Losing Joe's Place

* * *

  Rootbeer was waiting up, still squinting at his stamps. “So? How was it?”

  “You’re never going to believe this,” I said. “We were in jail.”

  “Yeah, I know. The cops called here, asking about the car. They told me they were holding you, and I didn’t want to spoil everything, so I hung up.”

  “What?!” I recalled our officer coming straight from the phone to lock us up. Now we knew why.

  “Holding cells are so relaxing,” the giant reminisced, a dreamy, far-off look in his eyes. “I’ve done some of my best meditation in jail. I warned Ferguson not to get you out too soon. You really need a good six or eight hours to — you know — gear down. I hope he didn’t wreck it for you.”

  I stared at Rootbeer’s earnest face. “No, it was just right,” I said finally.

  SEVEN

  The fight that never happened happened the next morning. At the police station, Don had been hog-tied. He couldn’t yell at Ferguson for stealing his girl in front of said girl, nor could he go for the guy’s throat in front of the cops. And Jessica was safe from his attack for her faithlessness not only because Don hadn’t called her all week, but also because he held lovingly in his hand the telephone number of the beauteous Kiki. This left him only me to yell at, for forgetting to report that stolen car not stolen, which prompted me to offer to run him over with the aforementioned car.

  “I can’t believe you did this!” Don roared at the Peach, who was making things worse by being totally unruffled. “Haven’t you ever heard of territory? You don’t move in on another guy’s girl!”

  “I didn’t,” said Ferguson. “She asked me out.”

  “Aha!” Don was triumphant. “I caught you in a lie! And I can prove it! Jessica didn’t have my number; I just had hers! So there’s no way she could get in touch with you!”

  “I was riding home in your uncle’s limo, and we were stopped at a light, and I noticed Jessica waiting for the bus. It was raining, and I knew she lived around here, so I offered her a lift.”

  “That’s even sleazier!” raged Don. “Using wealth and power to impress a girl! How low can you get?”

  “Hey, hey, hey,” interrupted Rootbeer. “Don’t you guys know that arguments like this cause stress, and stress causes executive burnout?”

  A “mind your own business” died on Don’s lips. Rootbeer had been with us for a while, and all had been serene, but none of us ever lost sight of the fact that, at any moment, we could be on the receiving end of bad luck.

  “You guys should take an interest in my stamp collection,” the giant went on. “It really gets your mind off the pressures.”

  Don got his mind off Jessica by putting a call through to Kiki. It lasted about ten seconds.

  “Her dad answered the phone,” he told me. “What a bonehead that guy is.”

  “He didn’t let you talk to her?” I asked.

  “Worse than that. He said, ‘There’s no Kiki here.’”

  “What are you going to do?”

  Don shrugged. “Keep calling until she answers. I’ll try in the daytime, when he’s at work.”

  Plotnick’s voice came up through the vent. “If my daughter got phone calls from such a chrome polisher specialist like you, I’d commit suicide, kill myself, and then jump off a building.”

  “I’m feeling stress!” said Rootbeer warningly.

  I thought there wasn’t a man alive who wouldn’t be intimidated by Rootbeer. I stand corrected. Plotnick could laugh off the neutron bomb if it wasn’t going to cost him money.

  “No wonder,” he called back. “There’s a lot of pressure in the gorilla business these days. You never know where your next banana is coming from.”

  I was excited. I couldn’t wait for Rootbeer to go down there and rearrange some of Plotnick’s lard. I would have helped, or at least called out suggestions. But Rootbeer just returned to his stamps. In his mammoth paws, he held up two tiny identical American stamps, depicting Thomas Jefferson.

  “Hey, you’ve got two of that one,” Don commented.

  “The book says they’re different,” said Rootbeer, squinting his eyes into slits. “One’s supposed to have ten and a half perforations, the other only ten.” He began to count with an index finger three times the width of the stamp. “One, two, three, four — hold it, I think I missed that one. One, two, three —”

  Suddenly he slammed the album shut hard enough to fuse the pages, and bellowed, “It’s washday!”

  In one lightning motion, he had the poncho over his head. An avalanche of stuff rained to the floor — an eggbeater, three pairs of sunglasses, one scuba flipper, a few crumpled bills and the odd coin, an Aztec fertility charm, a New Orleans city bus pass good for October 1981, an alarm clock with only one hand, a toilet brush, a mummified liverwurst sandwich, a Bulgarian-Greek pocket dictionary, a lime-green Nerf ball, and a diploma in the name of Gavin Gunhold from the University of Iowa. That was just the highlights. The pile was up to his knees, and things were still appearing. There were elastic bands and paper clips by the hundreds, a tangle of electrical wires, miles of string, wads of tape, random magnetic chess pieces, lint-covered raisins, and something that was either the Hope Diamond or a great big glass bottle stopper.

  The three of us just stood there with our mouths hanging open as Rootbeer stepped out of the town dump, and proceeded to rip off the rest of his clothes, a sight that would make a summer all on its own. Then he filled up the tub, shook in half a box of Tide, and dumped all his clothes in. With the toilet brush (I wondered what that could be for) he pushed his laundry back and forth, like a witch stirring her brew. And by this time, the suds were on the ceiling. Then, satisfied that everything was moving along, he climbed into the tub himself, and began scrubbing his back with the toilet brush. (Why didn’t I know that was coming?)

  The phone rang. “Hello, darling.” It was my mother. “Anything new?”

  “It’s washday.”

  * * *

  Since I had to go get the newspaper anyway, for the Employment section, I was in charge of the shopping.

  On Monday, I was in the grocery store, filling up my cart with our usual instant everything, when someone called my name. I looked up. There was Jessica, smiling and gesturing. Didn’t it figure? I strut myself all over the neighborhood with absolutely no results, and now that I’ve finally written her off, guess who finds me?

  “Am I ever glad to see you!” she said, waving a clipboard under my nose. “I’m totally confused.”

  “Well, first you have to get a cart —”

  “No, no, I’m not shopping. This is an assignment for school.”

  I stared at her.

  “Summer school,” she said distastefully. “I flunked a course this spring, and my mom says I have to make it up.”

  “Yeah?” The wondrous Jessica got pushed around by her mom, too. How human of her! “What course?”

  She looked ashamed. “Home ec.”

  “Home ec!?” I laughed in her face. It felt great. “How do you fail home ec?” Even Don had managed a D-minus in home ec.

  She looked at me belligerently. “If you put salt instead of sugar in the soufflé, and you sew the waistband to the bottom of the apron instead of the top, and you set fire to your recipe book, you flunk.” She shrugged sheepishly. “Especially if you cut a lot of classes, and forget to show up for the final exam.” She showed me her clipboard, on which she had written exactly one word: Beans.

  “What’s this?”

  “My homework. It’s a cost versus nutrition chart on at least twenty-five different products. You can help me.”

  What an honor! For this bright shining moment, I found myself wishing I had Plotnick’s mouth. I mean, what had she done for me lately? All I said was, “Well, I’m kind of in a hurry to get home so I can start looking for a job —”

  “This’ll take two seconds!” she assured me, grabbing my arm and dragging me down the canned vegetables aisle.

  Very quickly, I learned
why Jessica had flunked home ec. She didn’t know a pea from a carrot, and it was because she didn’t want to know. I’ve never seen anybody care so little. I ended up doing the whole assignment.

  When the chart was complete, I handed her the clipboard, and she looked at it in disgust. “This course is so stupid! What a waste of time!” was her comment.

  I nodded in agreement. A waste of my time.

  She glanced at her watch. “Oh, no! I’m late for class!” And she and her homework galloped off.

  “You’re welcome,” I called sarcastically. But I was a coward. I waited until she was out of earshot.

  An hour and a half behind schedule, I started the shopping. But it didn’t go very well. Every time I picked up an item, I kept seeing it on Jessica’s stupid chart. Our usual groceries were among the most expensive and the least nutritious items in the store. Maybe this home ec assignment wasn’t so stupid after all. When you buy instant and prepared stuff, it costs a whole lot more than when you buy the ingredients and make it yourself. Plus instant food is full of tons of chemicals. In fact, when I checked all the labels on the stuff we’d been eating the last few weeks, there was monosodium glutamate and polysorbate 60 in every single thing!

  So I got this brilliant idea. Instead of buying microwave chicken nuggets, I’d buy chicken; instead of TV dinners, I’d buy real food. And while saving a dollar or a dollar and a half here and there didn’t seem like much, you’ve got to figure on three people eating three meals a day, each consisting of at least four or five elements — we could save twenty-five bucks a day! Seven hundred and fifty bucks a month! More, if you calculated it against Plotnick’s deli prices! Maybe Jessica was going to get nothing out of her course, but to me it was the answer to our economic prayers.

  Since the cash value was going to be enormous, I didn’t feel bad about spending two hours filling my basket with exactly the right foods according to The 90s Cookbook for the Woman on the Go, which I bought, too. In fact, by the time I got all that stuff home, I realized that I’d forgotten to buy the paper. Oh well, at savings of $750 a month, job hunting could certainly wait until tomorrow. And I owed it all to that ingrate, Jessica Lincoln.

  I didn’t want to start off too fancy, so I figured I’d make hamburgers. Wouldn’t you know it — there wasn’t one word in that stupid useless cookbook about hamburgers. So I phoned the publisher. Turns out they wouldn’t refund my money, but the lady talked me through her own recipe. I’d save time by cooking them up now and nuking them in the microwave at dinner. The problem was, I hadn’t had lunch yet. So I ate mine for lunch, and I have to say it was great.

  While I was working on a fourth burger to replace the one I’d eaten, Rootbeer came in and scarfed down the other two. Then I was out of ground beef. So we split the last burger, and I settled on roast chicken for dinner. The book said “Put the chicken in a 325° F oven and forget about it for two hours.” That left me time to make soup. I couldn’t wait to see the look on Ferguson’s and Don’s faces when they got home to find a meal fit for a king waiting for them.

  I was slicing onions, and weeping delicately into a paper towel, when there was a loud buzz behind me. A small model World War I Fokker triplane whizzed past my ear, and landed with a resounding kerplop in the soup. I wheeled, and faced Rootbeer. There he stood in the center of the living room, remote control in hand, looking annoyed.

  “What a place to put soup!”

  “Sorry.” Here I was, apologizing for preparing dinner in such a ridiculously unexpected location as the stove. Fear of bad luck does that to a person.

  Rootbeer fished his plane out of the pot and licked the propeller experimentally. “Not bad. A little oily.”

  I examined the soup. It was a lot oily. “Rootbeer, what —?” I indicated the Red Baron in his hands.

  “I’m into model planes now. Stamp collecting isn’t a real hobby. It gives you a headache.”

  I looked over to the corner, where the stamp albums now rested against the tripod, the boxes of Kodak paper, and the developing chemicals. The camera was gone, probably to the pawnshop to finance the Luftwaffe.

  Rootbeer placed the plane on the floor and manipulated the remote control. The engine spluttered, then labored, then died. He tried again. This time the propeller spun around a few times, the craft moved forward an inch or two, and then died. Try number three didn’t yield a peep.

  Rootbeer shook his head. “You go into something for relaxation, and you end up more stressed-out than before because they sell you a piece of garbage.” With that, he stormed out of the apartment.

  Dinner shaped up deliciously. The chicken was smelling great. The new pot of soup, sans motor oil, simmered on the stove, the salad was crisp and fresh and, as a special treat, I was baking a cake. It wasn’t one of the top items on Jessica’s chart. It was a D-Lishus chocolate fudge cake mix, but I hadn’t been able to resist buying it.

  I was about to put it in the oven when an unseen force took me over. When I was a little kid, my mother always used to make D-Lishus cakes. Being allowed to lick the spoon and scrape the bowl was the biggest thing in my life. D-Lishus cakes were pretty good, sure. But nothing was better than D-Lishus cake mix before it got baked. I always used to say that, if I had my way, that glorious stuff would never get near an oven. It was only my mother’s presence that kept me from eating the whole thing. And today she was in Owen Sound. The real point of being on your own was getting to do stuff you normally couldn’t. I started with a tiny little bit on the end of my finger. It was ten times better than I remembered it. I found the biggest soup spoon in the place, and went to work. When the dust cleared, there was enough mix left for three cupcakes.

  That’s when the phone rang. It was Don. “I’m going to be working late tonight, Jason, so don’t wait for me.”

  I was crushed. “But I cooked a great dinner!” A crackle of laughter came through the receiver.

  “Yeah, right. Sure you did. See you later.” Click. It wasn’t thirty seconds later that the phone rang again. Ferguson.

  “Get your butt over here,” I said. “Wait’ll you see what I’ve made for dinner.”

  “I’m in New York,” said the Peach.

  “What? Why?”

  “Mr. Robb needed me to meet some people from the U.S. operation. They want me to tour their plant, so I won’t be back till late.”

  “But — but I’ve been slaving over a hot stove all day!”

  “Sorry. Gotta go. I’ll see you tonight.”

  I staggered back into the kitchen and stared at all that food, simmering, stewing, and cooling, and at the table, which really looked classy. I bellowed, “Who’s going to eat my dinner?”

  The door opened, and in stormed Rootbeer, muttering. “Stupid model planes — gotta be the stupidest hobby in the whole stupid world — hey, what smells so good?”

  Rootbeer ate more than Don and Ferguson could have managed together, even if they’d both come home famished.

  “You’re a great cook, Jason! That was fantastic!”

  “Thanks,” I said, pleased. “Help me with the dishes?”

  He said, “Sure thing,” and went into Manchurian Bush Meditation, slipping off his chair with an enormous crash.

  And as I washed up by myself, up to my ears in suds, it was the best thing about the meal that came back to me — the cupcakes. Well, not actually the finished product. I was going to have to get more of that mix! Fantastic!

  * * *

  Along with a snapshot of my brother Joe and Esmerelda on the beach somewhere in Spain, the mail brought a carrot cake from Mrs. Peach. It was a block of granite. God’s Grandmother brought it up to us; don’t ask me how. I’d have invited her in for a piece, but it would have shattered her dentures.

  “Now I know why Peachfuzz loves Stonehenge so much,” was Don’s comment. “His mom baked it.

  Don was irritable because Kiki’s parents continued to insist there was no one by that name at that number. Around us, though, he played it cool.
br />   “They can’t keep her locked up forever,” he said confidently. “Sooner or later, she’ll answer the phone. Patience is the key.”

  I knew it was mostly an act, because he switched his chips back to Jessica, just in case. He was bouncing around the apartment, laughing and singing, when she agreed to go out with him Tuesday night.

  “Eat your heart out, Peachfuzz! You’ve seen the last of this chick! Friday night was temporary insanity! She’s now fully recovered!”

  Ferguson Peach must have ice water in his veins. He took it all — hours of bugging, insults, baiting, and sarcasm. But on Wednesday night, he went out for his date with Guess Who?

  I was even more shocked than Don. Who did Jessica Lincoln think she was? Did she honestly believe there was nothing wrong with dating both my roommates at the same time? Eaten up with jealousy, I despised her. If there were a dozen people living in the apartment, instead of three, she’d probably be going out with eleven of them, leaving me high and dry! Stupid Jessica was having the summer of her life. And on top of it all, I had to referee the war between her two boyfriends.

  “We should both dump her,” growled Don. “She’s playing head games with the two of us.”

  “You want to break up with her?” said Ferguson. “Be my guest.”

  “You’d like that, wouldn’t you, Peachfuzz? Jessica all to yourself! Well, forget it! She’s not going to you, even if I have to marry her, or kill her!”

  All this was disturbing the fight against executive burnout. Rootbeer had taken up knitting, and had begun work on a pair of size twenty-three socks. If our large roommate got good and fed up with the bickering, and decided to hand out a little bad luck, who ended up with Jessica would no longer be an issue.

  Don’s next tactic was to soften Jessica up with a few gifts, mostly flowers and candy. Eventually he would be so in that, when he suggested she get rid of Ferguson, she would happily comply. This continued until one night Don caught Ferguson gift-wrapping a brass knuckles keychain.

  “You call that a present?” howled Don, convulsed with laughter. “You’re even stupider than I thought! Sure, go ahead! Give her to me on a silver platter!”