Dave’s mother wasn’t exactly stupid. Twice she got a bottle off me by giving me the key to her room in the Hermosa Biltmore and telling me to come up later, but both times the door was chained shut from the inside and she wouldn’t answer. For obvious reasons I never told Dave about her and it became a source of amusement for me to watch her come to the door and give him the concerned mother routine of straightening his tie and pushing back his hair and then leave with a bottle of good Scotch that he would slip her. He claimed he kept track of the bottles she took but I never believed it. So much petty theft took place every day, with most of it happening during the day shift when Dave and I weren’t working, that I assumed he marked the bottle off as stolen. However he covered it though, it seemed to work as Arnie, the owner, never complained. And if Dave’s mother was using him to get free booze, I wasn’t any better.
When I first went to work at the store I didn’t know anyone in Hermosa, and Dave and I got along all right. He was just breaking up with his wife, Jo, and when he learned I was quits with my old lady he started taking a bottle for us and we would keep it under the counter and get tight together while we worked, which suited me just fine.
We started spending some free time together and several times spent the early part of the day shooting clay pigeons over in Palos Verdes. Dave was a hell of a shot, and something I’ll never forget was the way he’d look over at me after he’d made a hard shot and say, “Christ, I’d like to have met Hemingway.”
He wasn’t kidding. As I got to know him better nearly all of our conversations would remind him of Hemingway. Dave had all the paperbacks by and on Hemingway and everything mentioned would be related to shooting and fishing or of going to the six-day bicycle races or boxing or bullfighting or Spain and Paris and Northern Michigan. Arnie said that one of the things that caused Jo to break with Dave was his obsession with Hemingway.
I could understand that. After a time the Hemingway talk started getting to me. I had already decided to quit the job as nothing in Hermosa was happening for me by then, and as I was making this decision I spent less and less time with Dave and finally stopped drinking at work with him. He didn’t like it and stopped talking to me.
The last night I worked in the store, though, Dave opened a fifth of Black Label in a farewell gesture and said that one time some famous critic had gone to visit Hemingway and Hemingway had slammed a bottle down on the table and said, Goddamn it, if you’re going to talk to me you’re going to have a drink with me.
“Sure, Dave.” I had to laugh. “I’ll drink with you.”
“Of course you will,” he said.
And I took a drink.
I gave the bottle back to him, wiping the lip with the back of my hand, and he asked me where I was going to go. I said I didn’t know right now but I didn’t care so long as it was somewhere new.
He said he could understand that, he’d really like to do that too, but what he would really like to do would be to go to Africa.
“Well, why don’t you?” I said.
“I can’t,” he said.
“Sure you can.”
“No,” he said, “I can’t.”
“If it’s money why don’t you quit and get a better job, then take off?”
“No,” he said.
“Is it because of Jo?”
“No, it’s simply convenient to work here.”
“Bullshit,” I said, “you’re here because any minute you keep hoping Jo will sail in here and sit down on the magazine racks like she used to do.”
“No, that’s not true. It’s my mother. I’m here because of my mother.”
But he looked away as he said it and put the bottle down, and the next thing he did was grab his jacket and walk out the door.
That was the last time I saw him. We weren’t very good friends to start with so I didn’t mind that much, but he had been nice to me at a time when not many other people were and I was sorry I had opened my mouth.
Then last week by chance I was at a party in Palos Verdes Estates and looking down on the long sweep of South Bay I could see the Redondo and then the Hermosa Beach Pier. So in the morning I drove up the coast through Hermosa and stopped at the store.
Arnie was there and after a welcome he gave me Dave’s new telephone number and told me to call him.
“I don’t know about him,” Arnie said. “He’s still doing a good job here but he’s into a new thing. You remember that Hemingway stuff?”
“For sure,” I said.
“Well, it’s space stuff now. He’s saving his money to try to get into one of those space programs.”
“That’s something,” I said.
“I don’t know. You remember his apartment? All that skeet-shooting and deep-sea fishing gear? All that’s gone now. He’s got the whole thing fixed up like a spaceship. He’s got this armchair he sits in, a big red job, with some kind of control panels built into the arms that control everything—windows, doors, the heat, lights, TV, the phone.”
“Sounds like he’s changed quite a bit,” I said.
“I don’t know,” Arnie said. “I was talking to him the other day and he said what he likes about outer space is that it’ll be a completely different place where a man has perfect control. He said if you land on a planet you don’t like you simply get back in the ship and blast off. You think that sounds any different?”
“I don’t know,” I said.
“No different than crawling inside a bottle,” Arnie said, “like a couple of characters I used to know.”
“Sure, Arnie,” I laughed, “but I’ll never confess.”
I laughed again and went over to the phone. I dialed Dave’s number and waited. The phone rang twice and then Dave’s voice came on.
“Computer Center, Computer Control speaking.”
“Dave,” I said, “this is Dick. How are you?”
“Repeat, please.”
“Norris,” I said, “Dick Norris.”
“Norris,” Dave’s voice said. “Norris, Dick. That does not compute.”
“Hey, Dave . . .” I said.
“Repeat,” the voice went on, “that does not compute.”
The line went dead.
“Son of a bitch,” I said. “He hung up on me.”
“I told you.” Arnie laughed, looking at me. “But I don’t give a damn, so long as he does the job and comes to work on time.”
“You’re all heart, Arnie,” I said.
“Isn’t everyone?” Arnie said.