The old neighborhood is gone. Next door used to be a thicket, home to songbirds and strutting mynahs. How sweetly it lingered, the gossamer complex of X-spiders, an occasional mongoose and a houseless person or two. Now it’s opaque, a monolithic tribute to the will, courage, vision and bankroll of Stan Goodman, who made it big, very big, in waterbeds when the rest of the nation was still sagging into box springs. Twelve thousand square feet of stucco, granite, marble, glass, steel and tiles rise in reverence to Stan. The front deck could host a bowling alley, and waving off the end is a portly, silver-haired woman, calling, “Hell-oh! Hell-oh-oh!”
Getting to know the neighbors doesn’t take long, and some of the old crowd turn up at the grocery store, on the beach or by chance. Talk is warm but sparse, what with everyone aging and the old crowd thinning, mostly returning to America or gone.
Gene is still around but not doing so well, living on coffee and nicotine. But she seems happy, and she damn near cried on seeing Ravid and then she did cry on seeing Skinny. She comes around or he stops in. It’s not like it was, but it’s something.
Crusty Geizen keeled over about a year and a half ago right in the middle of a trip — opened his mouth and bulged his eyes halfway home from a dive site on flat seas under sunny skies, on a day recalled for clarity, with viz running two hundred feet like nobody could remember. Crusty tensed up and toppled, not to worry — gone before he hit the deck, coronary thrombosis.
Crusty met his match, which is deemed a blessing in hindsight, just after he’d confided in a group of game doctors — all men of course — just up from the dive of a lifetime and eager to deepen the bonding process following the act of adventure. He’d told them that he’d reached that point where a perfect day was four hours of work, maybe a dive trip like this one — and yadda yadda to the image of an old, crusty geezer getting a blowjob, with a dash of curiosity on who might deliver, and then the punch line: not bad, I got about two more weeks of yoga to stretch my neck. Then the uproarious laughter broke like a wave.
Maybe Crusty looked a little queasy even then; here, too, hindsight is conjectural. It doesn’t matter. He gladly gave up center arena to a surgeon from Portland, who said this Hawaii is such a wonderful place, and so full of surprises. “Why, I was in Waikiki last week — and I saw this hooker. Beautiful woman, you know. She was everything you might want in a woman, physically speaking. And she’s standing on the corner with this cat under her arm, and I got closer and saw she was holding it backward. I had to look twice, because she had it with the ass end up, and she was licking this cat’s asshole. Beautiful woman, so I says to her, I says, ‘What in the hell you wanna do that for?’ And she says, ‘Oh, that. I just blew a lawyer and I want to get the taste out of my mouth.’”
The next breaking wave took Crusty on a guffaw, what was easy for everyone to call the way he would have wanted it.
Maybe. Crusty was sixty-four. Ravid wants it some other way, wants to find an old friend or any friend to ask about things and maybe find out what to do.
Of course he knows what to do, but viz is down around twelve feet, so he isn’t clear on how to do it.