Trapped in that Personal Void of Mine
Mike Lee
A heavy-set man in a too-small white tank top came up and slapped Manny on the back. Manny winced at the stroke and rolled his eyes.
“Manny,” the big guy yelled. “I didn’t see you come in. Grab yourself a beer. They’re in the ‘fridge.”
“Yeah, sure, Greider.”
“Thanks.” Manny hadn’t seen Jim Greider for years and had not missed him for a minute.
“Having trouble with the deck, man. Here you press this.” Greider pressed the play button, and the new Replacements album came on immediately.
“This record rocks,” Greider said.
“Uh-huh,” mumbled Top Tony, not as enthusiastic.
Meanwhile, Manny went through the living room and into the kitchen. He took note of everything he saw in the house. Greider inherited the house from his father, who had died during Greider’s senior year, leaving him with several rental properties.
By luck, Greider sold one home to a Dallas-based development firm that wanted to put it in a strip mall in South Austin during the building boom. Unfortunately, they overpaid for the lot; five years later, the site remained a vacant parking lot with a large sign advertising the future holed with buckshot.
Greider didn’t care; the money was enough to not give a damn about the other properties he rented out to his no-account friends.
Not bad for an ex-quarterback.
Well, that and the coke dealing.
Greider dealt dope and used his rental houses as stash holes. In that regard, Manny’s proudest achievement through the years was avoiding trouble and did not intend to gamble.
No matter how poor his circumstances, Manny never thought to take advantage of Greider’s generosity. Instead, Manny suspected his motives; it was apparent to him there had to be something more tangible than cheap rent in return for Greider’s bouts of good nature.
As Manny rummaged through the refrigerator for the coldest beer, he thought Greider at least kept the place clean.
Billie Mae, Greider’s wife, sat zoned out at the kitchen table, half off her chair. She had a drug fiend’s drawn-in visage and papery skin. Billie Mae’s shoulder-length blond hair hung limply like the bent unlit 120-millimeter Eve cigarette from her lips.
“You gotta light, bub?” Billie dropped a skeletal arm forward, pointing a bony finger at Manny.
“Sure.” He reached into his pocket and handed her a pack of matches that advertised the restaurant where he worked. “Keep them.”
He searched through the refrigerator until he found a frosted Bohemia on the back of the middle shelf. When he closed the door, he looked at Billie Mae again. He wanted to tell her she wore the thinnest jeans he had ever seen but figured it unwise to comment on this to the hostess. Greider was too big to mess around with over a purposefully inane, gratuitous insult, and Billie Mae, for her part, was too damned unpredictable.
Manny let the remark go unsaid and returned to the living room.
Although it was eleven-thirty, only five people had arrived. So when the cab dropped Manny off, he thought he had gotten the address wrong.
Sure enough, he had Greider’s location written correctly. He knew everyone there, but he counted only two as friends. One was Top Tony, Manny’s roommate and best friend, and the other was Eddie Ludlow. Ludlow slumped in the corner and tried to become one with the wallpaper. He looked the most uncomfortable of the bunch gathered here for the occasion.
“So, where the hell is the party boy?” Manny had asked this question twice before.
Top Tony stared back.
“He called in. He’s on his way in.”
“Great.”
Visions of sleep or hustling some pool at the Crown and Anchor danced in Manny’s head.
“Can someone change this record,” Chuck whined. “The Replacements are boring.”
Greider sat in an overstuffed red leather chair next to his prodigious record and compact disc collection. He absently flipped through a box of CDs, pulled one from the stack, and rose to change the disc.
“You might like this.”
Greider turned to Manny. “Have you guys at The Chronicle gotten the new Opal yet?”
“Yeah, I like that record.” Manny was already planning on including the record on his yearly top ten in the future New Year’s issue.
“I think it’s one of the best. Sounds like what T-Rex should have been.”
“Yeah.” Manny agreed, giving Greider credit for having enough brain cells to be so astute in his observation. But meanwhile, the great unwashed didn’t even remember or care who T-Rex was.
Herein lay the problem with modern America, Manny mused, a middle-brow people with low-brow tastes with high-brow pretensions—a sense of identity without one.
Manny’s eyes scanned the room, looking for an object to stare at to allow his mind to wander from this dreadfully listless gathering. Everyone left different impressions of blissful oblivion or did a fine job pretending.
Like Ludlow, he didn’t desire much in conversation and preferred to be somewhere else. He didn’t even want to speak to Top Tony. Manny held him somewhat responsible for persuading him, against his better judgment, to come to this feeble aggregation posing as a celebration.
For several days leading up to tonight, Manny had growing misgivings. Now, he felt sick to his stomach. It wasn’t necessarily from the sour-tasting beer he nursed in his hand with the awareness of the utter tastelessness of the entire evening, lending Manny a sense of disgust that, despite his jaded persona, had reached a crescendo. In short, Manny fought desperately to maintain his temper, keep the urge to stand up, pour his beer over Greider’s head, and walk out of the house.
Manny smiled as his eyes fluttered from each framed icon from their collective past posted upon the walls. The framed fliers from punk rock show from nearly a decade before were trophies of brief moments under the sun of innocence—right before the predictable call of doom rang out. In its own singly grotesque way was the probability that they celebrated the unwilling end of their childhood. As this realization sauntered into his consciousness, Manny became more disturbed, ruining what remained of his goodwill.
Manny saw the flier advertising the first show he went to, The Next at Raul’s.
It was early October 1978, when he was fourteen years old. He had wanted to go to Raul’s for months but lacked the courage. So finally, with Top Tony, he sneaked in, crawling under the back fence, and listened to two and a half songs before getting caught. The bouncer, an enormous, intimidating biker, wrenched Manny’s neck so badly while placing him in a headlock that it throbbed for a week afterward.
Getting into Raul’s was one of the most remarkable experiences of Manny’s life. Only having sex for the first time with his then-girlfriend remained more memorable and significant. In terms of staying power, going to see a live band in a small overcrowded club with people you considered your peers and wanted to belong to had effectively remained with Manny to this time. It influenced how he looked at his weary and tenuous environment.
Manny sat pensively in his chair, shifting his weight nervously in anticipation of the oncoming action—if any. He figured there would be something once the guest of honor, Johnny Quentin, finally arrived.
He glanced at the ceiling light hanging directly above him and became enthralled by the size of the spider web attached to the lamp. A nearby stain was either from a roof leak or an errant beer spray.
The more Manny looked around he began to realize what a shoddy place Greider’s house was. But, unfortunately, his first impression, as usual, was incorrect.
As Manny looked closely around the room, he found more inconsistencies. The caulking above the doorway was peeling, and the upper wooden frame was separating from the wall. The chipped pressed wood bookcase stood next to the entrance, stained with an unknown foreign substance. Manny looked down at the hardwood floor. At his feet, he noticed that several of the planks were curling. Despite the layers of wax, you couldn’t miss it. Upon these discoveries, Manny decided he wanted to leave soon. He reached into his pocket and lit another cigarette.
“Do you have an ashtray?” Greider inquired, answering his question by handing over a round brass ashtray.
“Thanks,” Manny said, placing the object on the arm of the chair. Greider liked to leave a good impression, but his attempts were unrelated and phony to Manny. People involved in illegal activity, sales, or politics shared that mentality; they always tried to create a universe so thoroughly detached from reality that, after a while, they believed their untruths.
“Hey, here he comes,” said Ludlow, who spoke up for the first time since he said hello to Manny.
“Is he with anyone?”
Greider sounded touchy.
Considering his business, Greider had good reason to be concerned with strangers.
“No,” Ludlow replied, sneering. “Johnny’s alone.”
With effort, Greider got up from his chair and went to the door. Manny thought for a moment about getting up but decided he was comfortable.
When Greider opened the front door, a gust of wind blew in, chilling Manny.
“Hey, Johnny,” Greider said to the solitary figure standing on the darkened porch. “Come on in from the cold.”
“I think I’ll do that,” he said.
Manny exhaled a stream of smoke from the side of his mouth.
He mumbled out of earshot. “That’s a hell of a metaphor.”
Fitzgerald once wrote: Show me a hero, and I’ll show you a tragedy. To Manny, Johnny Quentin aptly represented that sentiment.
Johnny epitomized disappointment, judging what had transpired since Manny crossed his path back in high school. At Austin High, Manny looked up to Johnny Quentin as a hero from the moment he first stepped through the plate glass doors next to the band hall. That memory angered Manny while he watched Johnny stagger drunkenly into the house. Witnessing Johnny’s stumblebum manner, Manny couldn’t decide if his embarrassment was for Johnny or himself. He decided to take the easy way out and pretend nothing was out of the ordinary—a tack Manny took more often than he cared to admit. Johnny went over and put his arm around Manny, gripping his shoulder tightly. “Hello, old friend,” he croaked. Manny nodded, grimacing. Johnny’s breath stank of bourbon, probably Rebel Yell—the breakfast of chumps of the Southern variety. Manny also felt uncomfortable from the grip Johnny had on him. He flinched, causing Johnny to slip to his knees.
“Whoa, big guy.”
Greider bent to help Johnny to his feet.
“The party has only just begun.”
“Yeah, you can say that for sure,” said Ludlow. He had moved over next to Manny. Ludlow tapped Manny on the shoulder and motioned to follow him to the kitchen.
Manny wanted to sneak out the door now that he had arrived and seen. Yet, he went along anyway. Billie Mae was absent from her roost at the Formica table. Manny suspected she had gone into the bedroom for a line. She seemed the type unwilling to share her nose powder.
Manny downed the rest of his beer and tossed the empty bottle into the garbage can. Ludlow opened the refrigerator door and pulled out two bottles.
Manny took one and popped the top off with the church key hanging from the door handle. “So, what’s up?”
Ludlow’s upper lip curled. “I’m thoroughly disgusted with this scene.”
“I’ll grant you that. This is a pretty awful situation. No one threw a party when your probation finished.”
“It’s not that.” Ludlow paused and then added, “You know what I mean.” Manny knew the ritual. Try to say as little as possible by scraping the story’s edge to ruffle no feathers. Then gossip afterward with Top Tony Delgado.
He nodded.
“Yeah, I do. Johnny doesn’t deserve this. No one does.” He didn’t mention that they had both given it undeserved legitimacy by showing up for the bash, especially in Ludlow’s case. Showing off one’s hypocrisy by the complaint was Eddie Ludlow’s clichéd way of doing things. Nevertheless, Ludlow tipped his hand as often as he did because he was genuinely hurt by the events that had happened eight years ago.
Manny pulled Top Tony aside and told him he wanted to leave. Top Tony listened and shrugged, betraying his indifference. “This party on Balcones Drive might be worth going to.”
Manny paused in thought. He would instead have gone home, but he wanted to salvage something from the evening.
“All right,” he said with some trepidation. “I’ll go.”
Top Tony grinned.
“Lots of girls,” he said—as if that would be enough bait for Manny.
As these things went, it took nearly an hour before Manny and Top Tony could finally leave Greider’s. Although the small gathering was excruciatingly dull, everyone went out of their way to make it not so—which only made the proceedings even more unbearable to those involved. The conversations became vapider, the music louder, and the ultimate indication that the situation was at its absolute most desperate was when Greider brought out the coke. Manny smirked while watching Greider and his girlfriend hog the carefully cut lines on the tabletop, snorting three apiece. Amazingly, there were no other takers, a given that either no one trusted the quality of Greider’s coke or there was an immediate self-imposed twelve-step program operating that no one had informed Manny about.
Top Tony fought the temptation, pleading some rather lame excuse about not feeling too well.
Ludlow walked out after the first fifteen minutes, mumbling as he left that he had to get up early for work. As far as Manny knew, that was a lie. He felt this party was tawdry and senseless, pervaded with untellable secrets.
There was no sense of belonging for him anyway. Meanwhile, Johnny was on his second wind. He sat on the couch, speaking semi-complete sentences, mostly about nothing.
Manny got increasingly restless and was ready to leave on his own. Instead, he returned to the kitchen and got another beer, noticing a broken bottle in the sink. When Manny leaned over to inspect the shards more closely, he saw the glass streaked with blood.
“Hey, you ready to go?” Top Tony looked sheepish, sensing Manny’s impatience.
“No,” Manny replied sarcastically. “I wanted to see the rotting corpse burst out of the cake.”
“God, you’re sick.”
“I am damaged beyond repair.”
Top Tony ignored him. “Anyway, I’m ready. Do you mind if we bring Johnny with us?”
Manny snickered with disgust, shaking his head.
“What, has Greider gotten weary of his worthless ass?”
Top Tony glared at him. That said a lot to Manny about what was going on. Manny sighed, dropping his hands to his sides. “All right, let’s bail out of here—and not soon enough if you ask me.” He spilled some beer on the floor, but Manny stepped over it. The floor needed character added to its surface.
“What a shitty night,” Manny mumbled. “To think it could only get worse.”
Top Tony overheard him. “You have a nasty attitude.”
“I’m only telling the truth as I see it.”
“Don’t be so damned condescending. I’ll go get Johnny.”
Manny rolled his eyes to the ceiling. “I get the front seat, Tony.” That was the least he could get.
When they arrived at the party, they found a spot on the landing. Manny leaned over the railing and looked down at the group gathering at the front door. He watched Top Tony work his charms on a well-scrubbed, bow-headed sorority girl.
She looked naive, but from experience, Manny knew better. Age and appearance usually meant nothing in the bedroom. The biggest tramps always seemed to strive to great lengths to appear innocent. Hence, the black widow theory, he supposed. Entice them with sugar and burn them when the victim is ready.
Bored by the scene below, he turned around and began walking down the hall toward the stairwell, hoping to run into someone he knew. Manny hated being in unfamiliar places. Although one could say something about being the unknown quantity in a crowd—flitting through like a ghost—Manny preferred friends’ safety and having both feet planted on his chosen turf.
He was a fool for letting Tony persuade him to come to this absurd shindig. He preferred going home, but Manny was too cheap to pay another cab fare. He believed he had arrived at one of the most sophomoric parties in his life.
It was bad enough that he did not know anyone there, worse than the other attendees were so extraordinarily dull.
Greider’s gathering, at least, was worth it, for comedy’s sake. Manny gritted his teeth and pretended it was a smile, stepping down the steps with one hand grazing the metal handrail. His feet sank into shag carpet, giving him the sensation of walking in a sewer overflow.
One of his better hobbies was making excuses for himself, denying another aspect of his personality with which he had become remarkably proficient. Since every prevarication originated and ended with the same person, Manny rarely wrangled with the moral questions on either end of the liar’s continuum. Instead, he was content with his life and thanked God whenever he deigned it necessary the Almighty had not glided him into the gutter. Manny felt the loneliest when in a crowd. As far back as early childhood, Manny thought he was on the outside looking in.
While it was uncomfortable enough that he felt claustrophobic at most prominent gatherings, Manny was sensitive to having been made to feel unwanted—whether that was ever the case or not.
Manny stood on firm ground in those assumptions. In his teenage years, he eventually concluded that he was the odd man out whenever he went to punk rock shows. For instance, many of Johnny’s friends rarely spoke to him, and occasionally he received various verbal insults. At best, Manny got backhanded compliments on his appearance and therefore made to feel terrible at every turn.
Johnny Quentin had made Manny feel welcome and occasionally gone out of his way to tell the others to lay off Manny—the football player has insight, he would say to him. Punk rock and there was a mutual alliance formed. However, he wasn’t around. After Johnny went to jail, Manny returned to the inside and left the marginal alone, but realized his life was a façade. He was only pretending to be a varsity jock.
However, he had few good memories of those days and preferred not to dwell on the subject whenever brought up.
The attitude positively transformed Manny into an unsentimental cynic, less prone to take hits from those he believed beneath him.
He surrounded himself with a couple of close friends from childhood and those scattered relationships made in the intervening years of his long walk through the decaying fields of nowhere.
Trapped in his carefully crafted sense of self as a loner, Manny painted a false picture of what was churning amid the complex emotions and memories that fought for primacy within himself. Unfortunately, Manny rarely came to grips with those facts. Again, his contentment remained within the context of making deadlines and paying the bills. Everything else was just an uproar of procrastination.
Manny had become less and less of a social animal in the last five years since he graduated high school.
Now, the last month was a nightmare of a broken relationship, sundered dreams to add to the other assorted heartbreaks now rendering his psyche apart.
In other words, he broke down. First, Manny spent the summer in his bedroom, listening to records, reading bad novels, and sleeping. Then, when Manny deigned it necessary to leave the house, it was to the nearby package store to purchase cigarettes—and occasionally—beer.
It led to keeping a vast emotional distance from others and a discomforting ignoring of the basic needs of the people close to him. Shannon had a case for breaking up with him; she had put up with this behavior as long as she could until she could no longer.
As time passed, friends fell in and out of his life while he just plugged on. Manny wandered wide awake but half-asleep, occasionally noting with a squinty gaze the various opportunities he failed to grasp or challenge with enthusiasm.
Manny wandered through the crowd and lined up to use the bathroom. When he got in, someone had stopped up the toilet.
Manny urinated into the sink, running the faucets at full blast until his issue drained away. He returned to the living room, looking for Top Tony. He found him, waving to the sorority girl as she stepped out. Manny wasn’t impressed.
Top Tony grinned. “Ain’t she cute?” Manny thought sometimes he acted like a moron and couldn’t remember how they became friends.
“Yeah, whatever,” Manny replied, bored. “Have you seen Johnny?”
“I saw him wander off a while ago.”
With that, Manny saw his chance. “Let’s split this crazy scene,” Manny said forcefully. “There isn’t anything here for us.”
Top Tony glanced around him, making a quick survey of the party. “Oh man,” he whined. “I got a shot at that redhead over there.”
Manny looked at the woman Top Tony referred to and immediately focused on the ring on her left index finger, ignoring everything else. “She looks married, moron. Didn’t you look at her hand?”
Suddenly, the lights dimmed.
“Good Lord,” Manny moaned.
Somebody in the back shouted, “Fleshtones time!”
The living room turned into an artificial dance floor as several partygoers lined up and jerked around the room like dying cockroaches. The stereo played Fleshtones ’77 with the treble up to screeching, speaker shredding levels. Manny put his hands up to his ears. Despite the years of blasting rock and roll, this high-end was too much for him to handle.
Manny yelled above the din, “I want to get out of here. We’re getting into tinnitus territory!”
“They can’t dance either,” Top Tony yelled back. “But I’m staying!” Just as he said, the redhead of Top Tony’s dreams wandered off to a balding and quite muscular man. It dawned on Top Tony that he was her husband; his expression turned crestfallen.
Manny grabbed him by the arm. “Now, do you believe me?” Hesitantly, Top Tony followed Manny out the door. They stumbled down the slate path and jogged the street to the car.
When they got in the car, Manny lit into Top Tony. “How did I allow you to talk me into going to this party? That was the biggest bunch of losers I’d seen since high school.”
“They were from our high school,” Top Tony replied. “They weren’t that bad. They are just normal people, like you or me.”
“God help us both if that is the case. These people were bopping to a seven-year-old record.”
“That’s meaningless,” Top Tony rejoined. “We listen to music that is at least twenty years old.”
“But we don’t prance around to it like minions dancing in the swamp. Those people are bona fide losers.”
Exasperated, Top Tony threw his hands in the air. “All right, anything you say.” He turned the ignition and pulled the car out from the curb. They reached the end of the block when both realized they had left Johnny Quentin behind.
“I don’t want to go back,” Manny said. “He can take care of himself. After all,” he added, swinging his thumb behind him, “They’re his people.”
“As I said before,” Top Tony said as he turned the wheel, getting on the exit ramp for the MoPac Expressway. “Johnny’s friends are normal, the kind of people who would stand up for you—unlike the creeps who got him in trouble.”
Manny leaned over and pulled a cassette from the dashboard. “You might be right, there.”
“I know I am.”
Manny paused and thought for a moment. Then he chuckled at his brilliant analysis. It was a brief conclusion based on his judgment that someone with less heart would have concluded long before. Finally, Top Tony spoke up, dubious. “Care to share the laugh with me?”
Manny pushed the cigarette lighter in, snickering again. Then, with an assuredness to the point of certainty, Manny said. “By the time Johnny Quentin dies, no one will remember him.”
“Then, what of us?”
“We got time, brother.”
Top Tony chuckled and began to agree, but the music drowned out his voice.
He pushed the gear into third and roared the car over the crest of a hill, wheels in the air. The two men howled when they hit the asphalt on the downward slope.
Mike Lee
A heavy-set man in a too-small white tank top came up and slapped Manny on the back. Manny winced at the stroke and rolled his eyes.
“Manny,” the big guy yelled. “I didn’t see you come in. Grab yourself a beer. They’re in the ‘fridge.”
“Yeah, sure, Greider.”
“Thanks.” Manny hadn’t seen Jim Greider for years and had not missed him for a minute.
“Having trouble with the deck, man. Here you press this.” Greider pressed the play button, and the new Replacements album came on immediately.
“This record rocks,” Greider said.
“Uh-huh,” mumbled Top Tony, not as enthusiastic.
Meanwhile, Manny went through the living room and into the kitchen. He took note of everything he saw in the house. Greider inherited the house from his father, who had died during Greider’s senior year, leaving him with several rental properties.
By luck, Greider sold one home to a Dallas-based development firm that wanted to put it in a strip mall in South Austin during the building boom. Unfortunately, they overpaid for the lot; five years later, the site remained a vacant parking lot with a large sign advertising the future holed with buckshot.
Greider didn’t care; the money was enough to not give a damn about the other properties he rented out to his no-account friends.
Not bad for an ex-quarterback.
Well, that and the coke dealing.
Greider dealt dope and used his rental houses as stash holes. In that regard, Manny’s proudest achievement through the years was avoiding trouble and did not intend to gamble.
No matter how poor his circumstances, Manny never thought to take advantage of Greider’s generosity. Instead, Manny suspected his motives; it was apparent to him there had to be something more tangible than cheap rent in return for Greider’s bouts of good nature.
As Manny rummaged through the refrigerator for the coldest beer, he thought Greider at least kept the place clean.
Billie Mae, Greider’s wife, sat zoned out at the kitchen table, half off her chair. She had a drug fiend’s drawn-in visage and papery skin. Billie Mae’s shoulder-length blond hair hung limply like the bent unlit 120-millimeter Eve cigarette from her lips.
“You gotta light, bub?” Billie dropped a skeletal arm forward, pointing a bony finger at Manny.
“Sure.” He reached into his pocket and handed her a pack of matches that advertised the restaurant where he worked. “Keep them.”
He searched through the refrigerator until he found a frosted Bohemia on the back of the middle shelf. When he closed the door, he looked at Billie Mae again. He wanted to tell her she wore the thinnest jeans he had ever seen but figured it unwise to comment on this to the hostess. Greider was too big to mess around with over a purposefully inane, gratuitous insult, and Billie Mae, for her part, was too damned unpredictable.
Manny let the remark go unsaid and returned to the living room.
Although it was eleven-thirty, only five people had arrived. So when the cab dropped Manny off, he thought he had gotten the address wrong.
Sure enough, he had Greider’s location written correctly. He knew everyone there, but he counted only two as friends. One was Top Tony, Manny’s roommate and best friend, and the other was Eddie Ludlow. Ludlow slumped in the corner and tried to become one with the wallpaper. He looked the most uncomfortable of the bunch gathered here for the occasion.
“So, where the hell is the party boy?” Manny had asked this question twice before.
Top Tony stared back.
“He called in. He’s on his way in.”
“Great.”
Visions of sleep or hustling some pool at the Crown and Anchor danced in Manny’s head.
“Can someone change this record,” Chuck whined. “The Replacements are boring.”
Greider sat in an overstuffed red leather chair next to his prodigious record and compact disc collection. He absently flipped through a box of CDs, pulled one from the stack, and rose to change the disc.
“You might like this.”
Greider turned to Manny. “Have you guys at The Chronicle gotten the new Opal yet?”
“Yeah, I like that record.” Manny was already planning on including the record on his yearly top ten in the future New Year’s issue.
“I think it’s one of the best. Sounds like what T-Rex should have been.”
“Yeah.” Manny agreed, giving Greider credit for having enough brain cells to be so astute in his observation. But meanwhile, the great unwashed didn’t even remember or care who T-Rex was.
Herein lay the problem with modern America, Manny mused, a middle-brow people with low-brow tastes with high-brow pretensions—a sense of identity without one.
Manny’s eyes scanned the room, looking for an object to stare at to allow his mind to wander from this dreadfully listless gathering. Everyone left different impressions of blissful oblivion or did a fine job pretending.
Like Ludlow, he didn’t desire much in conversation and preferred to be somewhere else. He didn’t even want to speak to Top Tony. Manny held him somewhat responsible for persuading him, against his better judgment, to come to this feeble aggregation posing as a celebration.
For several days leading up to tonight, Manny had growing misgivings. Now, he felt sick to his stomach. It wasn’t necessarily from the sour-tasting beer he nursed in his hand with the awareness of the utter tastelessness of the entire evening, lending Manny a sense of disgust that, despite his jaded persona, had reached a crescendo. In short, Manny fought desperately to maintain his temper, keep the urge to stand up, pour his beer over Greider’s head, and walk out of the house.
Manny smiled as his eyes fluttered from each framed icon from their collective past posted upon the walls. The framed fliers from punk rock show from nearly a decade before were trophies of brief moments under the sun of innocence—right before the predictable call of doom rang out. In its own singly grotesque way was the probability that they celebrated the unwilling end of their childhood. As this realization sauntered into his consciousness, Manny became more disturbed, ruining what remained of his goodwill.
Manny saw the flier advertising the first show he went to, The Next at Raul’s.
It was early October 1978, when he was fourteen years old. He had wanted to go to Raul’s for months but lacked the courage. So finally, with Top Tony, he sneaked in, crawling under the back fence, and listened to two and a half songs before getting caught. The bouncer, an enormous, intimidating biker, wrenched Manny’s neck so badly while placing him in a headlock that it throbbed for a week afterward.
Getting into Raul’s was one of the most remarkable experiences of Manny’s life. Only having sex for the first time with his then-girlfriend remained more memorable and significant. In terms of staying power, going to see a live band in a small overcrowded club with people you considered your peers and wanted to belong to had effectively remained with Manny to this time. It influenced how he looked at his weary and tenuous environment.
Manny sat pensively in his chair, shifting his weight nervously in anticipation of the oncoming action—if any. He figured there would be something once the guest of honor, Johnny Quentin, finally arrived.
He glanced at the ceiling light hanging directly above him and became enthralled by the size of the spider web attached to the lamp. A nearby stain was either from a roof leak or an errant beer spray.
The more Manny looked around he began to realize what a shoddy place Greider’s house was. But, unfortunately, his first impression, as usual, was incorrect.
As Manny looked closely around the room, he found more inconsistencies. The caulking above the doorway was peeling, and the upper wooden frame was separating from the wall. The chipped pressed wood bookcase stood next to the entrance, stained with an unknown foreign substance. Manny looked down at the hardwood floor. At his feet, he noticed that several of the planks were curling. Despite the layers of wax, you couldn’t miss it. Upon these discoveries, Manny decided he wanted to leave soon. He reached into his pocket and lit another cigarette.
“Do you have an ashtray?” Greider inquired, answering his question by handing over a round brass ashtray.
“Thanks,” Manny said, placing the object on the arm of the chair. Greider liked to leave a good impression, but his attempts were unrelated and phony to Manny. People involved in illegal activity, sales, or politics shared that mentality; they always tried to create a universe so thoroughly detached from reality that, after a while, they believed their untruths.
“Hey, here he comes,” said Ludlow, who spoke up for the first time since he said hello to Manny.
“Is he with anyone?”
Greider sounded touchy.
Considering his business, Greider had good reason to be concerned with strangers.
“No,” Ludlow replied, sneering. “Johnny’s alone.”
With effort, Greider got up from his chair and went to the door. Manny thought for a moment about getting up but decided he was comfortable.
When Greider opened the front door, a gust of wind blew in, chilling Manny.
“Hey, Johnny,” Greider said to the solitary figure standing on the darkened porch. “Come on in from the cold.”
“I think I’ll do that,” he said.
Manny exhaled a stream of smoke from the side of his mouth.
He mumbled out of earshot. “That’s a hell of a metaphor.”
Fitzgerald once wrote: Show me a hero, and I’ll show you a tragedy. To Manny, Johnny Quentin aptly represented that sentiment.
Johnny epitomized disappointment, judging what had transpired since Manny crossed his path back in high school. At Austin High, Manny looked up to Johnny Quentin as a hero from the moment he first stepped through the plate glass doors next to the band hall. That memory angered Manny while he watched Johnny stagger drunkenly into the house. Witnessing Johnny’s stumblebum manner, Manny couldn’t decide if his embarrassment was for Johnny or himself. He decided to take the easy way out and pretend nothing was out of the ordinary—a tack Manny took more often than he cared to admit. Johnny went over and put his arm around Manny, gripping his shoulder tightly. “Hello, old friend,” he croaked. Manny nodded, grimacing. Johnny’s breath stank of bourbon, probably Rebel Yell—the breakfast of chumps of the Southern variety. Manny also felt uncomfortable from the grip Johnny had on him. He flinched, causing Johnny to slip to his knees.
“Whoa, big guy.”
Greider bent to help Johnny to his feet.
“The party has only just begun.”
“Yeah, you can say that for sure,” said Ludlow. He had moved over next to Manny. Ludlow tapped Manny on the shoulder and motioned to follow him to the kitchen.
Manny wanted to sneak out the door now that he had arrived and seen. Yet, he went along anyway. Billie Mae was absent from her roost at the Formica table. Manny suspected she had gone into the bedroom for a line. She seemed the type unwilling to share her nose powder.
Manny downed the rest of his beer and tossed the empty bottle into the garbage can. Ludlow opened the refrigerator door and pulled out two bottles.
Manny took one and popped the top off with the church key hanging from the door handle. “So, what’s up?”
Ludlow’s upper lip curled. “I’m thoroughly disgusted with this scene.”
“I’ll grant you that. This is a pretty awful situation. No one threw a party when your probation finished.”
“It’s not that.” Ludlow paused and then added, “You know what I mean.” Manny knew the ritual. Try to say as little as possible by scraping the story’s edge to ruffle no feathers. Then gossip afterward with Top Tony Delgado.
He nodded.
“Yeah, I do. Johnny doesn’t deserve this. No one does.” He didn’t mention that they had both given it undeserved legitimacy by showing up for the bash, especially in Ludlow’s case. Showing off one’s hypocrisy by the complaint was Eddie Ludlow’s clichéd way of doing things. Nevertheless, Ludlow tipped his hand as often as he did because he was genuinely hurt by the events that had happened eight years ago.
Manny pulled Top Tony aside and told him he wanted to leave. Top Tony listened and shrugged, betraying his indifference. “This party on Balcones Drive might be worth going to.”
Manny paused in thought. He would instead have gone home, but he wanted to salvage something from the evening.
“All right,” he said with some trepidation. “I’ll go.”
Top Tony grinned.
“Lots of girls,” he said—as if that would be enough bait for Manny.
As these things went, it took nearly an hour before Manny and Top Tony could finally leave Greider’s. Although the small gathering was excruciatingly dull, everyone went out of their way to make it not so—which only made the proceedings even more unbearable to those involved. The conversations became vapider, the music louder, and the ultimate indication that the situation was at its absolute most desperate was when Greider brought out the coke. Manny smirked while watching Greider and his girlfriend hog the carefully cut lines on the tabletop, snorting three apiece. Amazingly, there were no other takers, a given that either no one trusted the quality of Greider’s coke or there was an immediate self-imposed twelve-step program operating that no one had informed Manny about.
Top Tony fought the temptation, pleading some rather lame excuse about not feeling too well.
Ludlow walked out after the first fifteen minutes, mumbling as he left that he had to get up early for work. As far as Manny knew, that was a lie. He felt this party was tawdry and senseless, pervaded with untellable secrets.
There was no sense of belonging for him anyway. Meanwhile, Johnny was on his second wind. He sat on the couch, speaking semi-complete sentences, mostly about nothing.
Manny got increasingly restless and was ready to leave on his own. Instead, he returned to the kitchen and got another beer, noticing a broken bottle in the sink. When Manny leaned over to inspect the shards more closely, he saw the glass streaked with blood.
“Hey, you ready to go?” Top Tony looked sheepish, sensing Manny’s impatience.
“No,” Manny replied sarcastically. “I wanted to see the rotting corpse burst out of the cake.”
“God, you’re sick.”
“I am damaged beyond repair.”
Top Tony ignored him. “Anyway, I’m ready. Do you mind if we bring Johnny with us?”
Manny snickered with disgust, shaking his head.
“What, has Greider gotten weary of his worthless ass?”
Top Tony glared at him. That said a lot to Manny about what was going on. Manny sighed, dropping his hands to his sides. “All right, let’s bail out of here—and not soon enough if you ask me.” He spilled some beer on the floor, but Manny stepped over it. The floor needed character added to its surface.
“What a shitty night,” Manny mumbled. “To think it could only get worse.”
Top Tony overheard him. “You have a nasty attitude.”
“I’m only telling the truth as I see it.”
“Don’t be so damned condescending. I’ll go get Johnny.”
Manny rolled his eyes to the ceiling. “I get the front seat, Tony.” That was the least he could get.
When they arrived at the party, they found a spot on the landing. Manny leaned over the railing and looked down at the group gathering at the front door. He watched Top Tony work his charms on a well-scrubbed, bow-headed sorority girl.
She looked naive, but from experience, Manny knew better. Age and appearance usually meant nothing in the bedroom. The biggest tramps always seemed to strive to great lengths to appear innocent. Hence, the black widow theory, he supposed. Entice them with sugar and burn them when the victim is ready.
Bored by the scene below, he turned around and began walking down the hall toward the stairwell, hoping to run into someone he knew. Manny hated being in unfamiliar places. Although one could say something about being the unknown quantity in a crowd—flitting through like a ghost—Manny preferred friends’ safety and having both feet planted on his chosen turf.
He was a fool for letting Tony persuade him to come to this absurd shindig. He preferred going home, but Manny was too cheap to pay another cab fare. He believed he had arrived at one of the most sophomoric parties in his life.
It was bad enough that he did not know anyone there, worse than the other attendees were so extraordinarily dull.
Greider’s gathering, at least, was worth it, for comedy’s sake. Manny gritted his teeth and pretended it was a smile, stepping down the steps with one hand grazing the metal handrail. His feet sank into shag carpet, giving him the sensation of walking in a sewer overflow.
One of his better hobbies was making excuses for himself, denying another aspect of his personality with which he had become remarkably proficient. Since every prevarication originated and ended with the same person, Manny rarely wrangled with the moral questions on either end of the liar’s continuum. Instead, he was content with his life and thanked God whenever he deigned it necessary the Almighty had not glided him into the gutter. Manny felt the loneliest when in a crowd. As far back as early childhood, Manny thought he was on the outside looking in.
While it was uncomfortable enough that he felt claustrophobic at most prominent gatherings, Manny was sensitive to having been made to feel unwanted—whether that was ever the case or not.
Manny stood on firm ground in those assumptions. In his teenage years, he eventually concluded that he was the odd man out whenever he went to punk rock shows. For instance, many of Johnny’s friends rarely spoke to him, and occasionally he received various verbal insults. At best, Manny got backhanded compliments on his appearance and therefore made to feel terrible at every turn.
Johnny Quentin had made Manny feel welcome and occasionally gone out of his way to tell the others to lay off Manny—the football player has insight, he would say to him. Punk rock and there was a mutual alliance formed. However, he wasn’t around. After Johnny went to jail, Manny returned to the inside and left the marginal alone, but realized his life was a façade. He was only pretending to be a varsity jock.
However, he had few good memories of those days and preferred not to dwell on the subject whenever brought up.
The attitude positively transformed Manny into an unsentimental cynic, less prone to take hits from those he believed beneath him.
He surrounded himself with a couple of close friends from childhood and those scattered relationships made in the intervening years of his long walk through the decaying fields of nowhere.
Trapped in his carefully crafted sense of self as a loner, Manny painted a false picture of what was churning amid the complex emotions and memories that fought for primacy within himself. Unfortunately, Manny rarely came to grips with those facts. Again, his contentment remained within the context of making deadlines and paying the bills. Everything else was just an uproar of procrastination.
Manny had become less and less of a social animal in the last five years since he graduated high school.
Now, the last month was a nightmare of a broken relationship, sundered dreams to add to the other assorted heartbreaks now rendering his psyche apart.
In other words, he broke down. First, Manny spent the summer in his bedroom, listening to records, reading bad novels, and sleeping. Then, when Manny deigned it necessary to leave the house, it was to the nearby package store to purchase cigarettes—and occasionally—beer.
It led to keeping a vast emotional distance from others and a discomforting ignoring of the basic needs of the people close to him. Shannon had a case for breaking up with him; she had put up with this behavior as long as she could until she could no longer.
As time passed, friends fell in and out of his life while he just plugged on. Manny wandered wide awake but half-asleep, occasionally noting with a squinty gaze the various opportunities he failed to grasp or challenge with enthusiasm.
Manny wandered through the crowd and lined up to use the bathroom. When he got in, someone had stopped up the toilet.
Manny urinated into the sink, running the faucets at full blast until his issue drained away. He returned to the living room, looking for Top Tony. He found him, waving to the sorority girl as she stepped out. Manny wasn’t impressed.
Top Tony grinned. “Ain’t she cute?” Manny thought sometimes he acted like a moron and couldn’t remember how they became friends.
“Yeah, whatever,” Manny replied, bored. “Have you seen Johnny?”
“I saw him wander off a while ago.”
With that, Manny saw his chance. “Let’s split this crazy scene,” Manny said forcefully. “There isn’t anything here for us.”
Top Tony glanced around him, making a quick survey of the party. “Oh man,” he whined. “I got a shot at that redhead over there.”
Manny looked at the woman Top Tony referred to and immediately focused on the ring on her left index finger, ignoring everything else. “She looks married, moron. Didn’t you look at her hand?”
Suddenly, the lights dimmed.
“Good Lord,” Manny moaned.
Somebody in the back shouted, “Fleshtones time!”
The living room turned into an artificial dance floor as several partygoers lined up and jerked around the room like dying cockroaches. The stereo played Fleshtones ’77 with the treble up to screeching, speaker shredding levels. Manny put his hands up to his ears. Despite the years of blasting rock and roll, this high-end was too much for him to handle.
Manny yelled above the din, “I want to get out of here. We’re getting into tinnitus territory!”
“They can’t dance either,” Top Tony yelled back. “But I’m staying!” Just as he said, the redhead of Top Tony’s dreams wandered off to a balding and quite muscular man. It dawned on Top Tony that he was her husband; his expression turned crestfallen.
Manny grabbed him by the arm. “Now, do you believe me?” Hesitantly, Top Tony followed Manny out the door. They stumbled down the slate path and jogged the street to the car.
When they got in the car, Manny lit into Top Tony. “How did I allow you to talk me into going to this party? That was the biggest bunch of losers I’d seen since high school.”
“They were from our high school,” Top Tony replied. “They weren’t that bad. They are just normal people, like you or me.”
“God help us both if that is the case. These people were bopping to a seven-year-old record.”
“That’s meaningless,” Top Tony rejoined. “We listen to music that is at least twenty years old.”
“But we don’t prance around to it like minions dancing in the swamp. Those people are bona fide losers.”
Exasperated, Top Tony threw his hands in the air. “All right, anything you say.” He turned the ignition and pulled the car out from the curb. They reached the end of the block when both realized they had left Johnny Quentin behind.
“I don’t want to go back,” Manny said. “He can take care of himself. After all,” he added, swinging his thumb behind him, “They’re his people.”
“As I said before,” Top Tony said as he turned the wheel, getting on the exit ramp for the MoPac Expressway. “Johnny’s friends are normal, the kind of people who would stand up for you—unlike the creeps who got him in trouble.”
Manny leaned over and pulled a cassette from the dashboard. “You might be right, there.”
“I know I am.”
Manny paused and thought for a moment. Then he chuckled at his brilliant analysis. It was a brief conclusion based on his judgment that someone with less heart would have concluded long before. Finally, Top Tony spoke up, dubious. “Care to share the laugh with me?”
Manny pushed the cigarette lighter in, snickering again. Then, with an assuredness to the point of certainty, Manny said. “By the time Johnny Quentin dies, no one will remember him.”
“Then, what of us?”
“We got time, brother.”
Top Tony chuckled and began to agree, but the music drowned out his voice.
He pushed the gear into third and roared the car over the crest of a hill, wheels in the air. The two men howled when they hit the asphalt on the downward slope.
