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Excerpts

The Vomitorium

Ralph ran a hand up and over his head, flattening his hair before some freak combination of wind and static electricity blew it straight up and into a real-life fright wig.

We were standing at the far edge of the blacktop at Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy Grade School, as far away from the recess monitor as we could get. It was 1978, the year we started eighth grade, though Ralph would have been in high school already if he hadn't failed both the third and fifth grades. He was nearly a foot taller than the rest of us, and every few weeks new sprigs of whiskers popped up along his cheeks and chin, scaring the girls and prompting the principal, Mr. Santoro, to drop into our homeroom unexpectedly and deliver speeches about personal hygiene.

"Boys," Mr. Santoro would say. "Some of you are starting to look like hoodlums." Though he addressed his insult to all the boys, everyone knew he meant Ralph.

Today Ralph pulled a fat Sears catalog out of a grocery sack, shook it at me, and said, "Get a load of this." The catalog was fatter than it should have been, as if someone had dropped it into a swamp and left it there to rot.

"I don't think they sell that stuff anymore," I said. "That's a 1974 catalog, Ralph. That was four years ago."

"Quiet," Ralph said. He licked two fingers, smearing photos and words each time he touched a page to turn it. "I'll show you Patty O'Dell."

"You found it?" I said. "That's it?"

Ralph nodded.

Rumor was that Patty O'Dell had modeled panties for Sears when she was seven or eight, and for the past two years Ralph had diligently pursued the rumor. If there existed somewhere on this planet a photo of Patty O'Dell in nothing but her panties, Ralph was going to find it.

"Here she is, Hank," Ralph said. Reluctantly, he surrendered the mildewed catalog. "Careful with it."

Ralph stood beside me, arms crossed, guarding his treasure. His hair still stood on end, as if he had stuck the very fingers he had licked into a live socket. I looked down at the photo, then peeked up at Ralph, but he just nodded for me to keep my eyes on the catalog.

I had no idea why Ralph and I were friends. I was a B+ student, a model citizen. Ralph already had a criminal record, a string of shoplifting charges all along Chicago's southwest side. He kept mug shots of himself in his wallet. The first time I met Ralph, he had walked up to me and asked if he could bum a smoke. That was four years ago. I was nine. I didn't smoke, but I didn't tell Ralph that. I said, "Sorry. Smoked the last one at recess."

The photo in the catalog was, in fact, of a girl wearing only panties. She was holding each of her shoulders so that her arms crisscrossed over her chest, and though I was starting to feel the first tremors of a boner, the girl in the photo was not Patty O'Dell. Not even close. After two years of fruitless searching, Ralph was starting to get desperate.

"That's not her," I said.

"Of course it's her," he said.

"You're crazy," I said.

"Give it to me." Ralph snatched the catalog out of my hands.

"Ralph. Get real. All you need to do is look at Patty, then look at the girl in the photo. They look nothing alike."

Ralph and I scanned the blacktop, searching for Patty O'Dell. It was Halloween, and I couldn't help myself: I looked instead for girls dressed like cats. All year I would dream about the girls who came to school as cats...Mary Polaski zipped up inside of a one-piece cat costume, purring, meowing, licking her paws while her stiff, curled tail vibrated behind her with each step she took. Or Gina Morales, actually down on all fours, crawling along the scuffed tile floor of our classroom: up one aisle, down the next, brushing against our legs, and letting us pet her. The very thought of it now gave my heart pause. It stole my breath. But only the younger kids dressed up anymore, and all I could find on the blacktop were Darth Vaders and Chewbaccas, C-3POs and R2-D2s, the occasional Snoopy.

The seventh- and eighth-graders were already tired of Halloween, tired of shenanigans, slouching and yawning, waiting for the day to come to an end. Among us, only Wes Papadakis wore a costume, a full-head rubber Creature from the Black Lagoon mask suctioned to his face. Next to him was Pete Elmazi, who wore his dad's Vietnam army jacket every day to school, no matter the season, and whose older brother was locked up in a juvenile home for delinquents because he'd beaten another kid to death with a baseball bat. There was Fred Lesniewski, who stood alone, an outcast for winning the science fair eight years in a row, since everyone knew his father worked at Argonne National Laboratory -- where the white deer of genetic experiments loped behind a hurricane-wire fence, and where tomatoes grew to be the size of pumpkins -- and that it was Fred's father (and not Fred) who was responsible for such award-winning projects as "How to Split an Atom in Your Own Kitchen" and "The Zero-Gravity Chamber: Step Inside!"

There were all of these losers, plus a few hundred more, but no Patty. Then, as a sea of people parted, Ralph spotted her and pointed, and at the far end of an ever widening path I saw her: Patty O'Dell. Ralph and I stared speechless, conjuring up the Patty of panty ads, a nearly naked Patty O'Dell letting a stranger snap photos of her while she stood under the hot, blinding lights in her bare feet. It was a thought so unfathomable, I might as well have been trying to grasp a mental picture of infinity, as complex and mysterious as the idea of something never coming to an end.

"You're right," Ralph said, shaking his head. "It's not her." He tossed the catalog off to the side of the blacktop, as if it were a fish too small to keep. He shook his head sadly and said, "Damn, Hank. I thought we had her."

Ralph had told me to meet him outside my house at eight, that his older cousin Norm was going to pick us up and take us to a party. Norm had just started dating Patty O'Dell's older sister, Jennifer, and with Norm's help, Ralph and I hoped to get to the bottom of the panty ads, maybe even score a few mint-condition catalogs from Jennifer, if at all possible.

"You got a costume?" Ralph asked.

"Of course I do," I said. "I've got all sorts of costumes. Hundreds!"

I had lied to Ralph; I didn't own any costumes. In fact, I'd had no plans of dressing up this year. But now I was trapped into scrounging up whatever I could, piecing together a costume from scratch.

My sister, Kelly -- though disgusted by my choice and unable to conceal her revulsion -- expertly applied the makeup.

"Of all the costumes," she said.

"What's wrong with Gene Simmons? What's wrong with KISS?" I asked.

"One day," she said, smearing grease paint from my eye all the way up to my ear and back. "One day you'll look back on this moment, and you'll consider shooting yourself."

"Okay," I said. "Whatever."

"Just let me know when you reach that point," Kelly said, "and I'll supply the gun."

I found hidden at the back of my parents' closet a stiff black wig hugging a Styrofoam ball. I sneaked a dinner roll out to the garage, spray-painted it black, then pinned it to the top of the wig, hoping it would look like a bun of hair. My parents didn't own any leather, but I found a black Naugahyde jacket instead, along with a pair of black polyester slacks I wore to church. For the final touch, my sister gave me her clogs. She was two years older than me, and her feet were exactly my size.

In the living room, in the shifting light of the color TV, my parents stared at me with profound sadness, as if all their efforts on my behalf had proven futile. My mother looked for a moment as though she might speak, then she turned away, back to the final minutes of M*A*S*H.

Outside, I met Ralph. As far as I could tell, his only costume was a cape. A long black cape. One look at Ralph, and I suddenly felt the weight of what I'd done to myself. Ralph said, "What're you supposed to be? A transvestite?"

"I'm Gene Simmons," I said. "From KISS."

"Jesus," Ralph said. He reached up and touched the dinner roll on top of my head. "What's that?"

"It's a bun," I said.

"I can see that," Ralph said. "But why would you put a hamburger bun on top of your head? And why would you paint it black?"

"It's not that kind of bun," I said.

"Oh."

"At least I'm wearing a costume," I said. "Look at you. Where's your costume? All you've got on is a cape."

Ralph smiled and pulled his left hand from his cape. Butter knives were attached to each of his fingers, including his thumb.

"Holy smoke," I said. It was the most impressive thing I'd ever seen.

"I'm an Etruscan," he said, pronouncing it carefully while rattling his knives in front of my face.

"A what?"

"An Etruscan," Ralph said. "I've been reading a lot of history lately."

"History?" I said. This was news to me. Ralph hated school.

"Yeah," he said. "Stuff about the Romans."

"Romans," I said. I didn't tell Ralph, but I knew a little something about the Romans myself. I wrote my very first research paper in the sixth grade on them, though all I remembered was bits and pieces: the Gallic War, the Ides of March, some creep named Brutus stabbing Caesar to death. The idea of Ralph picking up a book and actually reading it was so preposterous, I decided to lob a few slow ones out to him and test what little he knew against what little I knew.

"So," I said. "What do you think about Caesar?"

"A great man," he said. "He brought a lot of people together."

"Oh really. How'd he do that?"

"Violence," Ralph said. I expected him to smile, but he didn't. His eyes, I noticed, were closer together than I had realized, and his eyebrows were connected by a swatch of fuzz. Ralph glared at me, as if he were thinking about punching me to illustrate what he'd just said. But the thought must have passed, and he said, "Etruscans were the original gladiators. Crazy but smart. Geniuses, actually. Very artistic."

"How'd you get the knives to stick to your fingers?"

"Krazy Glue," Ralph said.

I nodded appreciatively. I had always feared Krazy Glue, scared I'd accidentally glue myself to my mother or father, or to a lamppost. I'd seen such things on the news, men and women rushed to the hospital, their fingers permanently connected to their foreheads.

"What if they don't come off?" I asked.

Ralph said, "I thought of that. That's why I glued them to my fingernails. My fingernails will grow out, see. And then I can clip them."

"You're a genius," I said.

"I'm an Etruscan," he said. "Very brilliant, but violent."

Ralph's cousin Norm eventually pulled up in a Chevy Impala and motioned with his head for us to get in. He was twenty-five years old and ghoulishly thin, but the veins in his arms were thick and bulging to the point where you'd think they were going to explode right there. A spooky guy with spooky veiny arms, but he worked at the Tootsie Roll factory on Cicero Avenue along with Ralph's other cousin, Kenny, and he gave me and Ralph bags of Tootsie Pops each month, which made up in part for the spookiness.

I took the backseat; Ralph rode shotgun. Norm said nothing about our costumes. I reached up and made sure the bun on top of my wig was still there. Norm gunned the engine, then floored it. Blurry strings of ghosts, clowns, and pirates appeared and disappeared along the sidewalk. Pumpkins beamed at us from porch stoops.

A mile or two later, Ralph said, "Where we going, Norm?"

"I've got some business to take care of first."

"What kind of business?"

"I've got a trunkful of goods I need to unload."

Ralph cocked his head. If he were a dog, his ears would have stiffened. He loved the prospect of anything criminal. "Goods," Ralph repeated. "Are they stolen?"

"What do you think?" Norm said.

Ralph turned around, smiled at me, then looked at Norm again. "What kind of goods?" he asked.

Norm lifted his veiny arm and pointed at Ralph. "None of your business," he said. "The less you know, the better."

Ralph nodded. Norm was the only person who could talk to Ralph like that and get away with it. A few minutes later, Norm pulled into a White Hen Pantry parking lot. "I need some smokes," he said, and left us alone with the engine running.

Ralph turned around in his seat. "So what do you think's in the trunk?"

"I don't know," I said.

"Drugs," Ralph said. "That's my guess. Stolen drugs." He turned back to the White Hen to watch his cousin. He rested his hand with the knives on the dashboard and began drumming them quickly. "Maybe guns," he said. "A trunkload of semiautomatic machine guns."

Norm returned to the car, sucking on a cigarette so hard that the tip turned bright orange and crackled. He filled the entire car with smoke and said, "I ran into a little trouble two nights ago. Serious trouble. I'll admit, I fucked up. But hey, everyone fucks up every now and then, right? Huh? Am I right?"

"Right," Ralph said.

"Right on," I said. I lifted my fist in the air, a symbol of brotherhood, but nobody paid any attention.

"I had to get on the ball," Norm said. "Think fast. Figure out a way to come up with some money, pronto."

"What happened?" Ralph asked.

Norm looked at Ralph, then down at Ralph's fingers with the attached butter knives, as if he hadn't noticed them until this very second. He turned to me, squinting, raising his cigarette to his mouth for another deep puff. "Just what the hell are you guys supposed to be, anyway?"

Ralph said, "I'm an Etruscan."

"And I'm Gene Simmons," I said. "From KISS."

"The Etruscans," Norm said. "I never heard of those guys. They must be new. But KISS -- " He snorted. "That's sissy shit. You should've gone as Robert Plant. Or Jimmy Page. Or somebody from Blue Öyster Cult. Now, that I'd have respected."

Then Norm put the car in drive and peeled out.

The longer we sat in the car, the more I thought of Patty O'Dell wearing nothing but panties, and the more I thought of Patty O'Dell, the more I had to cross and uncross my legs.

Norm wheeled quickly into the parking lot of a ratty complex called Royal Chateau Apartments and said, "Give me a few minutes, guys. If the deal goes through, we'll party. If not, I'm screwed. Big time." He opened the door and got out. He slammed the door so hard, my ears popped.

Ralph turned around and said, "How's it going back there?"

I gave him the thumbs-up.

Ralph said, "Let's take a look and see what he's got in the trunk."

"I don't think that's a good idea," I said.

"C'mon," Ralph said. "Pretend you're Gene Simmons. What would he do in a situation like this?"

I leaned my head back and stuck my tongue all the way out, but the bun on top of my wig flopped over, cutting short my impression. A pin, apparently, had fallen out.

"I got the Krazy Glue with me," Ralph said. "You want me to glue it down?"

"I'm fine," I said.

Ralph reached over, turned off the car, and jerked the keys from the ignition.

"Hey," I said. "What're you doing?" But Ralph was already outside, leaving me with no choice. I got out, too.

By the time I reached the trunk, Ralph had already inserted the key in the lock. "Ready?" he asked. He turned the key, and the trunk hissed open. Slowly, he lifted the trunk's lid, as if it were the lid of a treasure chest and we were seeing whether the mutiny had been worth the trouble.

"Holy crap!" Ralph said. "Would you look at that?"

My heart paused briefly before kicking back in and pounding harder than ever. I'd never seen anything like it. The entire trunk was packed full of bite-size Tootsie Rolls. There must have been a few thousand. I dipped my hand inside and ran my fingers through them. Ralph scraped his knives gently across the heap as if it were a giant cat wanting to be scratched.

"Norm," Ralph said, frowning and nodding at the same time, clearly impressed with his cousin. "He's a real thinking man's man. He knows when to steal and when not to. Don't you see? This is perfect. I mean, when's the only time people start thinking bulk Tootsie Rolls? Halloween, man."

"Halloween's almost over," I said.

Ralph pointed his forefinger/butter knife at me and said, "That's the point exactly. People are running out of candy. They're getting desperate. Here's where Norm comes in. Bingo!"

"We better shut the trunk," I said.

"Not yet," Ralph said. "I'm hungry. Give me a hand. Start stuffing some of these babies in my pockets."

Ralph and I scooped up handfuls of Tootsie Rolls and dumped them into Ralph's cape pocket. Then Ralph shoved as many as he could into his jeans pockets. Twice, he accidentally poked my head with a butter knife.

"Watch it," I said. "You're gonna put my eye out."

"Count yourself lucky," Ralph said. "An Etruscan would've chopped off your head or thrown you to a lion by now."

We shut the trunk and waited for Norm. Using only his teeth and one hand, Ralph unrolled Tootsie Roll after Tootsie Roll and crammed them into his mouth until his cheeks bulged and chocolate juice dribbled down his chin. He started talking, but his mouth was so full I couldn't understand a word he was saying.

"Uh-huh," I said. "Oh yeah? Really? No kidding, Ralph," I said.

When he finally swallowed the boulder of chocolate, he said, "What's your problem? You're not making any sense."

Out of the corner of my eye I spotted Norm. I nudged Ralph. Norm was walking toward us along with a fat guy decked out in a red, white, and blue sweatsuit. The man's hair was sticking up on one side but flat on the other, as if Norm had woken him.

When Norm saw us, he shot us a look and said, "Get off the trunk, you punks." To the man, he said, "All I need are the keys..."

"I got 'em," Ralph said. "Here." He tossed them to Norm; Norm glared at Ralph, a look that said, We'll talk about this later.

"Didn't want to waste gas," Ralph said. "Remember when they had that shortage?"

The fat guy said, "I ain't got all day. Let's take a look."

Norm nodded, popped the trunk.

Where there had once been a mound of Tootsie Rolls was now an obvious trench. I didn't realize we'd taken that many. I looked at Ralph, but he just pulled another Tootsie Roll from his cape pocket and unrolled it with his teeth and weapon-free hand.

The fat guy said, "These are the small ones. I thought you were talking about the long ones."

"They're the same thing," Norm said. "One's just smaller than the other."

The guy shook his head. "Look, Slick. To make a profit, I got to sell a hundred of these for every twenty of the big ones. You see what I'm saying? Kids want the ones they can stick in their mouths like a big cigar."

"That's true," Ralph whispered to me.

"Okay," Norm said. "All right. You want to haggle? Fine. I respect that."

But the guy was already walking away, back to his Royal Chateau, saying, "No can do, Slick. No business tonight."

After the man rounded the corner, I looked up at Norm, afraid he was going to yell at us, but he was holding two fistfuls of his own hair and yanking on it. "I'm fucked," he said. "Do you hear me? I...am...fucked."

Ralph made a move to offer Norm a few Tootsie Rolls, but when I nudged him again, he thought better of it, slipping the stolen goods back into his own pocket, keeping them out of Norm's sight.

For an hour we sat in Norm's car and said nothing while Norm drove. Ralph started running his butter knives through his hair, giving himself a scalp massage. "Hey, Norm," Ralph finally said. "What do you know about Patty O'Dell posing naked for a Sears catalog?"

Norm said, "Would you mind shutting up a minute and letting me think?"

"Sure," Ralph said. He turned back to me and said, "Hey, Hank. Quit talking. Let the man think."

"What am I doing?" I asked.

"Both of you," Norm said. "Shut the hell up."

Norm drove us in circles, a loop that kept returning us to Seventy-ninth and Harlem, a corner Ralph and I knew well because it was the home of the Haunted Trails Miniature Golf Range (where Ralph and I enjoyed chipping golf balls over the fence and into heavy traffic). Behind Haunted Trails was the Sheridan Drive-in, where we could sneak through a chopped-out part of the fence and watch women take off their clothes on a screen the size of a battleship.

I liked any movie with martial arts, and Ralph liked disaster movies, but we both preferred movies about women in prison. We never heard any of the dialogue -- we were always too far from the rows of cast-iron speakers -- so Ralph would pass the night speculating about what was going on: "See that chick?" Ralph would say. "She probably killed her old man. That's why the warden pulled her pants down."

The seventh time Norm made the loop, I gave up any hope of ever getting to a party. When Norm finally deviated from the endless loop, he jerked a quick right into Guidish Park mobile homes. He stopped the car, killed the lights, and turned back to me.

"I need a favor," he said.

It was so dark, I couldn't even see his face. "What?" I said.

"I want you to take something to number forty-seven -- it's about a half-block up there -- and I want you to give it to whoever answers the door and tell them I'll get the rest of the money tomorrow. Okay?"

I didn't want to do it -- my bowels felt on the verge of collapsing -- but I was awful at standing up for myself, unable to tell someone older than me no, if only because my parents had trained me too well. I was dutiful to the end. So I told Norm okay, and when I stepped out of the car, he rolled his window down and handed over a cardboard cylinder. It was about a foot long. After walking away, I shook it but couldn't hear anything inside. Only when I passed under a streetlamp did I see what I was holding: a giant Tootsie Roll bank. It had a removable tin cap with a slit for depositing coins. I shook it again but couldn't hear any change.

At number 47, I knocked lightly on the door, two taps with a single knuckle. I was about to give up when the door creaked open and a man poked his head outside. He narrowed his eyes and inspected my costume. Without looking away, he reached off to the side and asked, "You like Butterfingers or Milk Duds?"

"Milk Duds," I said. "But actually, I've got something for you. It's from Norm."

Before I could smile and surrender the giant Tootsie Roll, I was yanked inside the trailer by the scruff of my Naugahyde jacket. He shut the door behind us and said, "Who are you?"

"His cousin," I lied.

"Uh-huh," he said, nodding. "So you're the famous Ralph I've heard so much about."

"I guess so," I said.

"My name's Bob. Can you remember to tell that to Norm? Bob."

"Sure," I said.

"I'm Jennifer's brother," Bob said.

"Jennifer O'Dell?" I asked.

"That's right."

"So you must be Patty's brother, too." I glanced quickly around the room for catalogs. Bob kept his eyes on me, then squeezed the giant Tootsie Roll as if it were my neck, until the lid popped off. He emptied it onto a card table. The best I could tell, there were three tens and a twenty, along with a note folded into a tight triangle, the kind we used in homeroom as footballs.

"Maybe I should go," I said.

Bob put his hand out as if he were a traffic cop and said, "Not yet. Follow me." We walked down a short and narrow hallway to a door at the far end of the trailer. When Bob opened the door, he motioned for me to join him inside the room.

It was dark, almost too dark to see, the only light coming from the room behind us. Two women were resting in bed, and at first I wanted to laugh, because one of the women was wearing Wes Papadakis's Creature from the Black Lagoon mask, and the thought of a grown woman lying in bed in the dark wearing a stupid rubber mask struck just the right chord in me tonight. Bob was trying to scare me, his very own Halloween prank, but I wasn't falling for it. I started snickering when Bob flipped on the light and I saw her face. I wanted to look away, but I couldn't. It kept drawing me in, like a pinwheel or a pendulum: eyes so puffy she could barely see out...lips cracked open and swollen...the zigzag of stitches along her nostril.

The other woman sitting on the bed was actually still a girl, and when I realized who it was, that it was Patty O'Dell, I quit breathing. She was wearing a long white T-shirt that she kept pulling over her knees, trying to hide herself from me. I knew it was the wrong time to think about it, I knew it shouldn't even have crossed my mind, but I wanted to believe that she was naked underneath that T-shirt. I tried imagining it, too: Patty lifting the shirt up and over her head, taking it off, until she was completely naked on the bed. But each time I got to the naked part, I would glance over at her sister -- I couldn't help it -- and the nude Patty in my head would dissolve into something dark and grainy.

When I finally gave up, I raised my hand and said, "Hi, Patty," but Patty turned away from me and stared at the wall.

"How much did he bring?" Jennifer asked.

Bob huffed. "Fifty bucks."

Jennifer looked down at her hands.

"There's a note, too," Bob said. He unfolded the triangle and said, "Oh, this is classic. You'll love this. He spelled your name wrong. He doesn't even know how to spell your name. Hey. Big surprise. The man's illiterate." Bob laughed and shook his head. "Says here he'll try to get you the rest of the money tomorrow."

"Figures," she said.

Bob crumpled the note and said, "So what should we tell Gene Simmons? We can't keep an important man, a man of his stature, tied up all night."

"Tell Norm it's too late. He had his chance. That was the agreement. A thousand dollars or I'd call the police and file a complaint."

Bob looked at me. "You got that?"

I nodded.

"Good," Bob said. "Tell him to expect the police at his door in, oh, let's say an hour, two at the most. Maybe that'll teach the son of a bitch not to hit a woman."

My clogs clopped hollowly against the asphalt all the way back to the car. The night was officially ruined. I might not have been able to hold infinity in my mind, but I sure as hell knew the end of something when I saw it.

My stomach cramped up as if it had been punctured, as if my body were somehow poisoning itself. I was angry at Norm, certainly, angry at Norm for beating up Jennifer, angry at Norm for driving us around and acting like it was nothing, a mistake, a mistake anyone could make...but I was angrier at Norm for how Patty had looked at me then looked away, angry because I was close to something, I wasn't sure what, but each time I got within reach, I looked over at Jennifer, I saw her face, and it all disappeared. Norm had ruined it for me, whatever it was. For that I wanted to hurt Norm myself, but the closer I got to him, the more unlikely that seemed. I was thirteen. Norm was twenty-five. What could I possibly do?

Near the Impala, I heard someone gagging, trying to catch his breath. I dashed around the car and found Ralph bent over a pool of vomit next to a tire. Ralph's door was open, and the dome light inside the car lit up half of his face. Norm was slumped down, his hand drooped over the steering wheel, a cigarette smoldering between two fingers. The radio was on low. Ralph's fingers clanked together, and I thought of Brutus, his knife plunging into Caesar again and again.

"What did he do to you?" I whispered to Ralph. "Did he punch you in the stomach?"

"Who?" Ralph asked, still bent over, not looking at me.

"Norm," I said.

Ralph peeked up, fangs of vomit dripping from his chin. "Why would Norm punch me in the stomach?"

"You're throwing up," I said.

"I know. I ate too many Tootsie Rolls," Ralph said. "Besides, it's a Roman ritual. Eat till you puke. I wanted to see if I could do it. You should congratulate me."

After Ralph cleaned himself off with handfuls of loose dirt and the inside of his cape, we slid back into the car. Ralph said, "The first vomitorium on the South Side of Chicago. People will travel from miles around to come here and yak their brains out."

Norm revved the engine. He said, "So? What did she say?"

"She wants to talk to you," I lied.

"Oh yeah?"

"She wants you to go home," I said, thinking of the police at his door later tonight, knocking with their billy clubs. "She said she'll be there in an hour," I added.

"Really," Norm said, sticking the cigarette in the corner of his mouth and pounding the steering wheel with his palm. "What do you know about that? She's forgiven me."

"You bet," I said.

Norm shook his head and put the car in reverse. Back on Harlem Avenue, he said, "So where do you boys want to go?"

"Home," I said.

"Home it is!" Norm said. He said home as if it were an exotic place, like Liechtenstein or the Bermuda Triangle.

We drove in silence the first few miles. Then Norm said, "You think I should buy her some roses?"

"Nah," I said. "No sense wasting your money."

I could see Norm's eyes in the rearview mirror. He was watching me, but I couldn't tell if he knew I was lying. At a stoplight he turned around and said, "Gene Simmons, huh?"

"Gene Simmons," I said.

"From KISS," Ralph added.

Norm said, "When I was in high school, I went to a costume party dressed as Jim Croce. I glued on this big hairy-ass mustache and walked around with a cigar and sang 'Operator.' Chicks dug it." He smiled nostalgically until people behind us started honking. The light had turned green. "All right!" he yelled. "Shut the fuck up! I'm going already!"

Not far from the junior college, a pack of men and women wearing togas trudged along a sidewalk, hooting and raising bottles of liquor above their heads. "Would you look at that," Norm said.

Ralph cranked down the window for a better view. He said, "Stop the car."

"What?"

"Stop the car, Norm. I need to join them."

"Why?"

Ralph, peering out the window at the throng of bedsheets and olive wreaths, said, "My people."

"What people?" Norm asked.

"Romans!" Ralph got out of the car and yelled to the passing crowd: "Greetings!" He raised his hand with the butter knives in salutation, and the Romans went wild. They beckoned Ralph over, and he loped across the street.

Norm shook his head. "He's something else, ain't he? Half the time I forget we're related."

I had turned back to Norm, but Norm was still watching Ralph, amazed. I studied Norm but found no clues, no trace of what I was looking for, so I decided to ask him to see what he'd say. "Why'd you do it?"

Norm's eyes moved slowly from Ralph to me, focusing, his pupils seeming to grow. His brow furrowed, and he looked like he really wanted to answer me, as if the reasons were somewhere on the tip of his tongue. Then he shook his head and said, "Hell, I don't know. You lose control sometimes." He rubbed his hand up over his hair in such a way that it stood on end, the way Ralph's hair had stood on end this morning...a family gene, I suspected, a whole genealogy of screwed-up things inside him that he didn't understand, would never understand...and I thought, Of course Norm doesn't know. Of course. Not that the answer to my question was any comfort. Just the opposite, in fact.

Slowly we drove on, though a block away, as the last goblin of the night floated beside us, I couldn't resist. I turned and looked out the back window again.

The Romans were holding Ralph aloft, over their heads, and chanting his name. Ralph, floating above them, looked so content, so pleased, you could almost be fooled into believing he was leading his people into Chicago, as Caesar had gone into Gaul, to bring us all, by way of murder and pillage, together as one people, one tribe.

Copyright © 2004 by John McNally