Hot Pink

  “I’m sorry,” the guy says. The guy’s smiling like the situation is all lighthearted, but it’s like yawning after tapping gloves on your way back to the corner. A lie you tell yourself. And I’m thinking there’s nothing that’s itself. I’m thinking everything is like something else that’s like other something elses and it’s all because I said “Easy, Cojo” and didn’t mean it, or because this guy nodded.

  I think like this too long, I get a headache and pissed off.

  I put my arm around Cojo. I say, “Easy, Cojo.”

  “Fuck easy,” Cojo says to me. And when Cojo says that, it’s like the same thing as when I said “Easy, Cojo.” I know Cojo isn’t really saying “Fuck easy” to me. He wouldn’t say that to me. He’s saying “Fear us” to the guy. But I don’t know if Cojo knows that that’s what he’s doing with “Fuck easy.” That’s the problem with everything.

  “Give us your fruit,” I tell the guy.

  “My—”

  “What did you say?” Joe says.

  “Easy, Cojo,” I tell him.

  Then the guy hands his grapefruits to me.

  I say to him, “Yawn.”

  He can’t. Cojo yawns, though. And then I do.

  Then I tell the guy to get out of my sight and he does it because he’s been intimidated.

  Nancy Christamesta is no whore at all. And I’m no Jesus, but still I want to wash her feet. Nancy’s so beautiful, my mind doesn’t think about fucking her unless I’m drunk, and even then it’s just an idea: I don’t run the movie through my head. Usually I imagine her saying “Yes” in my ear. That’s all it takes. Maybe we’re on a rooftop, or in the Hancock Building Signature Room, the sixty-ninth-floor one, looking at the city lights, but the “Yes” part’s what counts. It’s a little hammy. I’ve known her since grade school, but I’ve only had it for her since she was fourteen. It happened suddenly, and that’s hammy too. I was eighteen, and it started at the beach—sunny day and ice cream and everything. Our families went to swim at Oak Street on a church outing and I saw her sneak away to smoke a cigarette in the tunnel under the Drive. There’s hypes and winos who live in there, so I followed her, but I didn’t let her know. I waited at the mouth, where I could hear if anything happened, and when she came back through, she was hugging herself around the middle for warmth. A couple steps out of the tunnel, her left shoulder-strap fell down, and when she moved to put it back a bone-chill shot her posture straight and a sound came from her throat that sounded like “Hi.” I didn’t know if it was “Hi” or just a pretty noise her throat made after a bone-chill. I didn’t think it was “Hi,” because I was behind her and I didn’t think she’d seen me. I wanted it to be “Hi,” though. I stood there a minute after she walked away, thinking it wasn’t “Hi” and wishing it was. That was that. That’s how I knew what I felt.

  Now she’s seventeen, and it’s old enough, I think. But she’s got this innocence, still. It’s not she’s stupid—she’s on the honor roll, she wants to be a writer—but Joe and I were over there a couple months earlier, at the beginning of summer, right when him and Tina were starting up. They went off to buy some beer and Nancy and I waited in her room. Nancy was sitting in this shiny beanbag. She had cutoff short-shorts on, and every time she moved, her thighs made the sticking sound that you know it’s leg-on-vinyl but you imagine leg-on-leg. I had it in my head it was time to finally do something. I lay down on the carpet next to her, listening, and after a little while I said, “What kind of name is Nancy for you, anyway?”

  Nancy said, “Actually, I think Nancy’s a pretty peculiar name for me. But I always thought that was because it’s mine.”

  See, I was flirting. I was teasing her. It was my voice she was supposed to hear, not the words it said. But it was the words she heard, and not my voice. It was an innocent way to respond. And I didn’t know what to do, so I told her she was nuts.

  She said, “No. Listen: Jack… Jack… Jack… Does it sound like your name still?”

  It completely sounded like my name, but I didn’t say that because hearing it was as good as “Yes” in my ear and I wanted her to keep going. I wanted to tell her I loved her. Instead, I said it. I said, “I love it.” She said, “Jack… Jack…Jack. I’m glad, Jack Jack.”

  If she didn’t have innocence, she’d have heard what my voice meant and either shut me down or flirted back at me.

  When we got to their house on the day of the nodding guy, she was sitting on the stoop with a notebook, wearing flip-flops, which made it easy to admire the shape of her toes. Most people’s toes look like extra things to me, like earrings or beards. Nancy’s look necessary. They work for her.

  Joe went inside to find Tina.

  Nancy said, “What’s with the grapefruits?”

  I said, “We intimidated a man. It’s all words.”

  “I don’t like that spoon,” she said. “I clink my teeth. It chills me up.” She was still talking about grapefruits.

  “They’re not for you,” I said. “They’re for your parents.”

  “What’s all words?” she said.

  I said, “You don’t say what you mean. You pretend like you’re talking about something else. It works.”

  “A dowry goes to the groom, not the other way around,” she said.

  I said, “What does that have to do with anything?”

  She said, “Implications. Indirectness. And suggestion.”

  Was she fucking with me? I don’t even know if she was fucking with me. She’s a wiseass, sometimes, but she’s much smarter than me, too. And plus she was high. I would’ve taken a half-step forward and kissed her mouth right then, except I wasn’t also high, and that’s not kosher. Plus I probably wouldn’t have stepped forward and it’s just something I tell myself.

  “Come inside with me,” she said.

  She kicked off her sandals and I followed her to the kitchen. It’s a walk through a long hallway and Nancy stopped every couple steps for a second so that I kept almost bumping her. She said, “You should take your shoes off, Jack. And your socks. The floor’s nice and cold.”

  That was a pretty thought, but getting barefoot to feel the coldness of a floor is not something I do, so I told her, “You’re a strange one.” Nancy likes people to think she’s strange, but she doesn’t like people thinking that she likes them to think that, so it was better for me to say than it sounds, even though she spun around and smacked me on the arm when I said it, which also worked out fine because I was flexed. I was expecting a smack. I know that girl.

  In the kitchen, Cojo was drinking beer with Tina and Mr. Christamesta. Mr. Christamesta was standing. He’s no sitter. He’s six foot five and two guys wide. I can’t imagine a chair that would hold him. He could wring your throat one-handed. If there was a black-market scientist who sold clones derived from hairs, he’d go straight for the clog in Mr. Christamesta’s drain whenever the customer wanted a bouncer. That’s what he looks like: the father of a thousand bouncers. Or a bookie with a sandwich-shop front, which is what he is. But it’s a conundrum after you talk to him, because you don’t think of him like that. You talk to him, you think he’s a sandwich-shop owner who takes a few bets on the side. Still, he’s the last guy in Chicago whose daughter you’d want to date. Him or Daley. But a father-in-law is a different story.

  He said to me, “Jack Krakow! What’s with the grapefruits?”

  I didn’t want to think about the grapefruits. The grapefruits made me sad.

  I said, “They’re for you, sir, and Mrs. Christamesta.”

  “You’re so formal, Jack. You trying to impress me or something? Why you trying to impress me, now? You want to marry my daughter? Is that it? My Nancy? You want to take my Nancy away from her papa? You want to run away with her to someplace better? Like that song from my youth? If. it’s. the. last. thing. you ev-er do? You want to be an absconder, Jack? With my daughter? So you bring me grapefruits? Citrus for a daughter? What kind of substitute is that? It’s pearls for swine, grapefruits for Nan
cy. Irrespectively. It’s swine for steak and beef for venison. You like venison? I love venison. But I also love deer, Jack. I love to watch deer frolic in the woods. Do you see what I mean? The world’s complicated. It’s okay, though. I am impressed with your grapefruits. You have a good heart. You’re golden. I like you. Just calm down. We’re standing in a kitchen. It’s air-conditioned. Slouch a little. Have a beer.”

  He handed me a bottle. I handed him the grapefruits. He’s got thumbs like ping-pong paddles, that guy. He could slap your face from across the country.

  What sucked was, grapefruits or no, I was trying to impress him, and I did come for his daughter, and he wouldn’t be so jolly about it if he knew that, so I knew there was no way he knew it. And since he didn’t know it, I knew Nancy didn’t know it, because those two are close. So I was like one of these smart guys like Clark Kent that the girl thinks of like an older brother. Except I’m not smart. And my alter-ego isn’t Superman, who she loves. At best I’m Smith, who no one knows his name but Cojo.

  The one good thing about Mr. Christamesta going off on those tangents was it got Nancy laughing so hard she was shaking. She pushed her head against my shoulder and hugged around me to hold my other shoulder with her hands. For balance. And I could smell her hair, and her hair smelled like apples and girl, which is exactly what I would’ve imagined it smelled like in my daydreams of “Yes,” if I was smart enough to imagine smell in the first place. I don’t think I have the ability to imagine smell. I never tried, but I bet I can only do sound and sight.

  An unfortunate thing about Nancy’s laughing was how it drew her mom in from the living room. She’s real serious, Mrs. Christamesta. So serious it messes with her physically. She’s an attractive woman, like Nancy twenty years later and shorter-haired—see her through a window or drive by her in the car, it’s easy to tell. If you’re eating dinner with her, though, or at church, and she knows she’s being looked at, the seriousness covers up the beauty. It’s like she doesn’t have a face, just her eyebrows like a V and all the decisions she made about her hairstyle. My whole life, I’ve seen Mrs. Christamesta laugh at three or two jokes, and I’ve never heard her crack a one,

  “You, young lady,” she said, “and you, too,” to Tina, “have to quit smoking those drugs.”

  That got Nancy so hysterical that I had to force myself to think about the grapefruits again, about that guy coming home with no grapefruits and acting like he just forgot or, even worse, him going back to the store and getting more grapefruits and then, when he got home, making this big ceremony around cutting them or peeling them, whatever his family did with them. I had to think about that so I wouldn’t start laughing with Nancy. If I laughed, it would look like I was laughing at Mrs. Christamesta. And maybe I would be.

  “It’s because you give them beer,” she said to her husband.

  “Is it you want a beer, honey?” he said to her.

  She bit her lip, but took a seat.

  He got up real close to her and said it again. “Is all you want is a beer?” He crouched down in front of her chair so his shirt rode up and I saw his lower back. His lower back was white as tits, and not hairy at all, which surprised me. He held her neck, and touched those paddles to her ears. “Is it you want a grapefruit?” he said. “I’ll cut you a grapefruit. I’ll peel you a grapefruit. I’ll pulp it in the juicer. I’ll juice it in the pulper. Grapefruit in segments, in slices, or liquefied. And beer. All or any. Any combination. All for you. Am I not your husband? Am I not a good husband? Am I not a husband to prepare you citrus on a sunny weekend in the Windy City? Have I ever denied you love in any form? Have I ever let your gorgeous face go too long unkissed? How could I? What a brute,” he said. “What a drunken misanthrope. What a cruel, cruel man,” he said. “I’ll zest the peel with the zester and cook salmon on the grill for you. I’ll sprinkle pinches of zest for you. On top of the salmon.” Then he kissed her face. Thirty, twenty times.

  That was the fourth time I ever saw Mrs. Christamesta laugh. Or the third. And thank God, because I was done feeling sorry for that nodding guy. I lost it so hard that when the laughter was finished with me I was holding Nancy’s hand and she was tugging on the front of my shirt and I didn’t remember how we got that way.

  I made a violent face at her, all teeth and nostrils. For comedy. Then she pinched me on my side and I jumped back fast, squealing like a little girl.

  “Fucken girl,” Cojo whispered. But he didn’t mean it how it sounded. It was nice of him to say to me. Brotherly.

  Mr. Christamesta threw a key at me. “You okay to drive?” he said. “You’re okay,” he said. He kissed his wife’s neck and we went out the back door. To the garage.

  The Christamestas have two cars. Both of them are Lincolns and both Lincolns are blue. I tried the key on the one on the left. It was the right choice.

  Cojo called shotgun, but he was kidding. I held the shotgun door open for Nancy and Cojo tackled Tina into the backseat.

  We stopped at the Jewel for some patties and nacho chips, and then we were on our way.

  I forgot to mention it was furniture day. Two Sundays a year, Chicago’s got furniture day. You put your old furniture in the alley in the morning, and scavengers in vans take it to their houses and junk shops. If no one wants it, the garbage trucks come in the afternoon and they bring it to the dump. That’s what makes it furniture day—how the garbage trucks come. That’s why there were garbage trucks on a Sunday.

  One of them had balloons tied to its grille with ribbon. We got stopped at a light facing it. Grand and Oakley. We were going south on Oakley. That light takes forever. Grand’s a main artery. It’s dominant. Grand vs. Oakley? Oakley gets stomped.

  There were white balloons and blue ones and some yellows. I don’t know what color the ribbon was, but I knew it wasn’t string because it shined.

  Nancy said, “Do you think it’s a desperate form of graffiti, Jack?”

  Jack. I checked the rearview. Tina had her feet in Joe’s lap. Joe was pretending to look out his window, but what he was doing was looking at the window. It was tinted, and he was looking at Tina’s legs, reflected. Tina has good legs. You notice them. You feel elderly.

  I said to Nancy, “It’s probably the driver had a baby.”

  She said, “I think maybe some tagger got his markers and his spraycans taken, and he was sitting on the curb out front of his house, watching all the trucks making pickups and feeling worthless because he couldn’t do anything about it. He didn’t want to write ‘wash me’ with his finger in the dirt along the body since there’s nothing original about that, and he didn’t want to brick the windshield because he wasn’t someone who wanted to harm things, but still he found himself reaching down into the weeds of the alley to grasp something heavy. He needed to let the world know he existed, and without paint or markers, bricking a windshield was the only way he could think to do it. Except then, right then, right when he gets hold of the brick—and it’s the perfect brick, a cement quarter-cinderblock with gripping holes for his fingers, it fits right in his hand—he hears his little sister, inside the house. She’s singing through the open window of her bedroom, above him. She’s happy because yesterday was her birthday and she got all the toys she wanted, and it reminds the boy of the party they had for her, how he decorated the house all morning and his sister didn’t even care because all she really wanted was to unwrap her presents—the party meant nothing to her, not even the cake, much less the decorations—and so this boy races inside, to the hallway in his mom’s house, and tears a balloon-cluster from the banister he tied it to, then races back out front, decorates the grille of the garbage truck.”

  Finally, the light turned green. If you’re Oakley, you get about seven seconds before Grand starts kicking your ass again.

  I said, “It could be the driver got married.”

  Nancy said, “And maybe it wasn’t even today. Maybe it was sometime last week. Maybe those balloons have been there for nine, ten days because the
driver thinks it’s pretty. Because he understands what it means, you know? Or maybe because he doesn’t understand what it means, because it’s a conundrum, but it’s a nice conundrum, something he wants to figure out.”

  “It could be his son,” I said. “It could be it was his son got married or had a baby,” I said.

  Nancy said, “Oh.” And I knew I shouldn’t have said what I said. She was trying to start something with me and I kept ending it. She wanted me to tell her a fantasy story. I’m a meathead. A misinterpreter. Like hot pink? For years I thought it was regular pink that looked sexy on whoever was wearing it. And that Bob Marley song? I thought he was saying that as long as you stayed away from women, you wouldn’t cry. Even after I figured it out, it’s still the first thing I think when it comes on the radio. It’s like when I’m wrong for long enough, I can’t get right. I had a fantasy story in my head, but I didn’t say it. And why not?

  We were merging onto the Eisenhower when this guy in a Miata blew by us on the ramp and I had to hit the brakes a little. Everyone cursed except Nancy, who was spaced out, or pretending to be. Then we got quiet and Joe said, “What kind of fag drives a Miata?”

  And Tina said, “Don’t.” Tina goes to college at UIC. She was a junior, like I would have been. “Don’t say fag,” she said.

  “Fag faggot fag,” Cojo said. “It’s just words. It’s got nothing to do with who anyone wants to fuck.” He took out a cigarette. He said, “This is a fag in England.” He lit the cigarette. He said, “I know fags who’ve screwed hundreds of women. I know fags who screw no one. Have a fag,” he said. He gave the cigarette to Tina and lit a second one for himself. He said, “That rapist Mike Tyson’s a fag. And my cousin Niles. He’s screwing his girlfriend even as we speak to each other here in this very car. There’s fags who like windmills and fags on skinny bicycles. I know fags who fix cars and fags who pour concrete. Regis Philbin’s a fag. Kurt Loder and that fag John Norris. Lots of TV and movie guys. Rock stars. Pretty much all of them. So what? It’s a word. It means asshole, but it’s quicker to say and more offensive cause it’s only fags who say asshole like it’s any kind of insult. Even jerk’s better than asshole. Asshole’s a fagged-out word, and fag’s offensive. And it should be offensive. I want it to be offensive. Someone calls me a Polack? I’m offended. But I’m a fucken Ukrainian, you know? I don’t give a shit about the Polish people. No offense, Krakow, but I don’t give a fuck for your people. Someone calls me Polack, though, I’ll tear his jaws off at the hinge. And cause why? Cause he’s saying I’m Polish? No. Cause he’s saying Polish people are lowlifes? No. He’s trying to offend me is why. When he’s calling me Polack, he’s calling me fag. He’s calling me asshole. So fine. You’re pretty. Okay. You smell good. You say smart things to me when you’re not telling me the right way to talk. Good news. I like you. I want to spend all my money on you. I want to take you on vacation to an island where there’s coconuts and diving. Miatas are for assholes if it makes you more comfortable. But the asshole in that Miata’s got fagged-out taste is what I’m telling you.”