CHAPTER 9

 

Dumb, dumb, dumb!

First rule of scoring with the ladies: Don’t make the first move.

Second rule: If you break the first rule, forget the lady and go on to someone new. She’s got you by the short hairs and you’re in for a long, rough ride of heartache and misery.

I didn’t care. Try as I could, I just couldn’t shake Donna, get her out of my mind. I had to face it, she owned me, my mind anyway and whatever else you got will follow what goes on upstairs. Time after time, I thought on it and kept coming up with the same thought. I’d rather be miserable with or without her than be happy with someone else. Dumb? Sure. But your dick ain’t got an I.Q. and neither does your heart. Maybe they’re one and the same, sometimes I guess they are, and sometimes they aren’t. I mean, I think that thing everybody calls love is maybe just more than sex, although sometimes that’s all it is but there were times, like with Donna, I could just lay there looking in her brown eyes and not even be thinking about sex with her, just wanting to smell her breath. She has this little chip on one of her front teeth that drives me crazy. I’d lay on the floor staring at her, both of us stretched out and just mug for hours into those eyes, the whole time aching for a peek at that tooth. I knew all I had to do was crack a joke and she’d smile and I’d see it but I’d play it out forever, holding back the jokes, whatever, until I couldn’t stand it any longer and then, man! I couldn’t hold back any longer, would say something funny and she’d grin and there was that tooth with that tiny little chip in the corner. In some ways, that kind of stuff was ten times better’n sex. Man! Sometimes I don’t even understand my own screwy self.

“Who you sending that to?” Bud said, when I got back in the car. “That broad’s got you all fucked up?”

“Sometimes you got a big nose,” I said.

“Good thing I ain’t got big tits,” he came back with. “You’d be mailing me love notes alla time, then.”

I got home the next morning there was a dog in my bed. A fucking German Shepherd, big as a sofa.

“Get the fuck out of there!” I yelled at him and grabbed the skin on his neck and pulled him off. He didn’t want to come but I got him down.

“Where the hell did this dog come from?” I screamed at Bud, laying on the other bed. He was smoking a doobie. I didn’t ask him where he got it or where he got the money for it. Should have figured he was holding out on me but for some reason it didn’t piss me off. That dog did though. I hate friggin’ dogs. Ever since that time at the Out of Towner Motel in South Bend when the cop sicced his mutt on me after I was cuffed. Fucking dog bit my back through a jacket, a wool shirt, a t-shirt and I lay on my stomach for two days in the cell before they sent me over to the hospital for stitches.

“I don’t know,” Bud said, staring at the TV where an old Lucy show was going on, Lucy and Ethel on some kind of production line, dressed up in white chef’s hats and aprons and the cupcakes or whatever they were supposed to be icing, going haywire, falling off the line all over the place. “He was outside the door and seemed hungry so I let him in. He likes beer.”

Plus, he’s got the radio on. Some Top Forty bullshit. I hate Top Forty. I’d rather listen to country, hillbilly shit than Top Forty. Talk radio. I’d rather listen to talk radio. I turned it off and Bud didn’t even seem to notice.

The goddamn dog was stoned, I could see that in a second, and kept wanting to sniff my crotch. I hate that, stupid dogs.

“His name’s Spot.”

I looked at the dog and gave him the knee as he was trying for my balls again. I didn’t see any spots on him. He was mostly dark brown with a gray ring around his neck and he had one blue eye and one brown one. Fucked-up looking dog if you ask me. Now he was trying to lick my face. Disgusting things, dogs. First they lick your balls and then they try to lick your face. Makes you really want to hang with a dog, you know?

“Hey, don’t hurt him,” Bud said, when I kicked Spot in the slats. The dog didn’t even whimper even though I cracked him pretty good. Must have been used to being kicked. Bud whistled, or tried to, it was a pretty sick whistle and the dog came over to him. He scratched his ears and talked baby talk to him. It’s disgusting, the way some people are with dogs. This dog smelled too. He was making my stomach roll.

“Dogs are better’n broads, Jake, you know that? You gotta talk to broads after you fuck them, entertain ‘em. You talk to dogs, they don’t talk back, give you any shit, they listen to you like you’re God. Hey, wouldn’t it be great, find a babe like that!”

I thought about saying, Yeah, well you got a dog already, name of Kimmie but I didn’t. Say that, that is. It was true though. Bud’s girlfriend kind of looked like this dog. I wondered if he scratched Kimmie’s ears, talked baby talk to her. Maybe I’d ask him sometime. Sometime when I wanted a black eye.

“I hate dogs,” I said and went into the bathroom to get a beer. We still hadn’t got a cooler although we’d talked about it. Just kept the beer in the sink, got ice for it every once in a while from the motel ice machine down the hall. I saw there was something blue on the ice and then figured out Bud must have brushed his teeth. I rinsed the can of beer a long time before I popped the top.

“I had a dog just like this once,” Bud was saying, still slobbering over the mutt, kissing him back on the muzzle. Yech!

“Belonged to Marty Simmons.” he said. “You know Marty? He was the inmate librarian at Pendleton when we was there. We got cut loose the same time but Marty didn’t even last a day on the streets.”

He was wrestling with the dog now which I didn’t appreciate much. It made him smell even worse. The dog, not Bud. Well, Bud too. Bud went on about Marty Simmons.

“We get off the bus in Fort Wayne and Marty’s not there five minutes he swipes a newspaper from the stand. ‘Course, with his luck the lady behind the counter spies him and calls the cops and there musta been a coffee shop just around the corner ‘cause they were there in twenty seconds flat. I offer to pay for the paper but they must have had a hard-on ‘cause they say fuck no, we’re taking him in. Get us another ex-con off the streets says the other one, his partner. ‘Bud,’ Marty says to me, they’re leading him away in cuffs. ‘Go by my old lady’s house and get my dog. She says I don’t show up and get him she’s taking him to the pound.’ Well, I did what he said, went by his old lady’s house—it was only three blocks away like he said—and sure enough she had this German Shepherd she was taking care of till Marty got out. He was right too—she said he didn’t come by that very day she was shipping him off to the pound. I got the dog and took him home. Great pet. Had that dog for almost six months before he got hit by a bus.”

“So how come Simmons didn’t get him when he got out?” I couldn’t believe stealing a newspaper would keep Marty behind bars for long.

“Oh, he got whacked. In the jail. They were just about ready to cut him loose—they just wanted to fuck with him a little on account of him being an ex-con. When I went down there to see if he was getting cut loose, the cop who’d busted him, the little one, was there. He was laughing. Said Simmons was dead, wouldn’t be snatching any more newspapers. Seems he got iced by a big fag-junky who got offended when Marty didn’t want to get romantic. Cut his throat with a double-edge razor blade match-welded onto a toothbrush.”

We’d both seen that little trick plenty of times.

“You know how it is in city lockup, Jake. Jail’s fucking worse than the joint, kind of trash you get in there.”

He was right on with that statement. The problem with jails, city, county, it don’t matter, is that lots of the guys you run into have just been thrown in there and are still drunk or high or whatever. In the joint, most of the guys have settled down, got the chemicals out of their system. Plus, there’s ways to avoid trouble, better than there is in most lockups where everybody’s put together in one big bullpen.

“So anyway, I end up keeping Marty’s dog. His name was Spot too. I seen this dog and it was like déjà vu. Maybe it’s the original Spot, looks a lot like him. You think dogs get reincarnated like Hindus do?”

I didn’t know and I didn’t care. I couldn’t say much though. The room was half Bud’s.

“Just keep him the fuck away from me,” I warned. “And give him a bath. He stinks.”

There was something on Bud’s mind he wanted to talk about, it seems. He was getting antsy. Unable to find work, unable to work even if he did find something, he laid around the motel room all day. He couldn’t even drink beer with the dose he was getting over. Only he did. The doc had said the symptoms might last a couple or three days. He drank anyway or tried to. Swig down two, three swallows and then he’d be in the john, sweat popping out on his forehead when he tried to squeeze a few drops out. I was getting tired of his bitching and moaning all the time. Now, if it wasn’t Bud whining, it was the dog. Picture all this in a room not much bigger than my cell back in the joint. I guess I was getting testy.

“You an alcoholic, Bud? Just lay off that stuff another day or two and you’ll be fine. Wise up. Listen to what the doc told you. Take your dog out for a run, make you feel better. A good long run, maybe for about a week. See if you can lose him maybe.

“Fucking dogs, anyway. My first bust a dog fucked me up. We’d just hit a bar—I think it was the fifth or sixth place that night and we’ve got TVs, cases of whiskey, rolls of quarters, all kinds of shit in the car. That was a great car, too.” I stopped my story for a minute thinking about that car. It was a ‘62 T-Bird, burgundy with a white leather interior. Class machine.

“It’s about four in the morning and we decide to call it quits. I’m taking Rat and DuWayne home and I was stopped at a red light at the corner of Ironwood and Lincoln Way, going south.

“This car comes around the corner behind us, back where Martin’s Supermarket is and the light is flashing. It could have just been a taillight out or something like that but with all the stuff in the car I didn’t feel like taking a chance. Besides, this was when the South Bend Police Department had all the Larks. Remember that?”

Somebody sapped the South Bend P.D. into buying these Studebaker Larks for patrol cars. Anybody remembers the Lark remembers they were total dogs on wheels. Six-bangers that could get up to fifty with a good tailwind maybe so long’s they had twenty minutes to unwind. Outlaws all over town, professionals and amateurs, had a field day with those pooches. Kids would squeal their tires in front of one of them and pull away in second gear. The cops hated them. Couldn’t catch a bicycle with more than two speeds. The chief of police that okayed buying them got laughed out of office next election and they just scrapped the whole entire fleet, bought Fords with Police Interceptors under the hood. It was nice while it lasted, though. Sweet.

“I took off from this turkey and hit the railroad track across the street—you know where it goes almost straight up?—and went airborne on the other side. I got a look at the speedometer just before we hit the top of that hill and it was already pegged over a hundred.

“We come down and all you seen was sparks but I kept my foot on the gas and we’re going down the street at one-twenty, although it coulda been faster—that’s just what it said on the speedometer.

“Ironwood narrows down there because of the residential neighborhood, stop signs every single block but I run them all.

“That’s when DuWayne—he’s in the back seat—starts screaming, ‘Let me out! Let me out!’ I look back and he’s got tears running down his cheeks and I said, ‘Hey, DuWayne, there’s the door. You want out go ahead.’

“I tell Rat and him to get down on the floor and DuWayne hits it so fast I thought he went out the door after all but he only fell to the floor crying and sobbing like he probably did when he was two and somebody stole his lollipop. I think he peed his pants too. There was something in the air wasn’t burning rubber.

“All this time we’re smoking down Ironwood. I got the peg buried and the cop is so far behind us I can’t even hardly see his lights anymore. Just then I see red lights up ahead of us, reflected in the sky.

“‘They called ahead,’ Rat says, like I can’t see the same thing he does. ‘This is close to my house,’ he says. ‘Turn there! I’ll get us out of here.’ Only it’s not the right street—it’s a dead end which we find out at the end of a very long block and now we can see the flashes of the cops’ lights and they’re close.

“We got to hit it on foot,” I said. “Grab what you can.” We all hit the silk. I grabbed a money bag had rolls of quarters and took off across a lawn. I could see a woods behind it. Where Rat and DuWayne went I didn’t have a clue. Time like that it’s every man for himself.

“Way it turned out, I get behind this house and into this woods and through it and I’m in this big-ass field with another woods in front of me and that’s what I’m heading for and I hear this heavy breathing and footsteps behind me and it’s Rat.

“‘Where’s DuWayne?’ I ask and Rat doesn’t know, he just took off after me and has just now caught me. His house where he lived with his mother is about three miles straight ahead in the direction we’d been running. We decided to head for there. DuWayne and I were staying at the Out of Towner Motel just a couple of blocks away.

“We kind of ran, then walked, then ran some more and along the way we came up with a plan. We’d get our butts to Rat’s house, get out of our clothes which were soaked and pick up his car—this was winter and there was about a foot of snow on the ground—then head over to the Out of Towner, see if DuWayne had made it there and then we figured we’d head to New York. We figured there was so many criminals in New York they wouldn’t even bother looking for three small-time burglars from Indiana.

“We got to Rat’s house okay and his mom never even woke up. She’s a stone alkie so I guess she was in her usual coma. We got our wet clothes off and grabbed some of Rat’s and put them on and went out and climbed in his car.

“Drive by the motel first,” I told Rat. I didn’t think there was any way the cops would know where we were staying but there was no sense in taking chances. We pulled into the all-night gas station next to it and filled up and then just pulled across the drive into the motel’s parking lot.

“There was a guy downstairs at the desk looked like he’d fallen asleep reading a magazine. He woke up for a second when we came in and then just nodded and started pretending to read his magazine again like he hadn’t been asleep on duty.

“We walked upstairs to where our room was and I dug in my pocket looking for my key. Rat kind of pushed on the door and it opened a little bit. I looked at him and pushed the door wider. I couldn’t see a thing as it was dark inside. DuWayne? I said, taking a step inside. See, I was thinking somehow DuWayne had beat us back and was sitting inside, probably shaking in his boots and wondering what in the hell he was going to do next.

“Then, BOOM! All hell bust loose. There were guys all over Rat and me like stink on shit and I was down on the floor on my knees when somebody smacked me in the back of the head and then somebody else was kicking me and there was this fucking German Shepherd chawing at my arm. It was the cops, only it took a couple of minutes before I realized what had happened. I found out later that stupid-ass DuWayne had never even tried to make a run for it. Just sat in the car and waited for the cops. They found the motel key in his pocket and had it all staked out long before we even got there.

“Well—now this is the part I’m getting to, about why I don’t like dogs, Bud—they get us cuffed up after they smacked us around a little—you ever been busted when they didn’t hit you? I never have. They always have to whale on you. Makes ‘em feel tough I guess, to beat up on somebody’s got handcuffs on. Major macho cop shit.

“They’ve got me cuffed behind my back and on my knees and bent over this couch is out in the hallway. And the German Shepherd is biting my back. I’ve got a jacket on, a sweater, a flannel shirt and an undershirt and this fucking dog goes through that like it’s the wrapper on a Hershey bar. I’m getting nailed by this dog—fuck, I can feel the blood running down my sides and these asshole cops are laughing. Finally, when they get enough jollies watching me get eaten alive by this mutt they jerk me up and start downstairs.

“They’re taking us downstairs to the squad car and I’ve got my hands cuffed behind me and this dog is trying to eat my cojones. The cop that’s dragging me is laughing and lets me in on the fact that these dogs are trained to go for the nuts or the throat. I’m walking like I’m spastic, trying to keep Rover from munching on the crown jewels and they think it’s a riot.

“Finally we get to the car and they put the dog in the back seat with me. Two of the cops climb in the front all the time this dog’s growling and taking nips out of my leg. ‘This is Joe,’ the one cop says, meaning the dog—he’s talking to me—and he just graduated from obedience school. At the bottom of his class. He’s hard to control, that dog is.’ They both hoot it up at that.

“Anyway, I’m in the St. Joe County Lockup and I got to lay on my stomach for two days before they send me to the hospital and get stitches. My back’s infected and this doctor doesn’t believe in wasting Novocain on degenerates like me when he’s sewing them up, so what I’m telling you, Bud, is—I-HATE-FUCKING-DOGS—especially German fucking shepherd dogs which is what that one over there is and this one looks exactly like that dog Joe that did this to me.”

I showed him my back, the scars, but he didn’t seem very sympathetic. He did try and keep Spot away from me the rest of the night. I don’t think it was my welfare he was concerned with though. I think Bud was more worried about his mongrel mutt and what I might do to him.

***

“I been thinking,” he said the next night, finally bringing up what was bothering him. I kind of had an idea what was coming, things he’d been saying. “This sucks, this place.”

“It’ll get better,” I said. We were lying back on the beds watching the tube, sucking on beers. The mutt was behaving for once, lying down on the floor beside Bud’s bed. A great movie, “The Hustler”, one of my all-time favorites was on. Paul Newman was doing some shots I wanted to try myself. Both on the table and back at his apartment with the broad he was shacked up with. Little crippled broad when she was walking around, an Olympic athlete when she laid down. “We get ahead some, things’ll look rosy again. Hang in there, pard.”

“No,” he said, swinging his legs around and standing up. “No, it won’t. I can’t stand this place, Jake. Everybody talks like a hillbilly, can’t understand them.”

“They are hillbillies,” I said, snorting. “I think they sound kinda cute. You’re just pissed ‘cause you can’t nail one, bein’s you got a tragic disease.” I wasn’t doing too hot in the romance department either. Seems none of the gals I met at work wanted much to do with a swamper. Mostly, they treated me like I was retarded or something.

“I’m going back, Jake. I’m gonna go call Kimmie, see if she’ll let me move back in.”

There was no talking him out of it. His mind was made up. I seen, after arguing for just a little bit, trying to talk him out of it that this was something he’d been thinking on for a while. I gave up, said fuck it.

“Hey, you gotta go, you gotta go.”

One thing you learn quick in the hustle game is not to get attached to anyone. We all move around, scuffle here and there. There’s no marriages nor partnerships made in heaven the way we live. Bud was a good pard and we’d hook up again someday I figured. That was another thing. Partners come and they go and when you meet up again it’s like you just seen them the day before even if it’s been maybe ten years since you’ve run into ‘em. That’s the nice thing about being in our corner of society—your friends are friends for life whether you see them every day or not. Same way with your enemies. Guys are all the time grudge-fucking somebody.

All I could do was wish Bud luck, which I did.

Once he made up his mind it didn’t take long to put his plan into motion. All he had to do was throw his stuff in his suitcase and I was driving him down to the Greyhound station, next morning. Guys like us didn’t stand on ceremony and sit around and suck our thumbs. We decided something we did it. Just like that.

“Kimmie gave me a ration,” he said when he came back from calling her, “but she come around. I told her how much I missed her sweet lovin’ and she like to make me come over the phone. You get back to the Fort, give me a call. I’ll be at the old pop stand.”

I give him twenty bucks and he bought a bottle of Jim Beam, a fifth, and a oyster po-boy at the shop across from the station and he was set in style for his ride back to Indiana.

“What you gonna do about your dog?” I wanted to know. We’d left him back at the motel with a water dish full of beer.

“Shit. I don’t know. I forgot about him. Tell you what, you take care of him. Just for a day or so. I get back to Fort Wayne I’ll send some money, you put him on a plane or something. Just be a few days.”

Sure, you bet, I thought but didn’t say anything, just nodded. He couldn’t hold me to any promise I hadn’t actually made.

“I’ll think about you when the snow’s ten feet deep up there,” I said and we shook hands and he swung up the steps and that’s the last I seen him, they had those smoked windows on the bus where you can’t make any of the passengers out.

I felt kind of sad but that’s the way it goes. You don’t stand in anybody’s way any more than you’d want them to stop you from what you wanted to do. That’s what makes a pard better than a wife any day.

Soon as I got back to the motel room, I collared the dog and drug him out to the car. The best place I found was that swamp we slept by the first night in town.

“Go on,” I said, giving him a little kick. The mutt trotted forward a few feet and sat down on his haunches and looked at me. “Bye-bye, Spot,” I yelled out the window. “Go find yourself a big alligator to play with.”

That night I got lucky, got a girl, one of the waitresses to come back to the motel with me, and then I felt better about things.

This girl, her name was Nancy but everybody just called her Sugar, was one sweet cookie in bed and we had us a good time and all...but I couldn’t help thinking about Donna the whole time. It musta been because Bud had left for Indiana made me think about the folks back there, her especially.

Sugar left, said she had to get back before her husband came rolling in from his nightly drunk and as soon as she left, I picked up my notebook and a pen and began writing.

“Dear Donna,” I began and damned if I wasn’t stuck for something to say.

Finally I put down, “I have tried to get you out of my mind but that is the IMPOSSIBLE DREAM. How about you? Do you think of YOURS TRULY ever?” Once I got going the writing came easy. I ended up with about six pages of mostly mush which is a lot for me. I tried not to talk about her stabbing Patsy and all that stuff, just tell her how I felt about her. After, I sealed it shut I put the stamp on upside down, wondering if she’d catch that.

About the only stupid thing I didn’t do was put S.W.A.K. on the dumb envelope.

Then I ran down to the mailbox on the corner and mailed it before I came to my senses.

I guess I got it bad.

Then, to make it worse, I hear something at the front door, sounds like scratching. Four a.m. in the morning it was. It was that cocksucking dog, Spot. A regular Lassie-come-home. I went back in and tried to ignore him but he kept on scratching and then whining and then just regular barking. I let him back in, gave him some beer and some of the fries from McDonald’s me and Sugar hadn’t eaten and he scarfed it down and jumped up on Bud’s bed.

“Tomorrow,” I said. Like I was talking to a regular person. “Tomorrow we’re gonna take a long ride. A real long ride.”

God! That dog sure smelled! Like somebody’s old socks, only worse.