Strange Weather, Page 2

  In this modern age of social media and sensitivity to bullying, if you call someone a fat-ass, you’ll likely find yourself on the receiving end of some abuse yourself, for body shaming. But in 1988 “twitter” was a verb used only to describe what sparrows and gossiping biddies did. I was fat, and I was lonely; in those days if you were the former, the latter was a given. I had plenty of time for walking old ladies home. I wasn’t neglecting my buddies. I didn’t have any. None who were my age anyway. My father sometimes drove me to the Bay to attend monthly meetings of a club called S.F. GRUE (the San Francisco Gathering of Robotics Users and Enthusiasts), but most of the others at those get-togethers were much older than I. Older and already stereotypes. I don’t even need to describe them, because you can already see them in your mind’s eye: the bad complexions, the thick-lensed glasses, the unzipped flies. When I dropped in on this crew, I wasn’t just learning about circuit boards. I believed I was looking at my future: depressing late-night arguments about Star Trek and a life of celibacy.

  It didn’t help, of course, that my last name was Figlione, which, when translated into 1980s elementary-school English, became Fats-Baloney or Fag-Alone or just plain old Fags, monikers that stuck to me like gum on my sneaker until I was in my twenties. Even my beloved fifth-grade science teacher, Mr. Kent, once accidentally called me Fag-Alone, to uproarious laughter. He at least had the decency to blush and look sick and apologize.

  My existence could’ve been much worse. I was clean, and I was neat, and by never studying French I was able to avoid honor roll: that list of smug know-it-alls and teacher’s pets who were just begging for a wedgie. I never faced anything worse than the occasional low-grade humiliation, and when I was teased, I always smiled indulgently, as if I were getting ragged by a dear friend. Shelly Beukes couldn’t remember what had happened yesterday. As a rule, I never wanted to.

  The door was flung open again, and Larry Beukes was back. I turned to see him wiping one enormous callused hand across his wet cheek. I was embarrassed and looked away, out toward the street. I had no experience with weeping adults. My father was not a particularly emotional man, and I doubt that my mother was much for tears, although I couldn’t say for sure. I only ever saw her two or three months out of every year. Larry Beukes had come from Africa, whereas my mother had gone there for an anthropological study and, in a sense, never really came back. Even when she was home, a part of her remained six thousand miles away, beyond reach. At the time I was not angry about this. For children, anger usually requires proximity. That changes.

  “I droff all around dis neighborhood looging for her, the goddem simple old thing. Dis is the third time. I thought dis time, dis time she will walg into traffig! The silly goddem—thang you for bringing her bagg to me. Bless you, Michael Figlione. Gott bless your heart.” He pulled a pocket inside out, and money sprayed everywhere, crumpled bills and loose silver scattering across the walk and the grass. I realized, with something like alarm, that he meant to tip me.

  “Oh, jeez, Mr. Beukes. It’s okay. You don’t have to. I’m glad to help. I don’t want . . . I’d feel stupid taking . . .”

  He narrowed one eye and glared at me with the other. “Dis is more than a reward. Dis is a down payment.” He bent and scooped up a ten-dollar bill and held it out to me. “Go on. Take dis.” When I didn’t, he stuck it in the breast pocket of my Hawaiian shirt. “Michael. If I hoff to go somewhere . . . can I call on you to loog after her? I am home all day, all I do is loog after dis crazy woman, but sometimes I hoff to buy groceries or run to one of the gyms to put out a fire. Dere is always a fire to put out. Every musclehead who works for me can lift four hundred pounds, but not one of dem could count past ten. Dat is where they run out of fingers.” He patted the money in my shirt and took his wife’s coat away from me. It had still been hanging over my forearm, like a waiter’s towel, forgotten. “So? We hoff a deal?”

  “Sure, Mr. Beukes. She used to babysit me. I guess I can . . . can . . .”

  “Yes, babysit her. She has entered her second childhood, Gott help her and me, too. She needs someone to make sure she doesn’t go wandering. Looging for him.”

  “The Polaroid Man.”

  “She told you about him?”

  I nodded.

  He shook his head, smoothed a hand back over his thinning, Brylcreemed hair. “I worry someday she will see someone walging by and decide it is him and stig a kitchen knife into him. Oh, Gott, what will I do then?”

  This wasn’t such a smart thing to say to the kid you were trying to hire to look after your old, mentally disintegrating wife. It was impossible not to consider the possibility that she might decide I was the Polaroid Man and stick a carving knife into me. But he was distracted and distressed and running his mouth without thought. It didn’t matter. I wasn’t scared of Shelly Beukes. I felt she could forget everything about me, and everything about herself, and it still wouldn’t change her fundamental nature, which was affectionate, efficient, and incapable of any real malice.

  Larry Beukes met my gaze with bloodshot, miserable eyes. “Michael, you will be a rich man someday. You will probably make a fortune, inventing the future. Will you do something for me? For your old friend, Larry Beukes, who spent his last years desperate with worry for his fool of a wife, with her oadmeal brains? The woman who gaff him more happiness than he ever deserved?”

  He was crying again. I wanted to hide. Instead I nodded.

  “Sure, Mr. Beukes. Sure.”

  “Invent a way not to ged old,” he said. “It is a terrible goddem trick to play on someone. Gedding old is no way to stop being young.”

  3

  I WALKED WITHOUT A PLAN, hardly aware I was moving, let alone where I was going. I was hot, I was dazed, and I had ten dollars crushed into my shirt pocket, money I didn’t want. My grimy Run DMC Adidas carried me to the nearest place I could get rid of it.

  There was a big Mobil station across the highway from the entrance to the Golden Orchards: a dozen pumps and a deliciously refrigerated convenience store where you could buy beef jerky, Funyuns, and, if you were old enough, skin magazines. That summer I was drinking my own frozen slush concoction: a thirty-two-ounce cup of ice drenched in vanilla Coca-Cola and topped with a squirt of something called Arctic Blu. Arctic Blu was the color of windshield-wiper fluid and tasted a little of cherry and a little of watermelon. I was mad for the stuff, but if I came across it nowadays, I probably wouldn’t try it. I think to my forty-year-old palate it would taste of adolescent sadness.

  I had my heart set on an Arctic Blu–Coca-Cola Slush Special and just didn’t know it until I saw the Mobil’s revolving red Pegasus atop its forty-foot pole. The parking lot had recently been repaved with fresh tar, black and thick as cake. Heat wobbled off it, causing the whole place to quiver faintly, a hallucinated oasis glimpsed by a man dying of thirst. I didn’t notice the white Caddy at Pump Ten, and I didn’t see the guy standing next to it until he spoke to me.

  “Hey,” he said, and when I didn’t react—I was in a sunstruck daydream—he said it again, less nice. “Hey, Pillsbury.”

  I heard him that time. My radar was attuned to any blip that might represent the threat of a bully, and it pinged at “Pillsbury” and the man’s tone of good-humored contempt.

  He didn’t have a lot of room to go ragging on people about their looks. He was dressed well enough, even if his clothes looked out of place: In duds like his, he belonged at the door to a nightclub in San Francisco, not at a Mobil pump in a nowhere California suburb. He wore a silky black short-sleeved shirt with glassy red buttons, long black pants with a blade-sharp crease, black cowboy boots embroidered with red and white thread.

  But he was feverishly ugly, his chin sunk most of the way back into his long neck, his cheeks corroded with old acne scars. His deeply tanned forearms were covered in black tattoos, what appeared to be lines of cursive script running around them in long, snakelike swirls down to his wrists. He wore a string tie—those were popular in the eigh
ties—secured with a Lucite clasp. A yellowing scorpion was curled within.

  “Yes, sir?” I asked.

  “You goin’ in? Get yourself a Twinkie or somethin’?” He thunked the pump’s nozzle into the gas tank of his big white boat.

  “Yes, sir,” I said, thinking, Suck my Twinkie, asshole.

  He reached into his front pocket and wiggled out a wad of yellowing, dirty bills. He peeled off a twenty. “Tell you what. You take this inside, tell ’em to switch on Pump Ten and— Hey, Land O’Lakes, I’m talkin’ at you. Listen up.”

  My attention had drifted away for a moment, my gaze caught by the object sitting on the trunk of his Caddy: a Polaroid Instant Camera.

  You probably know what a Polaroid looks like, even if you’re too young to ever have used one or seen one used. The original Polaroid Instant is so recognizable, and represents such an enormous technological leap forward, that it became an icon of its era. It belongs to the eighties, like Pac-Man and Reagan.

  These days everyone has a camera in his pocket. The idea of snapping a picture and being able to examine it immediately strikes absolutely no one as spectacular. But in the summer of 1988, the Polaroid was one of just a few devices that would allow you to shoot a picture and have it develop more or less instantly. The camera popped out a thick white square with a gray rectangle of film in the center, and after a couple minutes—faster if you shook the square back and forth to activate the developing agent within its chemical envelope—an image would swim up out of the murk and solidify into a photograph. That was cutting-edge back then.

  When I saw the camera, I knew it was him, the guy—the Polaroid Man that Mrs. Beukes was hiding from. The slick-looking weasel in his white Cadillac convertible, with its red top and red seats. He color-coded like a motherfucker.

  I knew that whatever Mrs. Beukes believed about this guy had no basis in fact, of course, that it was a misfire from an engine already choked up and giving out. Yet something she’d said stuck with me: Don’t let him take a picture of you. When I put it all together—when I realized the Polaroid Man was not a senile fantasy but a real dude, standing right in front of me—my back and arms prickled with chill.

  “Uh . . . go ahead, mister. I’m listening.”

  “Here,” he said. “Take this twenty in and get ’em to light up this pump. My Caddy is thirsty, but I’ll tell you what, kiddo. If there’s any change, it’s all yours. Buy yourself a diet book.”

  I didn’t even blush. It was a nasty swipe, but in my distracted state it barely grazed my consciousness.

  On second glance I saw that it wasn’t a Polaroid. Not exactly. I knew the devices pretty well—I had taken one apart once—and recognized that this was subtly different. It was, for starters, black with a red face, so it matched the car and the clothes. But also it was just . . . different. Sleeker. It sat on the trunk, within hand’s reach of Mr. Slick, and it was turned slightly away from me, so I couldn’t see the brand name. A Konica? I wondered. What struck me most, right away, was that a Polaroid had a hinged drawer you opened at the front, to slide in a package of instant film. I couldn’t see how this one loaded. The device seemed to be made of one smooth piece.

  He saw me eyeing the camera and did a curious thing: He put a protective hand on it, an old lady gripping her purse a little tighter as she walks past some street toughs. He extended the dingy-looking twenty with his other hand.

  I came around the rear bumper and reached for the money. My gaze shifted to the writing scrolled up his forearm. I didn’t recognize the alphabet, but it looked similar to Hebrew.

  “Cool ink,” I said. “What language is that?”

  “Phoenician.”

  “What’s it say?”

  “It says ‘Don’t fuck with me.’ More or less.”

  I tucked the money into my shirt pocket and began to shuffle away from him, moving in reverse. I was too scared of him to turn my back on him.

  I wasn’t looking where I was going and veered off course, bumped into the rear fender, and almost fell down. I put a hand on the trunk to steady myself and glanced around, and that was how I saw the photo albums.

  There were maybe a dozen of them stacked along the backseat. One of them was open, and I could see Polaroids slid into clear plastic sleeves, four on each sheet. The photos themselves were nothing special. An overlit shot of an old man blowing out the candles on a birthday cake. A rain-bedraggled corgi staring into the camera with tragic, hungry eyes. A muscle-bound dude in a hilariously orange tank top, sitting on the hood of a Trans Am straight out of Knight Rider.

  That last one caught my gaze. I felt I vaguely knew the young man in the tank top. I wondered if I’d seen him on TV, if he was a wrestler, had climbed into the ring with the Hulkster to go a few rounds.

  “You got a lot of pictures,” I said.

  “It’s what I do. I’m a scout.”

  “Scout?”

  “For the movies. I see an interesting place, I shoot a picture of it. I see an interesting face, I shoot a picture of that.” He lifted one corner of his mouth to show a snaggly tooth. “Why? You wanna be in movies, kid? You want me to take your picture? Hey, you never can tell. Maybe some casting agent will like your face. Next thing you know—Hollywood, baby.” He was fingering the camera in a way I didn’t like, with a kind of twitchy eagerness.

  Even in the theoretically more innocent time of the late 1980s, I wasn’t keen to pose for photographs taken by a guy who looked like he bought his clothes at Pedophiles “R” Us. And then there was what Shelly had said to me: Don’t let him take a picture of you. That warning was a poisonous spider with hairy legs, crawling down my spine.

  “I don’t think so,” I said. “It might be too hard to fit all of me in one shot.” I gestured with both hands at my paunch, straining against my shirt.

  His eyes bulged in his corroded face for an instant, and then he laughed, a raw, horsey sound that was part disbelief, part real hilarity. He pointed a finger at me, thumb cocked like the hammer of a gun. “You’re okay, kid. I like you. Just don’t get lost on the way to the cash register.”

  I walked away from him on unsteady legs, and not just because I was escaping a creep with an ugly mouth and an uglier face. I was a rational child. I read Isaac Asimov, hero-worshipped Carl Sagan, and felt a certain spiritual affinity with Andy Griffith’s Matlock. I knew that Shelly Beukes’s ideas about the Polaroid Man (only I was already thinking of him as the Phoenician) were the addled fantasies of a mind sliding apart. Her warnings shouldn’t have rated a second thought—but they did. They had, in the last few moments, assumed an almost oracular power and worried me as much as it would’ve worried me to learn I had Seat 13 on Flight 1313 on Friday the 13th (and never mind that 13 is a pretty cool number, not just a prime or a Fibonacci but also an emirp, which means it stays prime if you reverse the digits and make it 31).

  I got inside the mini-mart, dug the money out of my shirt pocket, and dropped it on the counter.

  “Put it on Pump Ten for the nice guy in the Caddy,” I said to Mrs. Matsuzaka, who stood behind the register alongside her kid, Yoshi.

  Only no one ever called him Yoshi except her; he went by Mat, one t. Mat had a shaved head and long, ropy arms, and he affected a laconic surfer-dude ease. He was five years older than me and heading off to Berkeley at the end of the summer. He was looking to put his parents out of business by inventing a car that didn’t need gas.

  “Hey, Fags,” he said, and tossed me a nod, which cheered me up some. Yeah, all right, he called me Fags—but I didn’t take it personally. To most kids that was just my name. That may sound savagely homophobic now—and it was!—but in 1988, the era of AIDS and Eddie Murphy, calling someone a fag or a queer was considered high wit. By the standards of the day, Mat was a model of sensitivity. He read Popular Mechanics faithfully, cover to cover, and sometimes when I wandered into the Mobil mini-mart, he’d give me one of his back issues, because he’d seen something in there he thought I’d dig: a prototype jet pack or a
personal one-man submarine. I don’t want to misrepresent him. We weren’t friends. He was seventeen and cool. I was thirteen and desperately uncool. A friendship between us was about as likely as my scoring a date with Tawny Kitaen. But I believe he felt a certain pitying affection for me and had a nebulous urge to look after me, maybe because we were both circuitheads at heart. I was grateful for any kindness from other kids in those days.

  I went to grab an extra-large cup of my frozen Arctic Blu–Coca-Cola Slush Special. I needed it more than ever. My stomach was restless and gurgling, and I wanted something with a little fizz to settle it.

  I had hardly finished adding the last neon-bright splash of Blu when the Phoenician pushed in the door with his forearm, giving it a hard shove like he had something personal against it. The open door blocked his view of the soda dispenser, which is the only reason he didn’t see me as he cast his glare around the room. He didn’t miss a step but stalked up to Mrs. Matsuzaka.

  “What’s a man got to do to get a tank of fucking gas around this joint? Why’d you shut off the pump?”

  Mrs. Matsuzaka was barely five feet tall and delicately built, and she had mastered the blank, uncomprehending expression common to first-generation immigrants who understand the language just fine but occasionally find it easier to feign bafflement. She lifted her shoulders in a weak shrug and let Mat do the talking for her.

  “You pay ten dollars, brah, ten dollars of gas is what you get,” Mat said from his position on a stool behind the counter, under the racks of cigarettes.

  “Either of you two know how to count in English?” said the Phoenician. “I sent the kid in with a fucking twenty.”

  It was like I drank my entire Arctic Blu–Coca-Cola Slush Special in one swallow. My blood surged with cold shock. I clapped a hand to my shirt pocket with a thrill of horror. Right away I knew what I’d done. I had reached into my pocket, felt money there, and tossed it on the counter without looking at it. But I’d handed over the ten that Larry Beukes had forced on me earlier, not the twenty the Phoenician had given me in the parking lot.