Roasted Face of Satan: Part II, The Proto-Stachening: One night, two new airbrush jobs appear on NecronicA—one that shows a fire reflecting in a Terminator-like chrome skull; another of Fearjaw Spangleveins, this character I drew one time at some sleepover and haven’t thought of since. His hands have molten off and his arms are burning, and you can tell it’s Fearjaw because of his long banana-shaped jaw and hat-and-feather and stubby Mario Bros. legs.
I can’t even tell which is worse, because the day after, on TV, two fires occur at two of the city’s larger homeless shelters. Police find part of a pink Swatch watch and some burnt wire casing at a small explosion that happened near the rear, smoking-break entrance of the Frederick Douglass Shelter. At Roads Home, police find a broken window, and on the pile of clothing directly below it, traces of what they call accelerants.
So the homeless go back to the Cadillac Hotel, or under Broad Street to the old subway. Or they go to Midtown Plaza, where there’s Applebee’s Baghdad, where me and Lip Cheese, tonight, go too. Because the soda at this Applebee’s, he says, is the most carbonated in all of Rochester.
We’re sitting at one of the round high tables. At least three overhead table lamps are broken. Lip Cheese stares out at the Plaza’s center court, where there’s this Spirit-Bunny-type girl, standing by the court’s fountain, which the managers shut off because people were washing their clothes in it.
She’s wearing one of those maternal apron-y hippie dresses and corduroys with duct tape over one knee. She’s standing under a tree that’s completely bare except for a pair of underwear hanging from a branch.
“She smiled at me from out there earlier,” Lip Cheese says. “But now, she’s baking my time! What is she out there, having her pyramid?”
Watch his eyes move like squirrels. Watch him look down at his hands like they’ve played a trick on him by moving.
Even sadder than Lip Cheese staring at Spirit Bunny is the Plaza concourse around her: a large lane of white tile through the middle and lanes of brown tile closer to the storefronts, shiny as an evacuated banquet. The monorail track, which I rode during Christmases years ago, circles the Plaza’s upper level, where all the stores are empty.
Still, Lip Cheese is the only one around tonight. And I have some things I need to learn from him.
“What is He’s Got a Home, He’s Got a Cash, Lip Cheese?”
“A Home? A What?” His lizard eyes widen and his lips quiver. “Oh. It was just a thing me and Necro said, for a day. It’s not a thing anymore.”
Lip Cheese plucks a napkin from the dispenser, runs it through his hair, and stuffs it down his shirt and into his armpit.
“Has Necro told you anything weird lately?” I say. “About NecronicA, about Weapons of Mankind?”
“I’m so happy for him! He’s really making it with Weapons of Mankind!”
So Alas, You Leave Me No Choice, said the chancellor. “Well on one of his pictures, on NecronicA?” I say. “It shows, like, this burning building with all these people on fire? And I’m worried. Because one of the people on fire is sort of short, sort of scringy, with black greasy hair parted off to the side, sort of like you?”
Which is a little messed up, maybe—that any given lie can make its way out of me so easily.
“I just hope Necro’s not out there, you know, committing arson or anything,” I say.
But how can you not lean back, twist your mustache and swirl your wine when you watch Lip Cheese’s face, sliding downward like an egg thrown against a window.
“But I just ate Dinosaur with him and Weapons of Mankind the other day,” he says.
Spirit Bunny has now wandered into the restaurant, standing near our table and staring upward, mouth open, at the TVs showing a music video of what I guess is Annie Lennox. Spirit Bunny’s hair is dark and she’s much tanner up close—a rough, beat-up tan. Her version of eye contact, I guess, is staring three inches above us.
“I feel so lost when I come in here!” Spirit Bunny says, apparently, to us.
“People always tell me I look lost! People called me Rain Man in high school!” Lip Cheese says, laughing where he should be breathing, unable to leave his hair alone.
“I know!” she says. “I was at the post office, where I’ll go downtown, and people will hand me things, like ‘Here, hold this,’ because they need me to hold on to their belongings for them—like cabbage, or CD players, or just bags of things.” She rubs her right eye, where capillaries have exploded into a small, red tree. “Earlier this afternoon, these guys who looked like lacrosse players pulled up to me in their van. They’re like: ‘You want to come to Irondequoit Bay?’ Because I’m thinking I can share my things if nobody comes back to pick them up.”
She runs her left index finger and thumb over a long strand of hair. “But these guys, in this van, they dropped me off outside Midtown, and they’re like, ‘Just wait here.’ I gave one of them a back rub for the entire ride, and they never came back!”
“I don’t think I’ve ever had a back rub,” Lip Cheese says.
So I tune out at this point because Lip Cheese proceeds to tell any one of his stories about his brother: the ticket scalping; the single six-hour-long VCR tape his brother gave him that contained snippets from the green-line stir-fry of the scrambled Playboy channel. Because the only way Lip Cheese will do anything at all in life is through his brother’s stories.
“And when my brother was stationed in Guam, he stopped cars at checkpoints, even if they had a headlight out, and he’d take their marijuana or, if they had it, their snacks!”
Which he says way too excitedly. And after Lip Cheese pays for our food, Spirit Bunny says: “So, you gentlemen don’t by any chance have a car to drive a lady home in?”
Lip Cheese’s face scatters. He looks at me like: Life or Death: “Sure we do!”
Of course, the second I think: Oh, I’ll only have to make a ten-minute drive, this girl tells us she lives seven million light-years away: in Buffalo! I can’t even tell if the fog on my windows is from Lip Cheese’s sweat or from outside.
The street where Spirit Bunny lives manages to hoist a loaf of frumped-up storefronts before crumbling into the rest of the city. Her apartment building has two floors, with a goopy coat of white paint on the cinder blocks. Cars are parked along the parking lot curb, engines idling, headlights on. A woman in curlers and a poofy overcoat yells something into one of their windows. We walk up a metal staircase to the second floor’s concrete balcony. Fluorescent lights flinch above the doors, and immediately Spirit Bunny takes off her day voice.
“You guys are troopers, man. Troopers!” she gravels, talking a little faster, a chain-smoking and used-needle tone. She works the key into her door, whose lock and doorknob are mounted on a metal panel. “You guys like to party?”
A deadbolt thunks heavily. “They found a head in that river over there,” she says, pointing somewhere to where, apparently, there is a river.
In her living room, the walls are white-out white with Sharpie drawings of tiny schools of fish. An algae’d over aquarium is positioned like it’s the TV. In a birdcage, two white parakeets make Pterodactyl in a Trashcan for noise. Beer cans on the floor have holes poked in their sides, and I smack my lips and chew on a cloud of thin, salty-tasting smoke.
Spirit Bunny brings us a few cans of Stroh’s from the mini fridge next to the aquarium and sits on the floor, hugging her shins, duct tape over her right knee peeling. Lip Cheese sits on the floor too, leaning forward, plucking hair from the carpet, and begins drinking like Death’s Not Wearing a Condom. He’s sweating beer mist: single-tilt drinkdown, pivoting to the mini fridge. Later, he asks Spirit Bunny if she has a boyfriend.
“My last boyfriend was an irrigation tuber in California,” she says.
“For what?” Lip Cheese says.
She leans forward. “Tomatoes?” Then she sputters laughter. “I gotta lie down.”
And when she stands up to go to her bedroom, the whole scene slows down, and everyone’s voice drags like mummies and balls and chains. Because Lip Cheese, right then, stands up too, and sets his hands on her waist, and presses his crotch against her, but in this four-year-old way, like he doesn’t totally understand why he likes the feeling. His breath stutters, and his cheek twitches, and then, he shapes his lips like he’s about to whistle, and he kisses Spirit Bunny. As in, on the lips.
“Um, okay,” Spirit Bunny says, in the over-adult way girls do after you’ve kissed them on the lips and they don’t want you to.
“What’s wrong,” Lip Cheese says, in this way that’s innocent-sounding, like a child possessed by Satan. My stomach folds, grows a thumb like a boxing glove.
“You’re welcome to crash on the couch if you can’t drive,” Spirit Bunny glazes, now back to her Spirit Bunny voice. “I’ll leave the hall light on. I still can’t believe those guys in that van today. Those Wasp, freaking Reagan-humping jocks!—that’s a bit touched, man!”
Her door closes. Lip Cheese chews on his thumb and paces in front of the aquarium, whispering entire paragraphs to himself, the occasional held breath squeaking out of him.
“Shut up, Nate,” he says. “Don’t do another goddamn thing.”
Which, I should talk. Because contrary to what you might think about me, I am not Coco Ferguson: Sex-Having Specialist. Which is the name Necro gave me when I was fifteen and told him I first became a Sex-Having Specialist with Lisa Alisi from Henrietta. And as I fall asleep in the apartment’s scabies recliner, I think: Dear God please don’t let anybody actually follow up with Lisa Alisi from Henrietta, because they would learn that I haven’t even lost my virginity to my pillow. And then I would no longer be able to tell myself, after a bad night, “Oh well, at least people still think I lost my virginity to Lisa Alisi from Henrietta!”
Then, I’m awoken by, of all things:
“I’m Jeffrey Dahmer! I’m Arthur Shawcross! I’m Jeffrey Dahmer!”
Lip Cheese is standing in front of Spirit Bunny’s bedroom door down the hall. He stares upward, no expression on his face, hands folded at his waist, waiting, neutral-like, like a Boy Scout ringing doorbells on a can drive.
Spirit Bunny opens her bedroom door, squinting at him in a tank top and orange boxers with the Coca-Cola logo.
“I ate a dude! I can do anything!” Lip Cheese says. “I’ve memorized this address!”
Spirit Bunny rubs her eye and drifts toward the door jamb. “Okay, that kind of abrasiveness is really not what we’re about here,” she whispers. “You want to sleep in the chair outside, that’s tops. But you need to know that within this space, you are riding the tip. Riding—the tip.”
“And you have enough hair on your head to clothe a small child!” Lip Cheese yells.
On the drive home, passenger-side windows fogging up with Lip Cheese’s having to piss, probably, here comes a preview for the movie Why Lip Cheese Will Die in a Life of Priestlike Anger: The Proto-Stachening of Lip Cheese. Which was the joke we made up when Lip Cheese slept over once, and we noticed how movie titles were always “The [Somethening] of [Some Guy’s Name]”; The Fridgication of William Perry, we said. Which eventually turned into the Proto-Stachening. The Proto-Stachening, right here, of why there is no way Lip Cheese will be able to live a full life:
“Hey Nate?” Lip Cheese asks, voice kernel-sized in the dark of the passenger seat.
“What.”
“Will you kill me?”
“Wait. What?” I say.
“As in, just, you know, pop me in the head.”
“I have to drop you off in—where am I going to get the gun?”
“Guess Necro had the right idea. Might as well light myself on fire,” he says, voice getting knots in its yo-yo string. “Lip Cheese the Maverick Jetpants. Gets all the women on a conveyor belt.”
He’s trying not to sniffle. “That girl?” I say. “How she kept rubbing her eye? That story about that van?”
But when you think the earthquake needle is about to settle, Lip Cheese shoves open the passenger door; wind rumbles in off the highway; the car jackhammers into the rumble strip.
“Lip Cheese!” I yell over the windquake.
“Gonna do it myself,” he yells, seat belt stretching.
“Quit it! Quit it!” I go, slapping his shoulder, grabbing at his shirt. “I’ll crash the car!”
He closes the door. I yank the car back into the lane. All quiet.
“I’m just trying to do the practical thing,” he says. “I’m just trying to be practical.”
So to keep him from crying until his tears form people, here’s what I do. As Buffalo’s early shift wakes up, me and Lip Cheese go to get Gatorades at a Wegmans in Depew or somewhere. The Wegmans building is huge, its red-lit logo turning pink in the sunrise. We walk through the heat blasters in the entrance’s corridor, and inside, it’s bright. Boxes and pallets are in the aisles, and men with tattoos fading under their arm hair maneuver industrial floor sweepers. Def Leppard’s “Hysteria” sounds like brittle crunch through the speakers in the store’s ceiling.
Me and Lip Cheese set our Gatorades on the checkout conveyor. When who is in front of us, in line, paying for coffee and a pre-rolled sandwich, but Mindy Fale?
She’s put on weight, in a beer-and-chested-up sort of way—all tits and failure. Her chin juts like a punter’s chin-guard, and under the white semi-see-through sleeve of her work shirt, there’s a Tasmanian Devil tattoo on her shoulder.
“Oh. Hey. Wait—hey!” I already hate myself. I’m already back in the low-ceiling halls of high school, when Mindy Fale and me got into a mock kickboxing match once, in the hallway, shoehorning each other into pretend headlocks. I’d listen to her laugh and try to figure out how she’d sound in bed. I guess she was always okay; she was maybe my eleventh choice for a girlfriend.
“Do you live here?” I say to her.
“Nope. Still in Gates! Parents and everything!” she smiles in an angry-chipper kind of way.
“Why are you all the way in Buffalo?”
She pays for her food, sighs, plants a palm on the bagging area, and leans.
“I was at Fredonia until about November, but it’s stupid, political,” she says. “Professors know what they want to see, and if you don’t do that, well. Now I’m making the drive to work at USNY Insurance. Buffalo office. Claims!” She makes a stiff thumbs-up sign.
The cashier scans our Gatorades. Mindy Fale looks at me, then Lip Cheese, and probably notices our reddened eyes and our pre-hangover sniffles.
“What were you up to last night?” she says.
And so I say—My One Asterisk: “More like, what was Lip Cheese up to?” Like I’m amazed and annoyed at him. “Coco Ferguson, Mustache Express, this kid. A celebrity sex tape waiting to happen.”
Lip Cheese pays for our Gatorades. We all three of us walk outside, where there’s a lone set of tire tracks, going all the way diagonally across the parking-lot slush. Mindy Fale walks toward her car, a white Civic with no wheel covers.
“Well, if you’re going to be a tape,” she says, half-grinning at Lip Cheese a little. “Might as well be a—” She waves, grocery bag swinging around her arm.
After she drives off, though, look at Lip Cheese, trying not to smile. That’s the asterisk, My One Asterisk, that I’ve tacked on to him.
“But since I’m not going to tell anyone what happened at that girl’s apartment, you need to do something for me, Lip Cheese,” I say.
“Sure Nate! Anything!”
“Since Necro still for whatever reason talks to you, you need to follow him around, do some Ninja Recon.”
“But why?” he says, ladling it on like Sadness Molassness.
“To give him shit for NecronicA, Lip Cheese! For acting like the Colonel Hellstache Unabomber. Just, you know, to find something Uncomebackable, that’s all. Maybe there’s something weird in his browser history, I don’t know.”
Lip Cheese frowns like a toy soldier, head tilted the way dogs do when they can sense something’s wrong with you.
“The kid practically set you on fire in a painting, Lip Cheese,” I say. “You want to spend the rest of your life being everybody else’s Washcloth Master? ‘I’m Jeffrey Dahmer?’ Think with your head once in your life.”