Mayor of the Universe

  There was a flash Fletcher would hold on to for years, an antidote against the absolute certainty that he was doomed to eternal loneliness, for in perfect synchronicity, they grinned, both of them displaying blacked-out teeth. It was a moment of connection that would have made Fletcher gasp if he hadn’t already been laughing.

  “Well, aren’t you two something,” twittered Olive, clapping her hands.

  “Nice outfit,” said Connie, and Fletcher, noting her bloomers under a dress fashioned out of burlap, said, “Likewise.”

  Smooth as a gigolo he poked out his elbow and Connie Yarborough placed her hand in its crook, and Olive leaned against the plaid recliner for support, watching them waltz toward the front door, waving the banners of youth and confidence that would never again unfurl for her.

  In the gym, under a ceiling festooned with swags of twisted crepe paper, Fletcher gave himself to the music, moving his feet, hips, and shoulders the way he did when he danced out in the fields.

  “Wow, you should be on American Bandstand!” shouted Connie over the music and Fletcher acknowledged the compliment, as Deke Drake might have done, with a wink and a spin.

  Watching as she tried a spin herself, Fletcher thought, She’s beautiful. It was not a word generally used to describe Connie—her face was wide and broad-featured but her brown eyes flashed with intelligence and her smile, while toothy, was friendly. She wore that smile now, and even though several of her teeth were blacked out, Fletcher found it dazzling. He was on cloud nine—for him, a most unusual perch.

  They danced through the band’s set and then, sweaty and loose, stood in line for Kick-a-Poo Joy Juice (lime punch) and Dogpatch Oar-Dervs (Ritz crackers topped with a swirl of Cheez Whiz). They sat with their backs to the gym wall, eating and drinking and chatting with anyone who sat down near them.

  It was all so easy! Just teenagers sitting around having a good time, and for once Fletcher was a part of it, even earning a few laughs when he guzzled his punch and pretended to feel its potent effects.

  When the band started its next set with a slow song, Fletcher pulled his partner to him as if she were a favorite sweater.

  “Connie,” he said, breathing in the peachy smell of her hair. “Connie, thank you for asking me.”

  “Asking you what?”

  “To the dance. To Sadie Hawkins.”

  “No prob. My pleasure.”

  Fletcher held up her hand and spun her under the arch their arms made.

  “But why did you ask me?”

  “Because you look so handsome without your glasses.”

  “Pshaw,” he answered in Dogpatch character. He had recently saved enough money to buy contact lenses, and he was thrilled someone finally noticed his new look.

  “I asked you because I like you, Fletcher. You’re different from other guys. And I like your accent in class.”

  Thanks to Miss Halprin, a newly certified language teacher who had lived two whole years in Milan, Fletcher and Connie were students in the first-ever Italian class taught at Central High.

  “Grazi, grazi,” said Fletcher, sounding more Italian than Marcello Mastroianni, and he dipped his bella signorina.

  When he pulled her back up, he wondered for a moment why she was patting him on the back so insistently until he realized the pats were coming from the policewoman next to him. Not an official cop, but Mrs. Debby Purdy, the English and drama teacher, dressed up as one of Dogpatch’s finest.

  “I’m a-takin’ you to the clinker, pal,” she said, grabbing his arm.

  “On what charge?” asked Fletcher, so genuinely confused that Connie laughed.

  “Fletcher, it’s a Sadie Hawkins thing. The guys get thrown in jail and the girls have to bail them out.”

  “It helps pay fer the victuals and the Best Costume ay-wards,” explained Officer Purdy.

  “Don’t worry,” laughed Connie. “I’m on my way to the bail bondsman now!”

  It was a short, sulky trip out of the gym and to the slammer, a flimsy plywood and chicken wire structure built for extra credit by wood shop students.

  Mrs. Purdy opened the gate and pushed Fletcher inside, directly into Dodd “The Bod” Beckerman.

  “Fletchie!” said the massive boy, enveloping him in his big hairy arms. “Lookit, everybody, it’s our old pal, Fletcher Weschel!”

  Beckerman’s cologne of Hai Karate and sweat was augmented by the smell of rancid hair oil, and Fletcher nearly gagged as he pushed himself away.

  When both boys were in the eighth grade, Beckerman had moved into Mrs. Pyle’s house after the gum hoarder went to live with her daughter in Rapid City, ensuring that the bullying that went on in school would continue on Fletcher’s own block.

  In the makeshift jail, three other boys sat on folding chairs, and with a cursory glance Fletcher could see he was not among allies. This was not an unusual predicament, but usually he had a means of escape—a hallway, a staircase, a bathroom stall.

  Resigned, Fletcher sat on a folding chair across from his cellmates, Beckerman standing at his side.

  “So Fletchie’s got a girlfriend,” said Beckerman in singsong. He put his bare foot on Fletcher’s chair. “Big Dyke Connie Yarborough.”

  Blood roared in Fletcher’s ears. He had long ago taught himself to ignore the slander served up by his next-door neighbor, but this was different: this was slander directed at the most wonderful girl in the world.

  “Yeah,” said the wrestling co-captain, nudging his big toe so that it pressed against Fletcher’s thigh. “Yarborough’s a dyke. Everybody knows it. They know it the same way they know you’re a—”

  One reflex launched Fletcher out of his chair, another propelled his fist into Beckerman’s stomach. It was a hard stomach, conditioned by the wrestler’s daily quota of three hundred sit-ups, and when contact was made it was Fletcher who cried, “Ow!”

  A second later, Fletcher’s head was in the crook of Beckerman’s arm and he realized he was in a fight.

  “Get him, Beckerman—get the dyke lover!” said a boy wearing a union suit.

  Fletcher flailed his arms but they made such ineffectual contact with Beckerman that the wrestler laughed.

  “Ooh, you’re killing me, Weschel.”

  “Let go of him, Beckerman.”

  The boy’s laugh was high for someone so big. “Oh, look, Fletchie, it’s your dyke girlfriend come to save you.”

  “Let him go, Peckerman.”

  “That’s right,” chirped Mrs. Purdy. “Down, Dodd.”

  The wrestler unceremoniously let go of Fletcher, who stumbled out the door Mrs. Purdy held open. As she closed it, she looked at the unclaimed boys still in jail.

  “I don’t know what’s taking yer gal pals so long to pay your bail,” she said, waving the counterfeit Dogpatch bills Connie had given her. “Maybe they is all standing you up!”

  Fletcher felt like a convict being transferred to another jail, not thrilled to be leaving, not thrilled to be staying. A trickle of sweat rolled over his lip as he walked down the school hallway and he struggled for breath as he pushed through the door. The evening air was bracing as a slap in the face.

  “Fletcher, wait up!” said Connie, but her request had the opposite effect on her date, who broke into a trot. He ran down the steps and the wide sidewalk and made it to the curb before Connie caught up with him, grabbing him roughly by the arm.

  “Fletcher! What’s the matter with you?”

  Biting his lower lip, Fletcher stood hunched for a moment, his whole body feeling like a condemned building caving in from the inside. He sat down heavily.

  Connie sat next to him and he turned to the face he thought he had been falling in love with.

  “Are you—are you what they say you are?”

  Connie stared at him as if she were on the outside of an aquarium and he was a whiskered, walleyed sea creature floating before her.

  “A dyke?” she said finally, and Fletcher, miserable, nodded. Connie wrapped her arms around her knees. “
Those guys are talking about a . . . an . . . incident that happened last year. Between me and Paula Kleiser. You didn’t hear about it?”

  “I’m . . . I’m not exactly in the loop.”

  “Well, it was nothing, really, it was just a little . . . kiss . . . in the locker room. I don’t even know if it meant anything but, boy, we were the talk of the town. You really didn’t hear?”

  Fletcher shook his head, staring at his palms.

  “So are you—”

  “—I don’t know, Fletcher. Like I said, it was just a kiss. Geez. ’Course if I’m supposed to like slobs like Beckerman, then maybe something is wrong with me, ’cause the guy makes my skin crawl.”

  “So why’d you ask me to this stupid dance? Was it just some big joke?”

  “It wasn’t anything like that, Fletcher. I thought it would be fun to go to a dance with you, that’s all.”

  Suddenly, to Fletcher’s great surprise, Connie Yarborough wrapped her arms around him and pressed her lips—Fletcher couldn’t imagine softer, warmer lips—against his. He was as buoyant as a helium balloon.

  “Cinnamon,” he said after their kiss. “Your lips taste like cinnamon. Your hair smells like peaches and your lips taste like cinnamon.”

  “It’s my lip gloss,” said Connie. “And my shampoo.”

  “I like it,” said Fletcher, but as he leaned forward for another kiss, Connie leaned backward. Defeated, he put his hands in his lap.

  “Fletcher—”

  “Never mind.”

  “Fletcher, do you want to get a hamburger at Bunnie’s?”

  “No, no thanks.”

  “So . . . should I take you home?”

  Fletcher stood up and brushed the dampness from the seat of his overalls. “Nah . . . I’ll just walk.”

  “Are you sure? I mean, I don’t want to leave my date in the lurch.”

  “Nah . . . I’ll be fine. Thanks for everything, Connie.”

  He offered his hand and they stood under the streetlight shaking hands as solemnly as parting pallbearers.

  “You’re home early!” Olive stated the obvious from her perch on the living room couch. Her tumbler of gin sat like a king on the throw pillow she hugged to her lap.

  “It’s not that early, Ma,” said Fletcher, poking his head into the room, which was lit only by the television screen. “Good night.”

  “Oh, Fletcher, you’re not getting off the hook that easily. Now you come sit by your old mother and give me all the gory details.”

  And so Fletcher did. He didn’t know what possessed him—he was a boy who had learned not to share confidences with his mother—but he enjoyed watching her face change. Expectation made her look almost young, but by the end of the story she was slack-jawed and haggard.

  “Good heavens, Fletcher, what on earth made you think I wanted to hear to a story like that?”

  “You asked me to give you all the gory details—”

  “—a figure of speech, Fletcher! A figure of speech! I wasn’t looking for something smutty—I just wanted to hear how well my boy had done, how many girls had asked you to dance, how you were the belle—well, the beau of the ball!”

  “I would have liked telling you that story, too,” said Fletcher wistfully, and by the time Olive figured it might behoove everyone if she said, “I’m sorry,” Fletcher was already upstairs, lying on his bed and staring at the ceiling, his hillbilly boots folded over on their sides in the corner of the room where he had kicked them.

  3

  Fletcher went away to college, to the University of North Dakota at Grand Forks, but it was not the liberating experience it can be for other adventurous students. His roommate, a sullen boy from Minot, subsisted on a protein diet of peanuts in the shell and considered the wastebasket too bourgeois to bother with, resulting in a floor that was as littered as a shoreline after high tide.

  His roommate’s breath, farts, and sweat smelled of peanuts, and the gag reflex was one that was visited on Fletcher every time he opened the dorm room door.

  “Geez,” Flecher would complain, “it’s like the monkey house at the zoo!”

  His roommate had two responses at the ready: either he’d mimic a chimpanzee—“Ooh-ooh-ooh”—and fling a peanut shell at Fletcher’s head, or he’d tell him, “Get bent, Weschel,” and fling a peanut shell at him.

  Olive was also a problem, calling her son every few days to tell him how much she missed him, how lonely the house was without him, and asking if all the men in her life were always going to abandon her. Fletcher tried to console and comfort her during these phone calls, a hard enough thing to do without the distraction of a boy shelling peanuts not ten feet away and reading aloud from his psychology textbook.

  “Do you mind?” Fletcher once asked, cupping the receiver with his hand.

  “Ooh-ooh-ooh,” said his roommate, flinging a peanut shell at his head. “At outset, euphoria and a feeling of invincibility signal a manic episode.”

  Fletcher, by sheer tenacity, lasted his freshman year but had his credits transferred to South Dakota State in Brookings, bringing him closer to home by more than two hundred miles. Olive scolded him that he could no longer use distance as an excuse not to drive home every weekend, and on his first visit home she flung her arms around him, sloshing a good portion of her afternoon cocktail on his shoulder. At that moment, Fletcher knew he should have stuck with the flying peanut shells.

  In Olive’s boozy embrace, Fletcher saw his destiny rolled out like the braided carpet runner before him, and even as he screamed internally, he stepped right onto it.

  Directly after graduating with a degree in accounting, Fletcher began his career at Mid Summit American Life. He had some sense of achievement in landing the first job he interviewed for (it wasn’t his new suit his Aunt Florence had bought with her Montgomery Ward discount that swayed the interviewer but his high grades and willingness to accept, without haggling, the first salary figures that were quoted), but it was overshadowed by the tiny whisper in his ear that asked, “What the hell are you doing?”

  These little voices—his own private hecklers—nagged him constantly about his choices or lack of choices. Vince Shark reminded him that the world was imperiled and needed his crack code-breaking skills or ability to wrest confessions out of diabolical counterspies with simple mind control; Hip Galloway told him that there were wild horses to be broken in the red canyons of Utah and fillies of an entirely different persuasion to lasso at the local saloon; and Deke Drake whispered that the Mediterranean was beautiful this time of year and had he ever captained a yacht bare-chested, wearing nothing but a beach towel borrowed from Yvette Mimieux?

  When the voices rambled on in their fantasy mode, Fletcher was a rapt audience. Listening to his alter egos was like taking a minivacation, but of course Fletcher never went further than listening; after all, he was, as Olive put it, practical as white paint.

  Fletcher felt he was a man not of his time. In college, he sidestepped the be-ins, the sit-ins, the antiwar protests that were the extracurricular activities on campuses across America. The few times he went to parties, he got headaches from the incense and pot smoke and loud music. He wondered what the point was of possessing a wild heart if it was ultimately harnessed by a timid soul. Others were capable of the adventure he yearned for—he read in the Central High Class of ’68 update letter that Connie Yarborough was working with Vista, and that Perry Bringley, who’d played clarinet in the fifth hour jazz band, was now playing in a real off-Broadway production and was a dues-paying member of the musicians’ union. Two classmates had gone to Vietnam, and one didn’t come back. Fletcher had been lucky to have a student deferment as well as a high draft number, unlike Dodd Beckerman, who hadn’t gone on to college and had a low number. Luck didn’t completely abandon The Bod, though; he was shipped only as far as Frankfurt, serving out his tour of duty on a base in southern Germany. Fletcher could picture his former neighbor in a rathskeller, natty in his dress uniform, blowing beer suds at a dim
pled and smiling Fraulein. As much as he thought Beckerman a cretin, he couldn’t help but admire him, couldn’t help but admire anyone who wasn’t afraid of a little dazzle, a little risk in their lives. Anything had to be more glamorous than living with his mother and wearing a Montgomery Ward suit to work every day.

  “You’ve got a fine job,” Olive liked to remind him, cigarette smoke streaming out of her mouth. She had taken up smoking while Fletcher was at college; she said it strengthened her serious businesswoman image, and now their house smelled of smoke and opened gin bottles.

  “It stinks like a bar,” Fletcher complained. “All we need is a dart board and hard-boiled eggs in a jar.”

  “That’s cute, Fletcher,” said his mother. “But it’s not my problem you’re overly sensitive to smells. I can’t hermetically seal the whole house, can I?”

  “You could at least open a window.”

  “Oh, quit complaining. Honestly, you complain about everything—the smell of the house, how hard it is to be a professional in the insurance business—complain, complain, complain. You’re a broken record, Fletcher.” Smoke leaked out of her flared nostrils. “Now, listen, there’s a TV dinner in the freezer—Salisbury steak, your favorite—don’t tell me I don’t cook what you like—and there’s some Neapolitan ice cream for dessert. Just don’t touch the strawberry part—it’s Laird’s favorite.”

  Laird, a furniture salesman, was the latest in what Olive hoped would pan out to be a love interest and what Fletcher knew would be a passing fancy.

  Like a dog straining against a leash, Olive stretched as far as she could to get nearest a hand that might pet her.

  You’re too needy, he wanted to counsel his mother, but what on earth qualified him to give advice related to matters of the heart?

  Fletcher’s first sexual experience had been with a girl who had a proprietary relationship with his homework, asking for his notes after every econ class, a rapacious girl named Helen who one day demanded that he come to her dorm room that evening.