Night Kites Read online

  The usual cigarette hanging on her lips. I had to hustle around and find her an ashtray.

  I felt like some kid the grown-ups were visiting, and I hid the cake wrappers under some college catalogs on the coffee table.

  Jack said, “We just had dinner with my folks.”

  “Can I get you some Cokes?”

  She shook her head no. Jack said they weren’t going to stay.

  She said, “Oh, there’s Ric Ocasek! I love him!”

  Rock-N-America was just coming up on TV.

  Jack said, “Maybe I’ll get a beer. Is there any out there?”

  “There’s some Molson’s ale. Help yourself.”

  “You want one?”

  “No.” Jack knew I rarely drank, that when I did it was always something sweet like a tequila sunrise or a black Russian. Even forgetting Dad’s rule that I wasn’t to drink until I was the legal age, I didn’t like the taste of beer or booze … Jack wasn’t a drinker either. He could get bounced from the football team for drinking. But he went out to the kitchen to help himself.

  Nicki asked me if I liked Ric Ocasek too. I told her I hadn’t paid much attention to him. I took a look and saw this long-faced, long-haired guy with dark glasses and ears like cup handles.

  “I like it that he’s so homely,” Nicki said, reading my mind. “It takes real nerve to get up and perform when you look like that. He gets better-looking while he’s performing, like Dee Snider from Twisted Sister?”

  I wasn’t crazy about heavy metal, but I remembered one old Twisted Sister video when this kid’s father storms into his room and starts calling it a pigsty, calling the kid a slob, asking the kid what he’s going to do with his life. “I wanna rock!” the kid tells him, and he throws his father out the window. The kid was Dee Snider; the name of the video was “We’re Not Gonna Take It.”

  Nicki slipped off her high heels and sat with her feet up under her. She started telling me about an interview with Dee Snider that she’d read in the Newsday Magazine.

  “Dee Snider really did have a father who got after him that way,” Nicki said.

  I said, “Don’t we all.”

  “One day his father hauled him into a barbershop and made the barber give him this Marine Corps crew cut,” Nicki said. “In the interview, his father talked about doing that to him. He said that after, Dee Snider said to him, ‘Daddy, I’m tall and skinny. I have a long nose. I have a long jaw. I have braces on my teeth. I have pimples on my face. The only nice thing about me is my hair. And you made me cut it off.’ … His father felt awful about it.”

  “It’s always too little too late,” I said.

  I sat beside her on the couch.

  She was like a walking encyclopedia on the rock world.

  “My favorite song of Ric Ocasek’s is ‘Jimmy Jimmy’,” she said.

  “I don’t know it.”

  “It’s real old. It reminds me of my daddy, even though it’s about a kid. The first verse does, anyway. Daddy’s always got to get out. He’s restless. Daddy always says we’re all in this together, too. There’s a line like that in ‘Jimmy Jimmy.’”

  She leaned forward to touch the cover of one of the college catalogs with her long, slender fingers. I picked up all the catalogs and moved them down the table, so she wouldn’t come upon the cake wrappers. “That’s just college stuff,” I said.

  “Where are you going to college?”

  “Wherever they’ll let me in.”

  “What do you want to study?”

  “Film. I don’t know. Writing. Communications.” Communications! I could almost hear Dad’s voice. What the hell does Communications mean? What are you going to communicate? … Dad wouldn’t be satisfied until I told him I wanted to study multivariate data analysis, the globalization of markets, and security and portfolio management.

  “I could go to college if I wanted to,” Nicki said, playing with the cigarette in her mouth, holding it between her teeth. “Daddy said he’d cash in his savings bonds so I could.”

  I had a fleeting vision of him from last summer. He’d show up at some of the town baseball games, Lorr’s Linoleum playing Diamond’s Furniture Store, those type games. He was a tall, lean, good-looking fellow with a shock of silver-blond hair that fell across his brow. He always wore a cap lilted over one eye, and even though he had this boyish look, the females he hung out with made him seem like a dirty old man, because they were always a lot younger, not much older than Nicki.

  “What would you study if you went to college?” I asked her. Dill wanted to study anthropology and be another Margaret Mead.

  “If I went to college, I wouldn’t study,” Nicki said. “I’d play … What I want to do someday?” That was the way she talked—she said things as though they were questions. “I want to study fashion? Go to New York City. Study fashion. Or promote rock stars?”

  Jack came up behind us and said, “No way! I want you right here with me!” Jack had already decided he was going into business with his father. He said he might take a few courses at Southampton College, but he wanted to settle down in Seaville for the rest of his life. He liked the ocean. He was a surfer like Pete had been. When the weather was warm enough, Jack’d get up and surf before school.

  I told them I got the Springsteen tickets. Nicki clapped her hands together, leaned back with her feet off the ground, then came forward and took the cigarette out of her mouth. She threw her arms around me. Her lips glided right past my cheek to my mouth. Her mouth smelled sweet and smoky.

  Nicki knew the names of all the performers that came on TV, and all five performers in R.E.O. Speedwagon. She said Kevin Cronin was the best of all, and she knew all the words to his song “The Key.” When she sang them very softly for us, Jack kept shaking his head in amazement, giving me these proud looks.

  Nicki didn’t wear anything like Vanilla No. 5. Her perfume was a different sort from Dill’s. It was the kind of perfume that pours out of the ventilators of some department stores on Fifth Avenue. Summer nights in New York sometimes, I’d meet Dad up across from Rockefeller Center, and I remembered the sexy perfumes in the air while I waited, and all the women in flimsy summer dresses, with their legs and arms bare … Something about Nicki reminded me of New York females. Her perfume was serious like theirs. It didn’t make you think of cookies.

  She told us George O’Dowd was Boy George’s real name, and that he was a Gemini like her.

  “Like me, too,” I said. “I was born May twenty-ninth.”

  “I was born May twenty-eighth! You know what, Erick? Geminis are supposed to be good at communications, so you should study Communications! We’re communicators! Did you know that?”

  She was beginning to communicate something to me, all right.

  When she got up to use the downstairs bathroom, just before they left, Jack said, “Do you like her, Erick?”

  “What do you keep asking me that for? I keep telling you I like her.”

  “She’s the first girl I ever brought home,” Jack said. “Mom took me aside and said, ‘Jackie, Jackie, that girl’s going to make mincemeat out of you,’ but Dad got a kick out of her. Dad trotted out all his old stories about me. Remember that time I put black shoe polish on the ear of the phone in Windmill Deli? Remember all the guys in trucks with their ears black?”

  “Are you making out?” I said.

  Jack stopped laughing and looked down at the empty bottle of ale. “I feel like I’m twelve years old again, wondering where the noses go when you kiss.”

  “You were still wondering that when you were fifteen.” I laughed.

  “Don’t remind me … She’s used to guys like Ski and T. X. Hoyle!”

  “And Bucky Moon, et cetera, et cetera.”

  “Not et cetera, et cetera, but I don’t think she’s ever been with a virgin.”

  “She doesn’t have to know that.”

  “That’s what stops me. I’m afraid she’ll be able to tell.”

  He looked around to see if she was coming
up behind him. She wasn’t anywhere in sight.

  “I think she’s gone,” he said. He got up.

  “Gone where?”

  “Out to the car. Sometimes she just disappears. She’s always saying, ‘Let’s go!’ right in the middle of things.”

  “Nice,” I said. “Are you supposed to go looking for her?”

  “I don’t mind,” Jack said. “She’s not like other girls, Erick. That’s what I like about her.”

  “To each his own,” I said. “That’s what makes horse races.”

  “New York’s going to change everything,” Jack said. “I’m so hot, I’m ready to pop!”

  Chapter Six

  JACK HAD MET CAP MARR, but I never had. Neither had Dill. We were supposed to go to Kingdom By The Sea to meet him the Friday night before we went into New York City. Nicki said he just wanted to look us over, before he let her go off with us for the weekend.

  But Cap’s manager, Toledo, known around town as the white Mr. T, broke both of Charlie Gilhooley’s arms Friday night. Cap had to go and bail him out. Charlie Gilhooley ran The Witherspoon Funeral Home. In Seaville he was known as The Gay Undertaker. He was this tall, sissy blond guy who’d no more make a pass at Toledo than he’d step in front of an oncoming train. But Toledo claimed that was what had happened, in the raunchy Kingdom bar, after Charlie stopped there for a drink after the end of a funeral service in Dune Cemetery.

  When we took off early Saturday morning, Toledo was still in the Seaville jail, waiting for bail to be set.

  We picked up Dill first. She hadn’t brought along a skirt, much less a dress. When she checked with me about what I was going to wear, I said I wasn’t even going to bring a tie, not to a rock concert.

  Dill was in skintight Guess? jeans and an Esprit denim jacket, new for the occasion. She had on some Reebok sneakers, and she was carrying a small suitcase with a maroon-and-white Seaville High sticker on the side.

  Then we drove out to the ocean for Nicki. She was standing down near the drawbridge to the castle in a wool camp shirt, with a tiny tube skirt and a big, oversized jacket. She had on high heels that sank into the sand under her feet. She was carrying a garment bag with two U2 buttons on it, and another button that said Totally Hot.

  The tension in the air between Dill and Nicki was thick enough to cut with a knife. I knew it was all because Dill hated it that Nicki was dressed better than she was. I knew Dill. Whenever we went anywhere, Dill could tell me later what every single female had on, with all the detail you’d see under some ad in a fashion magazine.

  Dill wasn’t saying much. Dill never had to. She was giving off the kinds of vibes that make water into ice.

  Nicki wasn’t one to take that kind of thing lying down, either. She said something about what a sweet little suitcase that was on the floor in back—“somebody has real school spirit, too”—and she was smoking like a fiend, while Dill waved away the smoke with her hands and rolled the back window all the way down.

  Dill kicked things off by saying something about poor Charlie; how could anyone have let that happen? Jack said Charlie finally got what he was asking for.

  We were all used to Charlie in Seaville. He wasn’t a macho gay like some of the ones who came out to Seaville on weekends and in summer. You could tell what Charlie was by looking at him, and if you heard him talking behind you in a restaurant, you could tell what Charlie was. Charlie never asked for anything but to be left alone with his embalming fluids and his funeral processions. I think most of us in Seaville had the kind of affection for Charlie any small town has for one of its characters. He was our resident gay.

  Nicki said, “Don’t stick up for Toledo just because of me, Jack. See, Toledo’s afraid if fairies hang out at the bar, they’ll ruin business, what little we’ve got.”

  “The story is that Charlie sidled up to Toledo and said, ‘Hi, thweeheart,’ and Toledo belted him really hard,” Jack said.

  “Oh, sure,” I said, “that sounds just like Charlie.”

  “Let me tell you the story that’s going around, okay?” Jack said. “After Toledo belted Charlie, he picked Charlie up and threw him out the door. When Toledo started to walk away, Charlie managed to get himself up on one elbow. ‘Yoo hoo,’ Charlie called out to Toledo, ‘I forgive you.’”

  “That’s a crappy joke,” I said.

  “It didn’t happen that way at all,” said Nicki. “See, once they start coming into a place, then others follow, that’s what Daddy says, so Toledo asked him to leave before he even served him. But Charlie wouldn’t.”

  “I’m just trying to make a joke of it,” Jack said. “You know: What do you call a gay bar without bar stools? A fruit stand.”

  Dill thought that was funny, and she laughed, finally.

  She leaned against me and whispered, “Honey? Do you think you’ll ever laugh at anything again?”

  I whispered back, “Sweetheart? When you don’t ever have sex, your muscles freeze in one position, making it impossible to laugh.”

  “Tough tuna, Rudd!” Dill said.

  We got to Pete’s place about eleven in the morning. It was on Eighteenth Street, on the second floor of an old brownstone. Pete was subletting it from some professor on sabbatical in London.

  Right away Jack said he and Nicki wanted to sleep in the living room that night. Nicki’d like to fall asleep to MTV, and since it was my brother’s place, Dill and I should have the bedroom. I knew old Jack. The first thing he did when we parked out at Montauk Point on double dates was turn up the music loud.

  Dill and I were due at her Aunt Lana’s, in Washington Heights, for lunch. Dill said Aunt Lana wanted to meet the reason she had to lie.

  Nicki turned on MTV first thing.

  Cyndi Lauper was singing her old song “She Bop.”

  “I love this thing!” Nicki said.

  “Do you know what it’s about?” Dill said. “Yeck!”

  “It’s just about masturbation,” Nicki said.

  “It is?” I said.

  Dill made another face and Nicki laughed. She was sitting on a pillow on the floor, in front of the TV, blowing smoke rings.

  She said, “Cyndi Lauper’s neat because her mother’s in nearly all her videos. Besides, she’s a Gemini, like Erick and me.”

  “Time to get to work!” Jack called out.

  We’d agreed to eat our dinner in, to save money, and Jack and Dill got busy in Pete’s small kitchen: Dill fixing a meat loaf for later, Jack concentrating on something he called Long Island Tea, a drink he said we’d all have a little of after the Springsteen concert, to celebrate his birthday.

  I kept Nicki company in the living room.

  “I never hung out with a crowd before,” Nicki said.

  “I never hung out without one,” I said.

  “Mostly I was with Ski. Did you know Ski?”

  “I’d see him roaring around on his Kawasaki. I’d see you hanging on for dear life on the back.”

  “I loved going on that thing!” She was rolling the cigarette around between her teeth that way she had of doing.

  “Weren’t you ever afraid of breaking your neck?” I asked her.

  “I was never afraid of anything with Ski. I was more afraid of going to Jack’s house for dinner.”

  “But you had a good time?”

  “My idea of having a good time? It isn’t having everyone look me over to see if I measure up. I hate all that family-around-the-table crap!”

  “Whatever happened to Ski, anyway?”

  “He was busted for dealing. If your name’s Walter Ruski, you get sent up when you break the law. If your name’s Richard Gaelen, somebody throws your wife a Bill Ball to get her out of debt.”

  I raised my hands like she was sticking me up. “Richard Gaelen’s married to my mother’s best friend,” I said sheepishly.

  “And he’s a crook!” Nicki said.

  “He beat the rap,” I agreed.

  Nicki leaned back on her hands, smoke curling up past her face. “Se
e, Jack takes me home to meet his folks. He wants me to get along with his friends. That’s the way it should be, I suppose. But it isn’t the way it really is, any more than I’d ever be a real pom-pom girl, even if those bitches had voted me in! I’m coming from somewhere else. I’m not like them. I don’t want to be, either.”

  “If you don’t want to be like them, don’t sweat it.”

  “I want to be better than them. I want to be like Cyndi Lauper. She stayed what she is, and turned out better than all the ones who thought they were better.”

  “The rock world is full of yesterday’s losers,” I said.

  “Yesterday’s, right. Look at them now.”

  “Didn’t you go through all the family-around-the-table crap with Ski?”

  “I knew his family from hanging out with him, but no big deal.”

  “How about with T. X.?”

  “T. X.? You’ve got to be kidding!”

  “Bucky?”

  She was shaking her head no, vigorously, as though I was asking her something crazy like where the million dollars was buried.

  “I guess I’m used to real riffraff, only after one thing,” she said. “And I don’t mean Jack. I know Jack’s not that way.”

  I wasn’t going to touch that one with a ten-foot pole.

  I said, “Riffraff’s a word my mother’d use.”

  “My mother used to say it, too. My mother used to say, ‘Nicki, don’t let anyone treat you like riffraff, because a famous psychic once told me that I was royalty in another life.’”

  That made me laugh. We were both laughing when Dill came out of the kitchen and said it was time to go to Aunt Lana’s.

  Just before we left, I went into the small bathroom, and Jack pushed his way in with me. “What time are you coming back?”

  “How do I know?”

  “Give me a time!”

  “Four o’clock. Okay?”

  Then I said, “Jack? She just finished telling me she’s used to guys only after one thing, but you’re not that way.”

  “Well, I am that way. She never dates anyone who isn’t.”