Thrill-Bent Read online

  “Miss Sybil?” I whisper. No response. I retrieve the crumpled flyer from my pocket and smooth it out on her card table. Then I wave it slowly, fanning her sullen, elderly face. Gradually she swims up from the deep, and I note the stages of her emergence: Anger, Denial, Bargaining, Depression, and, finally, Acceptance. That’s when she rights herself and covers her legs with her robe, snatches my flyer from midair, and clears her throat violently.

  “Ten dollars,” she says flatly, after she has coughed some phlegm into an old tissue she found in her pocket. She has a slight Southern accent, which might explain the “Miss” part—more a rank than a marital status, antiquated as Miss Daisy. She gestures for me to sit down on the other metal folding chair.

  On the opposite side of the tent, a white sheet with a red cross sewn onto it is strung between tent poles. Is a makeshift first aid clinic really necessary for such a small carnival? On the other hand, I’ve heard apocryphal accounts of a staffed medical facility outside the old el Serpiento de Fuego in Mexico City, where so many riders were injured that the proprietors decided, instead of softening the “spaghetti bowl” turns, to offer post-ride plaster casts and prescription painkillers free of charge.

  From where I sit, I have an angled view into part of the clinic beyond, where a bright red young man hobbles in circles, groaning in agony. A nurse walks with him, impatiently hoisting a plastic pail between them, positioned just under his chin. It is a scene out of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. At first I am confused: has the Giant Dipper rattled this boy’s brains so thoroughly that he has been startled into schizophrenia? But then I realize: here is the essence of the old Belmont Park that I was looking for! Sunburned kids drinking twelve packs at noon and riding the Zipper! Only now there is a tent for them to report to, and a sterilized white bucket purchased especially to contain their foolhardy vomit.

  Miss Sybil takes my hand and cranks it open on the table, palm up. I’m relieved that there is no fringed shawl draped over her junky card table, no candles or other gypsy-esque furnishings cluttering her bare-bones aesthetic. Perhaps Miss Sybil is the real thing; she feels no compunction to spruce up her little corner here—or to get dressed, even—because she knows that her talent is the star of the show. Is it a talent? Or a skill set? A gift for the grift?

  “Ten dollars,” she repeats, in a lower voice this time, as she traces my palm with her dry middle finger and gives me a serious once-over. Her irises are light gray, like iron, and for some reason I feel taken by surprise by this feature. As though she has snuck up on me with her eyes.

  “Right,” I say, pulling away from her grip and producing a ten-dollar bill from my pocket. She takes it and the money immediately vanishes, tucked away somewhere on her person.

  Back to my hand, she frowns. “Your lifeline is broken in half.” She shakes her head. “Very unusual. Have you had a bad car accident? Or a murder attempt?”

  “A murder attempt?” I have the nerve to laugh. This is what she’s opening with?

  “Watch your back,” she advises, not amused. She takes another coughing/phlegm-spitting break, then presses the spongy part of my palm a few times, hard. “That can also mean that you live two lives.”

  “Two lives? What do you mean?”

  She looks up at me. “You are not always authentic,” she says. “A part of you, maybe from your past, has developed and is coexisting with you. So you are living two lives: yours, and hers.”

  I can’t resist. “You mean, like Sybil?” I’m not sure if she’ll get my reference to the TV miniseries from the 1970s in which Sally Field played a woman with nineteen different personalities and as many corresponding poly-blend wardrobes. I waggle my eyebrows.

  Miss Sybil doesn’t blink, and continues her tour of my hand. “I think you know exactly what I mean,” she says, almost to herself.

  Before leaving Belmont Park, I buy some cotton candy for Betty. They still have one of those medieval torture machines that makes it fresh, staffed by an angry, aproned lunch-lady type who scowls at me for merely ordering. She dips the paper cone expertly into the spinning sugar, which flies onto it like it’s magnetic, and orbits the machine with a couple of slow turns of her wrist. Through an arch cut in the plexiglass booth, she reluctantly hands me the baby-pink cloud of floss. It is perfectly whorled, like she has created a new gas planet, wind-blown and carcinogenic, impossible to walk on. I don’t want to mar its fluffy surface, but when I get out to the car I realize I have nowhere to put the cotton candy where it won’t get ruined. It doesn’t fit in the cup holder, and I can’t even imagine the consequences of laying the thing down on the passenger seat. I try strapping the seatbelt around it like it’s a honey-baked ham, which works about as well as you’d expect. No, the eight-dollar pink ghost will need to be carefully held upright during the entire drive back to the hotel.

  I back slowly and jerkily out of the parking space, spinning the steering wheel with one hand and with the other thrusting the cotton candy up high, like I’m toasting a bride or handling the Olympic torch. The same officious kid with the polo shirt guides me out of the lot and onto Mission Boulevard, and he salutes me good-bye as I turn. I salute back with the cotton candy, accidentally shredding a giant pink feather onto my bangs.

  “Oh my God!” Betty screams when I kick open the motel room door. “Cotton candy!” I knew, with her love of kitsch, that she would appreciate the effort. But she gets bored after a couple of sticky finger-fulls, and I end up eating $7.50 worth as we sit on the bed and clean out our purses.

  “I always clean out my purse when I’m at a motel,” she says. “I think it’s because I can just leave all the shit that’s collected at the bottom on the bedspread, without feeling guilty.” Sure enough, she upturns her Longchamp tote bag and out spills shreds of tobacco and sand and wadded gum wrappers and old pennies and a few of those tiny packets of salt you get at movie theaters. “So, how was the dealio?”

  I tell her about Morticia and the vomiting sunburned boy. I leave out the part about Miss Sybil. I know Betty will make fun of her, or at the very least her eyes will flare and she’ll demand more sordid details, and I feel strangely defensive about the whole experience. Though I immediately reacted with sarcasm to Miss Sybil’s pronouncement that I have been living two parallel lives, I now—thirty minutes later—feel compelled to protect the idea from the acerbic clutches of my clever benefactress and confidante. Those mustard-yellow bruises on Miss Sybil’s upper thighs hang in my vision like vitreous floaters or ragged, tufted clouds.

  Your Mouth Is Open

  Leonardo DiCaprio’s best friend’s band may have been signed to a major label, but they haven’t started playing arenas quite yet. Pussy Posse is headlining at the Rock Shop, a small San Francisco club where anti-smoking laws are moot and obscenely cartoonish posters cover the walls like Maoist propaganda. In one, Lucy gives Charlie Brown a blowjob; in another, Nancy and Sluggo go at it doggy-style.

  It is a Friday night and the club is already crowded. “I’m so fucking sick of fucking guitars,” we overhear a gaunt, pasty guy say to a gaunt, pasty girl as we enter and get our wrists stamped with little mushroom clouds. “I wanna see somebody get up there and play, like, a fucking fire extinguisher!”

  There are three bands in the line-up, and one is onstage when we arrive: Pattycake consists of three girls in mini-skirts with varying shades of pink hair, playing bubblegum TV theme-song music on tiny strap-on keyboards while posing and pouting. “Taste me, taste me, come on and taste me!” they sing in unison. Betty and I order PBRs and take them out to the patio.

  “There’s Jamie,” Betty says as we step out the back door. She nods toward the staircase leading to the “green room,” a tiny redwood cupola built on top of the patio balcony, basically the only place for band members to go in order to smoke pot or shoot heroin or eat a burrito outside of the radar of drunkish rabid fans. I see a lanky man in brown suede pants slip into the cupola, his large afro d
ipping slightly to clear the diminutive doorframe. His hair is the same color as his pants.

  “Who’s Jamie?” I ask.

  “Hey Jamie!” Betty shouts. His chestnut head bobs back out of the portal just as swiftly as it ducked in, and he quickly surveys the landscape of rock swine strewn across the patio. We are a motley assortment of sadsacks—mostly white nerd-hip boys in full beards and plaid fedoras wearing ’70s shirts bought at Christmastime visits to thrift stores in their hometowns—and their counterparts, skinny girls with Beatleoid mops of hair, stovepipe black jeans, and checkered Vans; a few neophytes in high heels and salon haircuts, probably hoping in vain that Leo will show up at some point in the evening; a white guy with silver dreads and a pierced chin; and one chubby pigtailed chick in a cowgirl outfit smoking a clove cigarette. Jamie spots Betty, turns and salutes. His face, straight-on, is too wide and two-dimensional; his jaw extends like a wingspan, making him look like some kind of comic-book hero. Betty turns to me and takes my hand, smiling furtively. “A little surprise for you,” she says. “I met Jamie on MySpace. He plays drums in this band called Staggering Genius.” She sees my blank expression. “He has Tourette’s,” she whispers.

  Jamie grabs the handrail at the top of the stairs. Slowly and deliberately he leans forward to lever his body up. His shoulders thrust downward and his biceps bulge, hips slowly lifting behind him, at first almost imperceptibly, and then his feet are hovering off the ground like disembodied souls. I wonder if he is going to leapfrog the railing in slow-motion, hurling himself into midair just to prove that he is worthy, in spite of that disconcerting jaw. I almost yell, “No!” but what comes out is a brief, grunting “Nnn” as though I am constipated or deaf. I glance at Betty and she laughs, still watching Jamie intently. He has levitated now into a handstand position, and his legs wobble and kick delicately, like a swimmer trying not to make a splash. I think, this is it: “Tourettic Indie-Rocker Dies In Tragic Handstand Mishap”—but then his hips swivel and his feet come to rest on the top of the doorframe behind him. He smiles, like he’s done this a million times. He even lifts one hand and slaps at his mouth five or six times in frenzied succession, like a child approximating an Indian war cry. Somehow he manages to stay upside-down and vertical with just one arm supporting him. Finally, his hips gracefully descend back to the earthly plane, and he breaks into a drum roll, performed on the flat top of the railing, a little trill of fingered exuberance that finishes up his clown-alley act perfectly. He smiles and waves. I scrutinize his narrow back as it disappears into the doorway once more.

  “Your mouth is open,” says Betty.

  I look around at the crowd on the patio and it seems that no one has even noticed the performance that just took place above their heads. Three bearded guys next to us continue their conversation about Krispy Kreme donuts.

  “They’re not crispy, and they’re not creamy, for fuck’s sake,” the one in the gold Flagstaff Pie Alley shirt says. “I mean, somebody should sue them for false advertising!” The other two nod their heads seriously like yeshiva students unraveling a Talmudic riddle. Behind them, the oblivious cowgirl smokes and waits, her deep dimples gouging her cheeks with every inhale.

  “What’s his MySpace handle?” I ask Betty.

  “Ticsaplenty,” she says, giving me a what could I do? shrug.

  I am half-appalled that Betty has been trolling MySpace for dudes who might possibly have complex nervous system disorders in order to help me realize my lifelong dream of having sex with someone with Tourette’s (at least I think that’s her intention), but I’m half-flattered that she would use her cyber superpowers to arrange an intricately plotted surprise for me. She must have offered up Pussy Posse as a smoke screen when she realized that Jamie’s band would be here tonight too. Despite my ambivalence about Betty’s surprise attack, I am unequivocally delighted that the overrated Pussy Posse has managed to serve as an alibi for so many of her intentions. Thanks to Leo’s narcissistic friend Kevin (Betty pointed him out to me as he pushed past us toward the green room: he was wearing wrap-around sunglasses and literally snapping his fingers at his roadie), she got: an all-expenses-paid California vacation (and therefore a chance to see the Condor in [in]action); an opportunity to provide a cool but slightly creepy shock for me just when I am feeling extraordinarily weird and confused about all things Tourettic; and a brilliant digital snapshot for her column of someone wearing a T-shirt, obviously homemade, featuring the faces of Leonardo and Kevin and the words Puthy Pothy.

  “Malena!” Betty shouts. How does Betty know the bartender at a semi-obscure rock club in San Francisco? Through some alchemical combination of social media, her column in BadMouth, and sheer good looks, Betty tends to know more people intimately than I will probably meet in my lifetime.

  Malena is one of those bartenders whose persona is so honed that you really don’t have to do more than glance at her to know all the important facts. She spends most of her tips on clothes and make-up; she knows everything about everyone; she used to be a man.

  “Betty Crocker!” Malena loudly announces to the bored-looking short-banged girls at the bar, “Come make us a cake from scratch!” She is vaguely Asian and vaguely Latin; with her smooth skin and dark, full lips, she is strikingly gorgeous. She tosses her long black hair—a wig?—and leans all the way across the wide bar to plant a kiss on Betty’s mouth. I can hear the wet quack from three feet away.

  As she refills our beers, her voice changes from a high-pitched feline squeak to a growly stage-whisper just loud enough for everyone on this side of the club to educe. “Are you going to hang around for the after-party?” she asks, “We’re having a little private party for Kevin on the patio later. Only the crème de la crème.”

  “We’re very creme-y,” says Betty, handing me my beer. “No lumps at all.”

  “We regularly rise to the surface,” I chime in.

  Malena doesn’t seem amused, but she doesn’t withdraw her invitation either. “Sweet!” she says dismissively as she turns to trot on her high heels toward a cockrocker at the other end of the bar with a bleach-blond soulpatch inside a black goatee. I can’t tell if she’s being sarcastic.

  “Sweet!” I repeat in a whisper to Betty, attempting to approximate Malena’s bitchy-yet-perky delivery.

  She laughs. “As opposed to sour, I guess.”

  Pattycake’s boyfriends are breaking down their gear when we approach the stage. The ’cakes linger offstage and receive compliments from male fans while three big punkabilly guys wind cords around their arms and tuck the sherbet-hued electric keyboards into tiny coffinlike cases. When one of the boyfriends picks up a pearly pink Casio with one hand and holds it above his head in order to disengage its cord, I picture King Kong holding a subway car in his giant mitt like it’s a piece of glittering jewelry. Meanwhile, Jamie and his bandmates filter in through the crowd with their equipment, hoisting big pieces of gear onto the stage and tripping up the beefy Pattycrew.

  I always enjoy these transitional moments in rock clubs. No matter how glamorous or ultra-modern the act, this blue-collar downtime ruptures the image. Even in high-class yuppie-lounge venues, there is just no way to facilitate a totally smooth shift from one band to another, unless you have multiple stages. And even then, somebody is always dropping some part of a drum kit and causing a brief expository head-turning clang.

  “Have you noticed that there seem to be an increasing number of band names out there that refer to cool literary wunderkind?” I ask Betty. “I mean, leafing through the music section of the Voice has become some kind of postmodern lit trivia quiz—Vonnegut, Pynchon, Henry Miller, Baudrillard.”

  “Kilgore Trout, Gran Faloonbus, Buddhakowski ... uh ... The Crying of Lot 49,” Betty adds.

  “Obscene Goo!” I chime in.

  “Even Steely Dan was cribbed from Naked Lunch. Remember the milk-spewing dildo? And then there are the Beautiful Losers, after that Leonard Cohen novel.”
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br />   No one names their band after an Edna St.Vincent Millay poem or a Flannery O’Connor short story. That’s because rock and roll is like any other industry: it claims to be co-ed but is actually devoted to the truculent tactics of guys with tattoos on their triceps.

  Jamie jumps down from the stage, where he’s been setting up his drums, and gives Betty a one-armed hug while he clutches his cymbals with the other. We each mumble a shy “hi” as Betty introduces us. I am tempted to say something about his earlier anti-gravity act on the railing, but before I can figure out how to word it, Malena appears and thrusts a pint of beer into Jamie’s free hand.

  “On the house, loverboy,” she says in a sultry whisper, obviously her favorite flirtatious tone of voice. Then she pinches Betty’s ass before she slithers back behind the bar.

  Staggering Genius is a good name for this band, whose black-suited lead singer’s lurching delivery resembles an auctioneer at a county fair. Twenty-five thir-ty, thirty-five for-ty, forty-five fif-ty ... The songs are not so much melodic as incessant, like a speeded-up church chime, the round syllables of vowely words repeating themselves in hurried, echoing rapture.

  I am almost moved to shout out a bid, but I become distracted by Jamie behind the drumset. I peer at him between the heads and hats of my compatriots. He is watching the bass player intently, opening and closing the loop of his mouth like a fish. His playing is fiery and impetuous; he leaves open spaces unexpectedly, ducking out to create sudden silences where the singer presses forward into sharp relief, like a whisperer at a funeral. Between songs, Jamie slaps at his lips with the back of his hand, occasionally scrubbing at one side of his mouth as though it bears the traces of something that offends him—residual popcorn oiliness, or lipstick. The gesture is familiar; the repetition of it is clearly Tourettic. His tic storms are similar in intensity to my dad’s, or to my dad’s erstwhile tic storms, even if the specifics are different. I recognize the dedication to follow through with the compulsion, the blazing energy that infuses the moment.