The Time of Your Life

Jack Steele                                                                                                          3890 wds.

240 Regency Drive

Marstons Mills, MA

508-280-8645

jack steele1@comcast.net

The Time of Your Life

By

Jack Steele

     Charley was a lucky man.  In the late sixties his brother opened a record store in Texas and made a lot of money selling rock and roll and drugs.  Ten years later, about the time Charley was getting tired of being a poor and out of work actor in California, his brother decided he wanted to travel for a while, see the world, and then maybe settle down to write a novel in some faraway country.  He told Charley he could take over the store for nothing and keep whatever it made, as long as he agreed to give the store back if and when he ever decided to return.  No papers were signed.  They didn’t even shake hands.  The brother was long gone by the time Charley showed up in Texas.

     That didn’t concern Charley.  He figured he couldn’t lose, no matter what happened.  It was time, now that he was in his early thirties, to make a change, even if it did no more than give him a little breathing room, a chance to think things over before deciding what to do next.  He knew what he liked to do.  He liked going to movies and the racetrack.  He liked eating and drinking.  He liked making love to his wife.  He liked talking to his daughter in the morning while she ate her cereal before school.  What he didn’t like, unfortunately, was anything that made any money.  He hated working in warehouses.  He hated waiting tables.  He even hated acting, which he was reluctant to admit until the opportunity in Texas came along.

     His wife didn’t want to leave her job or California, but he made her choose and she chose him.  He wasn’t sure why, maybe just for the sake of their daughter, but for the first year or so she had no reason to be sorry.  The store made a lot of money.  She found a job she liked with an oil company.  Their daughter made new friends and seemed happy at school.  They bought a house, modest but it suited their needs, and an almost new car.  The heat was oppressive, of course, and everything was third-rate, even the beaches, but the town, Corpus Christi, was so laid back and inexpensive that they both got used to it, and even began to like it.  “It’s so unselfconsciously tacky,” his wife said one night, approvingly, after putting their daughter to bed.  They’d taken her to a movie that afternoon and then out to a Mexican restaurant.  It’s what they did every Sunday, just as every Saturday they went to the beach and came home to cook steaks, and every Friday ordered pizza.

     Charley could get away from the store any time he liked because of Horacio, the guy who’d always worked there with his brother and literally never left the place.  Horacio was middle-aged, fat, and a walking music encyclopedia.  He bought all the records they sold and all the drugs.  All Charley had to do was help mind the store and pay the bills, which suited him fine.  Horacio was an interesting guy and easy to get along with.  His answer to almost anything Charley said was “Adelante,” which Charley learned quickly was the Hispanic version of “I hear you.”  Horacio spoke softly and walked like a cat.  He knew all the regular customers by name.  He knew their taste in music and in drugs.  With Horacio around, the store seemed to almost run itself, and best of all, the money arrangement was simple.  Charley had to trust Horacio, but he didn’t know why he shouldn’t.  His brother had, for one thing, but more to the point, the profit from the store was more than satisfactory.  Charley even started to think about a bigger house, a brand new car, a sailboat, a trip to Europe.

     Horacio slept on a cot in the storeroom, and his one vice, if you didn’t count being stoned all day and eating too much, was pornography.  For a while Charlie’s daughter had come to the store after school, but that stopped abruptly when his wife saw the stacks of magazines around Horacio’s cot.  Charley had diligently shielded his daughter from them, and he and Horacio had been discreet about the drug transactions that went on when she was there, but his wife decided that the store was no place for their daughter, and that was that.  They found a suitable day care center, and from then on neither his wife nor his daughter ever set foot in the store.  She didn’t give Charley a hard time about it.  She said nothing, and Charley said nothing, and after a while it was as if the store didn’t exist.

     For the first time in his life, Charley found himself in the midst of uneventful days.  He had his routine, his chores and errands and recreations, and he enjoyed Horacio’s company, dealing with customers, listening to music all day, and now and then tooting up a little, just to break the monotony.  After a while, though, perhaps a year or so, he began to think about acting again.  Maybe he didn’t hate it so much after all.  All his life, long before he’d had any training or ambition, and until reality had set in, until humiliation and boredom seemed to be all he’d ever get from it, he’d assumed it was in his blood.  He knew every movie line of every actor he’d ever admired, and that led to acting classes in college and making himself crazy in Los Angeles.  He’d even found a role that he knew he was born to play.  Joe in The Time of Your Life.   

     He’d read the play in high school, and since then he’d seen a couple of productions, including the movie James Cagney made, but in nothing he’d seen had the lead actor even come close to portraying Joe the way Charley read him.  No one could, he’d finally decided.  He knew Joe, knew who he was, and no one else did.  He’d never had a chance to do it, but he’d rehearsed the part nearly half his life, and he knew that his obsession with it was different from his habit of memorizing his favorite movie roles.  It went deeper.  Being Joe sometimes helped him get to sleep at night and up in the morning.  It relieved the tedium of long road trips, of waiting in doctors’ offices, of standing in line at the post office.  He knew he could do Joe, although it wasn’t really a matter of doing it.  He was already Joe, plain and simple, or could be.  The minute he walked on stage or got in front of a camera, no matter the part, he was Joe, which made his rejections in California even more frustrating.  He thought he’d found a charisma, a way of being when he was acting, his voice, so to speak, but no one had noticed yet.  If he wanted he could be Joe every minute of his life, whether he was saying the lines or not, and what happened was, soon after the monotony of each day began to make him reconsider his hatred of acting, soon after the monotony led him to “do” Joe more and more in real life, even more perhaps than he ought to, the chance to do the role of fell in his lap.  One of the store’s best cocaine customers was a heavy backer of a local theater company.

     If it hadn’t been for Charley’s customer, when the original Joe, for reasons no one saw fit to discuss, dropped out two days before the scheduled opening, the part probably would have gone to someone else.  No one knew Charley, but the company was desperate, and Charley’s customer wrote relatively big checks and everyone agreed, after a brief reading, that Charley knew the part and could act.  He had an unusual, even strange, take on the character, they didn’t mind saying, but the audience could probably be relied on to not know or care about the difference.  It wasn’t like they were doing Our Town.  There would be no audience expectations.  Even the director didn’t care how Charley did Joe.  She was doing the play in the first place only for the money it would get for the group.  Another big check writer, a crazy blonde married to a rich oilman, had pestered her into it, and the blonde had been happy with Charley’s reading.

     A week after the play’s run, the crazy blonde pulled up in front of the store in her green Austin-Healey.  She parked in the loading zone and left the motor running.  Horacio was changing records from one of the mellow jazz records he liked to another, and the Healey’s quiet rumble could be heard even inside the store.  That’s why Horacio turned to look when the blonde walked in.  Charley saw the look, but she probably didn’t.  The record player was too near the entrance, and she was busy looking for Charley.  She missed the double take.  Horacio was very sensitive to glamorous women.  Just their photographs could make his mouth water and his eyes bulge out.  In real life, they made it hard for him to control himself, and seeing the blonde actually in the store made him freeze.  He just stood there and held the record over the turntable, and when he finally collected himself enough to put it on, it took him three tries to get the needle placed properly.  That’s why Charley got the cocaine himself.  Several grams, just to make sure, as the crazy blonde waited by the door, her back to them, looking out at the street.  He told Horacio he didn’t know when he’d be back.

     It was the truth, and only the start of what he didn’t know.  Her showing up made him not know a lot of far more important things than that, things he’d taken for granted.  In fact, his whole life fell out of focus.  Whole normal life.  Whole life up until then.  For a while, during the two week run of the play, he had two lives, both in focus.  Now, as the crazy blonde already knew, his wife and daughter were in California for a week, and the store didn’t really mean that much to him.  They hadn’t touched yet, except to shake hands.  She hadn’t even hugged him or pecked him on the cheek, a noteworthy omission given that everyone else in the production hugged and kissed all the time.  What they’d done was smoke cigarettes and stare at each other in the parking lot outside the theater.  And tell their life stories.  She knew his wife and daughter would be gone.  She knew he had plenty of cocaine.  She knew that all she had to do was show up.

     In her life in general, she’d sold out.  That was the point, to hear her tell it, of every episode of her life.  At least he’d gone to California, she told him.  That took courage, never mind that nothing happened.  Her plan had been to go to New York after college.  She’d have a drama degree, try to get into a famous acting school, wait tables and share an apartment with two or three other girls just like her.  An old story, but one that she fell in love with and was eager to live out.  Instead, she got pregnant her freshman year and married a rich boy she didn’t love.  Another old story, but this time she hated it.  “I saw this play in Houston before I dropped out,” she told him, “and ever since then I’ve wanted to live in that bar in San Francisco.”  That was the only explanation she ever gave for bribing the company to produce it.  She called herself an “idiot,” a “rich bitch” and a “slut,” all as if in good humor, not like she was going to slit her wrists over it, but it didn’t really amuse her, he could tell.  She told him she’d had a string of lovers beginning almost immediately after her marriage.  No actors yet, but only because she’d just recently become involved in local theater.  “Giving up my dream hurt so much, I stayed away from it.  Otherwise, you wouldn’t be the first actor,” she said, laughing.  “It’s only because I didn’t know any.”

     Her self-alleged promiscuity had the usual effect, it excited him and made him jealous, but he had no trouble understanding that the point was to warn him off, in case he had any plans beyond fucking her.  Let’s nip that in the bud, she was telling him, and during those eye contact sessions in the parking lot, he had no intention of leaving his wife and child.  He had no intention of any kind, which for the two weeks he was Joe, was easy.  Not every waking moment, maybe, but on the whole he was Joe.  It was like being high for two weeks.  He took no drugs during that time, had exactly two shots of bourbon every night before going to bed, mostly to help him sleep, but it was still like being high.  He lived the part.  During the second week, he was so confident that he often changed the way he said lines without warning the other actors, without even thinking about it, and the miracle was that for the most part they went with it.  It was like being in a jazz band.  He could do anything and they would follow.  Even the director, so indifferent at first, began to show some interest.  Not a lot, but some, and the audience was okay.  Not wonderful, but never hostile.  The newspaper review was just okay too.  The hit he made was with the cast and crew.  He felt like the brilliant soloist, backed by people who understood and applauded him.  It was only Corpus Christi, he knew that, but still.  You’d have to be pretty mean spirited to say it was nothing.

     The only issue, given the crazy blonde, the eye contact, the cigarettes in the parking lot, was his wife, who confused him unmercifully by coming to every performance and understanding him completely.  She was his biggest fan.  She was proud of him, happy for him, and she never thought for a minute that this was something extra, that he’d “found something to do.”  She knew what it meant to him.  She’d been with him at his lowest moments in California.  He’d never allowed himself to express any self-pity to her, but she’d seen his restlessness, his anger and despair.  Seen it and felt it.  Suffered through it.  From it.  Put up with it.  She’d never left him, never even threatened to, but he wouldn’t have blamed her.  And then Texas, she followed him there, maybe even for himself after all and not just their daughter, and then the relative calm, stability, even happiness of that first year.  No wonder she got used to Texas so fast.  At times that first year he’d paid as much attention to her, been as nice to her, loved her as much as he had when they were dating.

     The ennui, which began creeping into his moods after a year, wasn’t nearly as bad as the lowest points in California.  He was just a little indifferent.  Sluggish.  Only someone you’d been married to for ten years would even notice.  It wasn’t satisfactory, though, and it probably would have gotten worse, even bad sooner or later, if not for the good luck of the play.  The play saved their marriage.  Neither of them said that, but both believed it.  You make your own luck, of course, but still, it certainly came along at a fortuitous time, and it was all so perfect, gave him just the boost he needed, that it was hard not to think of it as luck.  “Our good fortune,” is how she put it when things went well, and she liked that way of looking at things and made no apologies for it.  She liked the phrase “meant to be” and everything it implied.  She even said it at a sentimental moment as she was about to board the plane for California.  She whispered it in his ear as she gave him a last hug.  “Don’t forget, Charley.  We were meant to be.”

     The crazy blonde parked the Healey on the beach and they spent most of the afternoon snorting coke and sipping on a bottle of tequila.  It didn’t rain but dark clouds hung over the water.  Now and then they saw lightning.  Only one other car was parked nearby, a junker with the front bumper tied to the frame with a rope.  It belonged to two lean girls in bikinis.  They saw only one person walking the beach, a shirtless old man in a tight fitting bathing suit.  He had a Marine tattoo on one arm, seemed to have a semi-erection, and was throwing bread crumbs to the sea gulls.  Charley wondered if he belonged to the hippie caravan.  Behind them, against the dunes, was a hippie school bus and two Volkswagen buses.  They were there every time he came to the beach, always in the same place.  Like gypsies.

     He still had a choice.  He could tell her to take him back to the store.  He could refuse to touch her.  He could make a speech about how he was happily married and cheating on his wife would ruin his life.  He thought about all of those things, but none of it made any headway.  He didn’t want to change his mind.  He wanted to be right where he was.  He wanted to touch her.  It probably wouldn’t, not in the long run, but he didn’t care if it ruined his marriage.  She was blond, crazy, rich, and glamorous, all good things, but best of all, she very much wanted him to fuck her.  That’s really what made changing his mind difficult, if not impossible.  Sitting so close to her in the Healey, he could feel it.  Her dress was pulled up, her knees apart.  He put his hand on her leg and kept it there as she started the car and drove back down the beach.  She pushed in the clutch, changed gears, pressed the gas pedal down, let up on it, and braked.  He had no idea where they were.  A motel somewhere.  The light in the room was a permanent gray dusk.  It seemed not to change, no matter how much time passed.  He was pretty sure for a long time that they would never stop fucking. 

     He was just as sure later that they’d never stop eating fried oysters.  Deep fried in cornmeal; served with lime and Tabasco sauce.  “If it weren’t so late,” she said, “what we’d do now is rob a bank.  I know just the one, but it’s closed.  Maybe tomorrow.”  Then she told him about it.  A little red brick building with white columns, on a county road in the middle of a maize field.  The best time to rob it would be in the summer when the maize was high.  All granite inside, columns and high ceiling, tellers behind wire cages.  “A throwback,” she said, “to when a bank was a bank.”  She had a .38 revolver, a Saturday night special.  She wanted to walk up to a teller and point it at her face.  “We’d put the money in paper grocery bags.”  “Why?”  “I don’t know.  What else would it fit in?”  She wanted to show him the bank, even though it wasn’t the right time of year, only stubble in the maize fields, and it had gotten dark.  She would point her headlights at the building.  She had a flashlight in the glove compartment, but first they needed to go to a supermarket and get paper bags.  Just in case.  Besides, she had a craving for oranges, so they filled up the bag with them.  He wanted peanuts.  Oranges, peanuts, cigarettes.  The county roads were mostly straight as arrows.  The pretty sound of the well-tuned Healey, a purr, gears changing like chords, the flat bare fields, a few dark farm houses and equipment barns, a moon mostly hidden by fast moving dark clouds.  He knew she wanted a curve.  He knew the feeling.  Speed was good but curves were better.  What she finally decided on was to “float a turn” at an intersection.  “That’s how it will feel,” she said, as she geared down.  “As if we’re floating.  You’ll see.”  She did it twice successfully, and she was right.  A wonderful feeling of slowly turning while being suspended in air.  The third time she went into a ditch.

     “Shit.”  She kept saying that as they sipped tequila.  They snorted cocaine.  They watched the moon race through the clouds.  The Healey wasn’t badly damaged, just high-centered.  The engine still sounded pretty, but they would need a tow truck to get it back on the road.  Neither of them had any idea where they were.  She carried the peanuts; he took the bag of oranges.  There was a light maybe half a mile away.  It was an old farm shack that was now a beer joint.  Two cars in front.  The bar was a piece of plywood over two metal drums.  A horrible looking old woman sat in a chair just inside the open door.  She had scabs on her face that kept moving.  Warm beer in cans.  No one wanted oranges or peanuts.  No phone said the plump woman who served them.  Two greyhounds played pool.  Charley squinted his eyes.  Two men played pool.  They just looked like greyhounds, he told the plump bartender, but got no reaction.  Maybe these people don’t speak English.  He didn’t know the Spanish word for greyhound and thought better of saying dogs, but the humor of it, how they might react if he called them dogs, how he might get his ass whipped, got to him, and he started giggling.  He saw the crazy blonde standing near the pool table, but the next time he looked she wasn’t there.  He’d been trying to cheer up the plump woman behind the bar by telling her the story of his day.  Their day, starting with the crazy blonde showing up at the store, but then he went into a long digression about his wife, then another one about his daughter, somehow it was all okay now, everyone would understand, and then the crazy blonde was gone.  So were the two greyhounds, which gave him an empty feeling in the pit of his stomach, and when he looked back at the plump woman, the expression on her face made him want to go outside.  There was no porch.  Just dirt outside the open door.  He sat down on the ground and leaned back against the wall.  Only one car there, he noted.

     He remembered the warm humid wind in his face and how dark the fields were, but he didn’t remember being put in the Healey.  It was still gray dusk in the motel room.  The crazy blonde lay on her back, stark naked, snoring.  Had they done it again?  He had no idea.  He thought about the cocaine in his pants pocket but didn’t care enough to get up.  Even if it was still there.  Even if it would make him feel better.  But he had to pee, so he might as well.  It did make him feel better, a lot better.  That and a cigarette.  He sat on the edge of the bed, feeling good.  Staring at the wall and feeling good.  It came back to him in spurts.  Shifting gears.  Her legs.  Fucking her.  Fried oysters.  A bank robbery.  Peeling oranges.  Shelling peanuts.  Smoking cigarettes.  Speed.  Floating.  Dark fields.  Greyhounds.  The bartender’s face.  She thought he was a total fool, and maybe he was.  One car.  The Healey.  The wind.  He turned to look at the crazy blond, and he really, really wanted to fuck her again.