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Nancy Zafris BLIP IN A LIMO If you knew Scranton Richie you also knew he'd do anything for attention. If someone told you he hired a white stretch limo to pick him up at the airport even though the guy could have walked home he lived so close, you'd hardly be surprised. What if it came to your attention that he had no flight to be picked up from, that he had driven his Chevrolet Celebrity to the airport, parked in long-term, then walked with his garment bag to Gate 6A Arriving From Boston and blended in with the crowd, picking a nice-looking woman to chat up just so he could ostentatiously excuse himself and head toward the chauffeur waving the cardboard banner of his name? Ditto, no surprise either. In fact, pretty typical, right? And what about the big-shot calls he made on the limo's phone? Guess take-out pizza and a couple of pranks to that half-pretty loan officer who had turned him down, and you'd be right on the money. That was Scranton Richie for you. Him in a nutshell. He liked suiting up in his double-breasted Italian, extending his hand and announcing, "Hello. I'm Scranton Richie." He even said it to the mirror, practicing the sounds of his own name as if he were a hapless immigrant just off the boat and some official had said, "Stanovoi Ryzhkovyetskikh, what the hell is this? Here's your new title, your Highness, Scranton Richie, learn it, welcome to America, next." Fact is, he said his name so much because he loved it. It sounded classy, like some Kentucky Derby owner who'd gone to Princeton. Actually he was born in an automobile in Scranton, Pennsylvania; hence, the Scranton part. And Richie, despite its vocabular flirtation with riches, wealth and blue-blood, was a trusty old hillbilly name. Look it up in the phone book and all the Richies lived on the west side, in Little Appalachia. Fortunately, most of the people he was trying to impress didn't know that because most of the people he was trying to impress weren't hillbillies. God no. At this point was he too old to call himself an orphan? It had helped him get laid a couple of times, the sympathy angle. The death of his parents, to put a positive spin on it, was probably the best thing that had happened to him, not to be disrespectful. But come on, he was born in a car on his exact due date, which was December 20, good time for a snowstorm, not a good time for two twenty-year-olds about to become parents to turn into kids wanting to see Santa at the Scranton Mall. They could have taken a wild guess they should stay home near the hospital in case anything happened, such as labor, which might lead to the birth of their child, all of which might transpire on the day the doctor said it would. But instead they wanted to go see Santa at the Scranton Mall 35 miles away. Both of them were killed sixteen years later by an open-top tourist bus near Hilton Head. That's where he had grown up from age 10--but in the shitty part of Hilton Head, shacks by the sea where mainly black people lived. They all worked as maids for the vacation homes, his mother too. His mother used to have first go at the best jobs until she blew it, showing up late or not at all. They started picking the black women first and that was embarrassing. Then his parents were killed and he got social security for two years until he was 18, and a settlement from the bus company, paid twice, first when he turned 21 and just recently when he turned 25, and he got a surge of the smarts. Saved up, and in a rush moved away, choosing midnight as the time for his departure so it would more rightly seem an escape. He drove his used RV to a trailer park in the Midwest, where it happened not to start the next morning. He was on the road to Los Angeles, to become a model like Ron Goldman, but he had inherited a capacity for inertia from his parents--that was the hillbilly in him--and he ended up staying right where he'd broken down, in Columbus, Ohio. Took up Buckeye residence--safer, maybe the Goldman story wasn't such a positive inspiration--and flopped on the couch. After a while he started worrying about getting flabby and got himself a job at a country club with a Jack Nicklaus signature course and a $31,000 initiation fee, neither of which caused him to blink an eye he was so used to Hilton Head. He could tell right away they liked his good looks; then he reeled them in with his southern accent that was soft rather than ill-bred--that's because he grew up in Pennsylvania the first ten years of his life--man, were some people easy to fool. He was friendly with the members without any starstruck groping and gaping. His hidden grudges, the sloppy poor for example, never came up at a country club, so his temperament on the job was mellow and tension-free, unmolested by secret torments. He could have passed for the handsome privileged son of one of the members, getting in a little honest labor as practice, except such a son wouldn't have driven a Celebrity, which they asked him to park in the service area out back so members wouldn't have to be exposed to it. That was how they said it, "exposed to it," as if he had dropped his pants and snuggled his penis into one of the rich biddy's golf bags where it waited, posing as a seven-iron for her next approach shot. But that was the way they talked at country clubs. He was used to that, too. Why those old rich ladies wore short skirts he would never understand--who wanted to see thigh flesh dripping down in half-molt?--but they wore 'em, there you had it, and there was nothing he could do about it. He accepted the situation without comment to a co-worker or a second glance. He had never known a grandmother. He had no opinion about old ladies, one way or the other. By then he'd ditched the RV and found himself an apartment. The dirty tan bricks of the building suggested government-issue, something built by the WPA and currently leasing its first floor to the bureau of motor vehicles and its basement to the food stamp program, not that it was, it just looked it. The apartment buildings were squeezed into the woods, into what Ohio had once been before it became the Rust Belt. On the road to the apartments an old foundry was collapsed along most of the opposite side of the street, also an auto flattener taking up a couple of lots, a welding garage, Volkswagen repair shop, and a cement supplier with its skyline of sand hills. That was your view before turning into the apartments: a planned community of rust. He had slag for neighbors. No wonder everyone was so excited about rumors of a Dairy Mart. It was as if God had squirted the neighborhood with WD-40. Despite this, there still managed to be a big groundhog and raccoon problem--a little rabies to add to all the tetanus. The woods, such as they were, were pathless, snarly, raging with poison ivy--they were simply a neglected entanglement of leaf and wood that allowed the apartment complex to call itself a Glen. But the worst part--or very best, depending on what side of wicked your sense of humor lay--was the view from the back "decks": the interstate, right where a swing-set would have been. Drivers whizzing by on the interstate must have had a good laugh seeing the lawn chairs and grills set up a few feet away. They must have been pretty happy not to be the people living in those government-issue apartment buildings. Was the owner of the complex getting kickbacks for providing travelers with this moment when they were actually pleased with their own lives? When they actually wanted nothing more than to drive past that apartment building as quickly as possible and get it out of sight? Say they threw you a penny for the feeling. Just a penny a car, a penny a moment, you'd still make a million. Scranton never sat out on the deck. He didn't relish being an object of ridicule. He didn't like wishing three times a second, 180 times a minute, that he was in one of those whizzing cars. When it got too bad he called up the limo service. That woman he chatted up in the airport, coming in from Boston, looking pretty nice too, he couldn't believe she didn't want a ride home. Already he was undressing her in the back seat, the privacy shield going up, he had the olive suit on and the Oleg Cassini designer bag from Odd Lots, he couldn't believe she wouldn't get in with someone who looked like him. Seventy-five dollars for that limo and what did it get him? Seventy-five dollars for take-out pizza and a prank call to that loan officer who wasn't even home. Seventy-five dollars to leave a message on her answering machine. God, he hated Donato's pizza. He sat in his living room, finishing up another beer. Infomercials had started to come on the TV so he knew it was late. Jesus, it was that Mike guy again working all the infomercials, every last one of them. Mike, let me tell you how this dehydrator works. Next channel: Mike, let me tell you how you can turn an ordinary white T-shirt into a work of art. Next channel: Mike, have you ever seen a vacuum cleaner that can work like a mop? Mike! Mike, it's that easy! Mike! Jesus, what a job being Mike. Mike served the same function to the 3 a.m. channel surfers that he and his neighbors did to travelers of the interstate: they made them glad for the moment to be who they were. He, for one, was glad he wasn't Mike. Hello, I'm Scranton Richie. With that nice soft accent of his, the Italian suit, Jesus, why didn't she just get in? The curtains to his living room were heavy green draperies which he never pulled shut. Never. Hated them. The material was spongy and heavy as a rubber bath mat. Where had he seen curtains like that? Certain kinds of motels where his mother and father liked to stay, they had the same thing. They used to close the curtains immediately, sealing the seam by overlapping, and that was it. That fucking curtain--the kind of curtain Mike could be proud of--could shut out the strobe lights of a disco. Mike, look at this! Aliens are landing, the world is on fire, signal flares and rockets are strafing the sky, but with this curtain you'll never know it! They always slept late, his parents, the curtains drawn and their internal time clock set on perpetual midnight. He was in the next bed; he could feel the earth falling away, the ground slumping out from under him, and he had no idea about anything, his floating bed rocking against 2 a.m. or 7 a.m. or noon, he didn't know, he'd just lie there rocking, his head crashing, hoping one of them, his mother or father he didn't care which, would get up, would just get up out of bed and open the curtains and start the day. He was just a kid. He wanted to play. What time was it? He could never tell. For Christmas he'd gotten one of those watches with the turquoise dials but it only worked immediately after holding it up to a beaming light bulb, which defeated the purpose since he needed to check it when he was trapped behind the curtain in the dark. Pounding on the door by the managers followed by shouts and threats. That's what usually got his parents up. Well no wonder he never shut his curtains. That explained it. He stood in front of his living room window. A beautiful view of the highway before him. He'd once set up a camera on a tripod and taken a photograph of this highway at night, held the lens open for twenty seconds and the headlights came out solid streaks of yellow. Everything else was solid black. It was interesting to look at but you couldn't really tell what it was a picture of. It was more of an art photo. When it was night, with the curtains wide open, he knew everyone could see inside his apartment, but he didn't care, there was no way he was shutting the curtains. Besides, everyone meant people in their cars on the highway, no one else, and half of them were from out of state. He would never see them again, but for the split second they'd met he had made them happy--happy not to be him. He'd driven by on the highway himself, to see what the apartments looked like at night, and there was his apartment neighbor Bob Early on his couch clear as day. It was after midnight. He slowed down, watching as long as he could. Bob Early laughing, sitting on his couch. Scary. He went to the refrigerator to get another beer. His ticket from airport long-term parking hung under a magnet, a casual footnote to female guests about all his bicoastal wanderings. Except for the TV, the refrigerator cast the only light in the apartment. When he opened the refrigerator it was like in those movies where the bad guy finally figures out how to outsmart the blind girl, shed a little refrigerator light on the situation so to speak, as if that would be really hard with a blind girl as your prey and you having only a pair of eyes and a .354 Magnum to rely on. Tough call. Why were there no lamps on? He must have been sitting there zoning out and gradually it got dark and he didn't notice. But he was watching infomercials, which meant what? It must be about three in the morning. He'd been sitting for five hours as if it were twenty minutes. No one was able to do that except zombies and what were zombies but people without a life? If the drivers on the interstate knew this, they'd whiz by even faster, a speedy offer of thanks for being themselves and not this guy Scranton Richie, a zombie watching infomercials in the dark. A healthy, good-looking 25-year-old male who happens to be so pathetic he can sit in front of the TV for five hours and think it's twenty minutes. And he has no idea what he's even watched! Okay, name one thing you've watched. The dehydrator, people making beef jerky in a dehydrator. Mike and the dehydrator. Dried apple slices. Okay. He remembered. All was not lost. He turned on his two living room lamps. He had four standing sewing lamps he'd bought for $15 each at JoAnn's Fabrics, embarrassing to be in a sewing store but he was trying to find somebody with jumper cables, had tried every store but theirs because it was a sewing store--a girl's store--but wouldn't you know it, three women in that store not only had jumper cables but were anxious to help him. He'd learned something: seamstresses are prepared, they are really prepared for almost anything. It was a good lesson. He liked going back there to the sewing store, eventually amassed the four metallic standing lamps, put two of them in the bedroom on either side of his bed where they shone a bright harsh light as if for a homemade porno movie--a man in need of darning and a girl of fine stitches, the rolling hay and one big needle, the movie as yet unmade--and the other two lamps he arranged in the living room where at night they spotlighted him to the highway as he performed his sideways dance. Here I am, world. Check it out. He dropped his shorts. Flung off the T-shirt. He'd done it before, his whipstitch pose to the interstate. Actually, it had begun to get habit-forming. But for what reason? As if someone going 65 miles per hour would care about a glimpse of a naked man. Like it would have time to even register on the brain. He was a stupid blip on the screen. Who stopped for blips? For instance, he had pulled up to Donato's in a white limo and his pizza wasn't ready. He had made the call from the limo phone before they had even pulled out of Port Columbus--they were stopped at the traffic light by Blue Long-Term Parking. It took ten, fifteen minutes max to throw some sauce and cheese on that sawdust they called crust, but his pizza wasn?t ready and it had been twenty minutes. The chauffeur had had to wait. It was the fuckingest thing. He was at a two-bit pizza joint. He was a man in a white limousine at a two-bit pizza joint and his pizza wasn't ready. No, he wasn't a man in a limo. He was a blip in a limo. Somehow they'd known. Did they spot him coming on the radar screen and decide to screw around with him? He had sat in his limo all alone (except for the chauffeur), being driven here, driven there, hoping to raise a crowd downtown, no luck. Scare up something in the restaurant district, no luck. Cause a commotion in the suburbs, no luck, lights already out. Only on the west side at a dollar movie theater did he get any attention: white-trash teenyboppers, no thanks. He should have driven by the home of that loan officer but he didn't know where she lived. Anyway she wasn't home; either that or she was screening her calls. Why did he care about her? She was pretty but she wasn't country-club pretty and that was his type. Her skin was fraying around a dry, reddened nose. And--and she had fucking turned him down for an FHA loan. Nobody got turned down for an FHA loan. The French fry scooper-outer at McDonald's could get one. He had the house all picked out, a double, he'd rent one side, live in the other, the rent would pay for both--it was a good location, too, on the edge of the 'burbs, the value would only rise. And look who beat him out for it, someone totally undeserving, someone who put up Halloween masks instead of curtains, sending wart-tipped noses back to the nosy neighbors. Ha ha, very creative. And in the spring too, wow, even funnier. He went up to the window anyway, went up there nose to nose and managed to peek through a pair of nostril holes at what the proud owners called interior decorating: bead curtains, water-bed couch, it looked like a bong shop. Through the gap tooth of a pumpkin he spied a very strange bookcase--it looked just like the magazine rack of a library, and there were magazines arranged on it in the same manner. Was this any way to run a HOUSE? He had had much better plans, namely, chairs, table, sofa, lamp? regular HOUSE things. If you wanted to have a bunch of magazines, put them in a pile on the coffee table. Pretend you're in a HOUSE. Don't fill up a whole dining room with those odd, hanging down library shelves. He immediately gave her a call, the loan officer that is, and told her about the mistake she'd made, she should come out herself and take a look and prepare to be scared?by the way was the address 31 October Street? And while she was at it, compare what she saw in pumpkinland to his own apartment, which he kept very neat and NORMAL, any beer cans left out at night were thrown away in the morning. Counter was clean. He saved up coffee grinds to scour fry pans, something he learned from one of the sewing ladies. What if that sort-of-pretty loan officer happened to be driving by on the interstate while he stood there naked? Maybe she was one of those people who aimlessly cruised highways late at night. There were human beings like that. He ought to give her an illuminated erection, make her crash into the guard rails. Or maybe through the guard rails, through the windshield, up the chain link fence, and into his second floor window where he awaited her--now that would be a blow job, nothing but net. Might wake her up from skimming through life. The wake-up call. Don't wait for the final two minutes. He'd explain all the sports analogies to her later. Why did he like her so? She had leaned over her tiny loan officer desk with the intensity of a first-grader--that was when it had first happened, the attraction--and had added up figures, comparing them to a chart, and it was as if she was coloring in a coloring book with all the lines drawn for her, automatic, the pleasure gone but the compulsion to finish the picture remaining. The coloring book had to be finished, had to be finished. She didn't understand that these figures were adding up to a real person. At the same time he couldn't help the desire he had to put his arms around her in protective lust even as he began sensing the worst. Her nameplate was upside down. She didn't notice, she was too busy playing Hangman with numbers. When she drew the final leg on the cartoon of figures, he was hung. Scranton Richie, a real person, dressed in a nice olive suit, often seen carrying an Oleg Cassini designer garment bag, was turned down for a loan. So she deserved whatever she got, loan officer sailing the interstates found drowned in own bathtub. He looked down at himself. He couldn't do it to her. The odds were that she wouldn't be driving by at the exact moment he had an erection, but you never knew. Besides, he wasn't an exhibitionist, just a poor naked sod, a blip in a limousine, a guy from Hilton Head who was raised poor, a kid born in a car. Anyway, she wasn't even that pretty, she was on the cusp of skinny hillbilly looks herself. He suspected it right away when she seemed to recognize the name Richie for what it was. Got friends and family with that name, she was on the verge of saying, as if someone with her skin should go around making judgments. Did she think he didn't know she was on prescription acne medication? Still, it would be nice if she drove by. He pulled out some rope from underneath the bed, no it wasn't for the porno movie although now that he thought about it.... It was clothesline rope. Yes, he had gone so far as to get clothesline rope for his new house. What was wrong with that? He could always screw in planter hooks and string the rope across the apartment. Who was going to turn him in, the people on the highway? He hated the smell of machine-dried clothes, reminded him of Hilton Head and the big laundry room where the maids gathered to wash sheets. Talk about strong chemicals. Whatever they had used on those sheets could probably cure AIDS. He was looking forward to buying a bucketful of cement from his slag neighbor across the street and securing clothesline poles in his new backyard, clothesline poles that would stand up to a tornado and with a new coat of Rust-Oleum every 6 months would never rust. There would be no rust where he lived. None. He'd even do rope changes twice a year. He took one end of the rope, snaked it into an S shape and began looping the slack over the S to create a noose. Wanna play a little Hangman, Scarecrow? He dropped the noose over his neck, swung the other end around the curtain rod as if it were a tree branch, and pulled. The Death of a Highwayman. The two metallic standing lamps from JoAnn's Fabrics shone on his hanging body. He could feel their heat. Strong lamps. Kept the sewing ladies' eyes from going bad. He was a naked man, hanging from a noose, high-intensity study lamps emphasizing his body in case the interstate nomads had trouble seeing him, which he personally knew from experience was not the case, he'd witnessed it himself, a fucking drive-in movie of Bob Early on the couch. They'd be on their cell phones in a second, 911, man hanging in an apartment building as I sped past. How long would it take the police to arrive, fifteen minutes? He didn't want to get burned up from the lamps. He supposed that's what the loan officer did, use those kinds of lamps to scorch off the acne. He wished he'd put on the stereo so he could judge the time. Maybe hang there for three songs. By then some panicking driver would have called 911. It would be his luck to get three Eagles songs, they lasted forever and sounded alike. Why were people going to their reunion concerts? Old news. Like attending a eulogy. Sung. He didn't have a watch on. The TV was muted. His neck was already cramping from twisting to the side and he bet it was only three minutes tops that he'd been hanging there. Maybe Mike had a product for noose-sore necks, didn't know because he couldn't hear the infomercial. For some reason the traffic on the highway had thinned dramatically, it would have to be now that this would happen. No one driving by, no one seeing him hanging. But maybe that was for the best. When a driver did finally go by, he would be able to do a double-take and slow down, take another look. Yes, a hanging man. Then call 911 on his car phone. Help! Good-looking guy committing suicide! Good-looking guy committing suicide! It was just a matter of how many minutes it would take the police to respond. Then he'd tell them, What, me, officer, suicide? About as likely as Ron Goldman slashing his own throat. He'd tell them he'd been getting a lot of prank calls lately. Reluctantly he'd have to give her up, the loan officer who'd been phoning him so much, making all those prank calls and now this, a 911 prank, he didn't want to use the word stalking but obsession might do. He'd give them her name as soon as he could think of it because some of his blood supply was being cut off, including unfortunately the very drop of blood carrying her name tag. That tingle in his teeth from whenever he drove past the rusted-out foundry across the street, happening again. Light-headed feeling. He'd tell the cops, Look, don't arrest her, she's just a poor loan officer, do you know what being a loan officer is like? Would you like coloring in a coloring book all day long for the rest of your life? Maybe some kind of community service instead. Or better yet, he and the loan officer should go to couples therapy for strangers. Something might come of it. "Hotel California" playing far down the hall, like someone singing into a tin can. Knees buckling. He was going. The curtain rod came down on top of him, followed by the plop of rubber mat curtains. It was like slipping in the bathtub. What time was it? He had no idea. Pounding and shouts on the door woke him up. He waited for one of his parents to get up. To finally get up and start the day. But they never did. They just kept on sleeping.
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