked and its eye turned red. The old guy was staring at something to the left, away from his wife, in the park maybe, so intently just then that Salter guessed that he hadn’t even heard the question, but as Salter cleared his throat and undertook to repeat himself verbatim, the old guy replied, overlapping him, with a distant voice, “For a very long time.”   

For a very long time.  

Which sounded so nice. It sounded so nice that it made Salter regret every single fact of his life as it was, and made him hunger for a change, it made him long for a second chance, and the first thing he resolved to throw out before relocating into the shiny new home of the Duplex of his re-organized Soul was ‘Art,’ that dusty thing. That furry brown dust-caked 19^th century attic heirloom called ‘Art.’ Fuck it! Toss it! Filthy old bristly bearded hoary repulsive thing! Musty thing! What had it done but ruin his life? ‘Art!’ May it nevermore be freed from the restraining cage of inverted commas!

Where was Salter’s convertible? Where was Salter’s love-dumb, worshipful wife? Where was all his stuff, his security, his piece-of-fucking-mind? Somewhere back there, at some juncture so remote that he couldn’t even remember what sickly-sweet pop song was a hit on the radio the day that he did it, he had turned Left when so many others…so many others!…had kept on going. Kept on going on that long straight road. The long straight road of happiness. So easily achieved! You just remain on that long straight road. That’s all! No turning right; no turning left…just: straight. From now on. Tomorrow, in fact, as a first step…Salter nodded to himself as he blessed the back of the head of the Happy Duffer in his Commodore’s Cap. Tomorrow. First thing. He was going to buy a tie. 

The light changed green again and the car moved forward, as effortlessly as a breath, or a liquid downhill, advertising wealth, and a jet bellied directly overhead on its way to Lindberg Field and Salter hollered, “It must be great to grow old with someone you love!” and he was nearly choked with emotion as he hollered it, touched as he was by the serene beauty of human completion seemingly radiated by the white-haired couple, the living opposites of Salter’s world and Salter’s monotonously unspectacular luck, but Salter vowed to change all that, inspired by this couple. First thing tomorrow. A tie; a blazer…a navy-blue blazer…he repeated himself at a lower volume. “It must be great…” 

“Rubbish,” laughed the old coot, over his shoulder. “We can barely stand the sight of each other.” 

Salter laughed back at him. Weren’t old guys always funny in the same way? Never quite slap-your-knee funny (to anyone under fifty), but just as reliably never unfunny, either. Wry. Are young people ever ‘wry’? That’s one thing age could give you: a sense of…

“I suppose you think I’m joking,” he said and then grunted, like a man on the phone on the toilet, doing something complicated with the gear shift and clutch or whatever as the car took on the hill that rose up like a striped black whale before them, “But I’m not, I promise. ‘Hate’ is too strong a word, of course.  But…” 

“But, no. Love? No. I can see how you’d get that impression. Nice old couple, cruising around in a convertible on a Friday night, right? Not a care in the world! All smiles…” He winked in the mirror. Then:  “But that’s just nerve damage.  See? Look: that’s a permanent grin on her face, like a Jack-O-Lantern. Pure luck it didn’t freeze into a scowl, really…I’ll give The Good Lord credit for that much.” His eyes touched lightly on Salter’s in the rearview again. How far can I go? they seemed to be saying. How far…

“She’s ten years older than I am, but you’d never know it. Got a collection of face lifts older than our grown children. I even started naming them! The last one I called Griselda. That’s the nerve damage right there, if you ask me. You can only lift a human face so many times …something’s gotta give.” Then he released a sigh so long that Salter could smell his breath: bananas. “I could have had two convertibles for the money I’ve spent on making a seventy-five year old woman look seventy!”  

Salter had never realized, before now, how genteel…how delicate…he really was. He was unbearably embarrassed. His face was as red as a blood-blister; as numb as heel-rubber; he didn’t know what to say; it wasn’t as simple as being trapped with a bore, or in a conversation gone shamefully wrong, at a cocktail party; he was in a moving car. Not that the car was moving so fast… a gifted jogger could have caught up with it.  Should Salter politely inquire about getting out at the next light? Perhaps old Don was deranged; without a doubt rude; but was he dangerous. Did he pose a threat. 

They were headed for the Highway. Salter could see it clearly with his Tales From The Crypt imagination: a Luger in the glove compartment. Which was stuffed in beside a bloody roadmap which was folded around a sandy, black-edged, ear-ringed ear. Or: thirty two wallets. Or: Mexican scalps on a belt. A fetus in a jar? Don Ameche was shaking his head. Then he exploded with a guffaw that sounded like an Apache War Whoop that made Salter jump in his bones. 

“You must think I’m awful! But don’t worry, I forgot to mention, the poor thing can’t hear a word. Deaf as an old boot!” He leaned on the horn and raised his voice over it and shouted, “AREN’T YOU, NAT? AREN’T YOU?” Then shrugged. “Can’t read lips, either. Couldn’t be bothered. I keep this happy look on my face,” he nodded, grinning, “And Old Yeller  just thinks I’m saying nice things about her. Haven’t done the Hokey-Pokey in a Coon’s age. Mostly I abhor the smell of talcum powder. Turns me off.”  

After a long pause he added, with extra significance, “I’m dying for a little company,” and he waited a calculated interval before slipping a shy glance into the rearview mirror. But Salter was already gone, tumbling on the blacktop, over and over. Laughing like a loon.

He limped back home.