Idioms are cheap, but there's truth in "Idle hands [being] the devil's tools." It was a normal dead July afternoon when we started torturing Billy.
"Get me a drink, Billy. A vodka and cranberry, or orange juice." Charles barked from his deck chair.
"Get it yourself."
"Ooooh. Big balls on Billy." Nolan laughed.
"Get me a drink." Charles snapped back.
"Get it yourself." Billy grinned over his beer, safely across the pool from Charles. He was semi-buzzed, and his ethanol courage was peaking. There was no other explanation for it. The kid had fetched cocktails for Charles all summer, but now, suddenly, he was balking at the job. I figured he'd had enough of us, that he was sick of being treated as joke or a non-person. Billy tended to say a lot of dumb things - not technically stupid, but misplaced, naïve or a second behind the conversation - what you'd expect someone hanging around people two and three years his senior to offer. I'd ignore it, as it was my general rule to ignore Billy altogether. To me he was a plug, Nolan's goofy man-servant. His voice was filler, carrying dead spaces between people who had something to say.
It wasn't that I didn't like him. Billy was a good kid. He was just so obsequious toward Nolan that I couldn't respect him. I'd wince when Nolan slapped him across the back of the head for making a dim comment in the same fashion as Moe would Curly. Nolan was a disaster. He was so disheveled - his clothes, hair and even his posture so sloppy - that he appeared permanently drunk. And he had an instinctual knack for finding trouble where none existed. He'd drunk-drive his car into a ditch and flatten the tire on a well lit, wide open, dead straight road leaving a party. He'd write up a cheat sheet for an exam only to realize when the test was handed out he'd copied notes from the wrong chapter. If there was somebody passed out face down out in the grass at a party, I could be sure that when I nudged the body over with my foot, I'd see Nolan's face. There are only so many people who manage in the twilight hours of the morning after prom night to park their mother's Lincoln Town Car sideways in the driveway, with the peak of the front quarter panel sheared off - shredded fiberglass hanging over the right front headlight - and the trunk open and filled with empty and broken liquor bottles. Nolan had a death wish, and it was death by idiocy. He was chasing the sort of ignominious obituary people forward to each other from the "Oddities" sections of news websites. A "Darwin Award" in the making. The sort of person who'd be browbeaten and slapped like a gimp by Nolan had nothing to say to me.
I knew Billy was in for major pain the minute I saw Charles amble up from his deck chair. "You going to make me come over there?" He gave Billy the stink-eye across the pool. Billy laughed and flipped Charles the bird. I went inside for a drink.
Charles wasn't cruel or sadistic by any stretch. But he drank like few I've met. He's the only person I knew who took four bottles of Everclear grain alcohol to the beach for senior week.
"Why that?"
"It's easier than fucking around with fake IDs or carrying beer and it's twice as strong as anything else. I'd have to carry twice as much otherwise. I don't feel like having to worry about liquor."
Charles was loaded, and he was strong as an ox. I'd played him in pickup basketball games and eaten many of his Bill Laimbeer elbows. If he had to hoist his drunken carriage around that pool until he caught Billy, Billy was going to pay.
I was savoring the first gulps of my frigid 16 ounce Busch can, waiting for a microwave pizza to finish when Nolan came barreling through the back door. He didn't say a word, darting for the corner of the kitchen counter closest to the refrigerator and grabbing a tub of peanut butter. On his way back out he stopped at the last drawer in the cabinets, yanked it open, pulled out a knife and ran back out the door. The pizza took another 20 seconds or so to finish cooking. I grabbed the paper plate from the oven and bolted out the back door.
"This isn't working." Nolan turned to Charles and threw the knife in the grass.
"You're doing it wrong." Charles leaned over, picked it up and grabbed the peanut butter from Nolan.
"Fine. You try. You always know everything." Nolan huffed.
"The problem is there's nothing for it to stick to." Charles grabbed a towel from a chair and handed it to Billy. "Dry yourself. Get rid of all that sweat." Billy followed the order without a sound.
For the next five minutes, Billy stood still as a statue, in a crucifixion pose, while Charles troweled layers of Jif into his armpits. When he'd spackled Billy from the tops of his rib cage to the underside of biceps, Charles ordered him to start running laps around the pool. It was at least 90, and it was humid.
"Faster, and keep your arms in the air!" Nolan hollered as Billy rounded the pool over and over, his arms held out like a small child mimicking an airplane or a bird. He must have done 15 laps before they ordered him to stop. Billy was a naturally athletic sort of kid, the kind who'd probably have made a good offensive back or wrestler, but at that time he was clearly in terrible shape - panting, wheezing, sweat pouring down his face and running out of his armpits, mixed with peanut butter in long brown streams down the sides of his torso.
"Fuck, Billy... Haven't you heard of deodorant?" Nolan held the knife, covered in a blob of sloppy tan goo in front of Billy's face.
"Don't relax your arms." Charles barked at Billy.
"Eat it. Open up." Nolan snarled.
Billy struggled to keep his mouth shut for a few moments, but he knew resistance was futile. Charles and Nolan would only pin him and force it down his throat. Still, that seemed more dignified than standing prone, like some hopeless wretch on the scaffold in a medieval carving. First he had a small bite, then a bigger one, then Nolan was heaping the lumpy fetid slurry from his armpits into his face. Billy stared daggers, but he gulped it down, face straining as he struggled to get the paste through his dehydrated gullet.
"Why?" I asked Charles after they finished.
"He didn't listen."
"Not that - the peanut butter thing."
"I don't know. It just came to me."
This made sense. I've known Charles for over 20 years, but I might as well have met him yesterday. What he's thinking, doing, studying or interested in at any given moment varies so wildly from day to day there's really no way to exactly describe him. He's one of those personalities that seems to fit into just about any situation while simultaneously remaining just detached enough to never be stereotyped along with whoever he happened to be hanging around for any given period of time. We all take on some of the vestiges of what we're around. You're going to wind up acting a little like the rest of the people with whom you work or go to school. Charles was sui generis. If personalities are wheels where interests and experiences branch out from the hub, most people are five or six spoked. Charles had about forty, like one of those ornate varieties you'd see on an old Jaguar convertible. Low brow and high brow all in the same moment, oblivious to any of subtle social strictures that groups of people observe to differentiate themselves from one another.
Where most of the kids we hung out with, including me, were cultivating what's today known as snarkiness, to signal to others where we saw ourselves and where we expected them to see us, Charles walked his own path. He was in the circle but never felt any need to act to an expectation. He'd talk Broadway with a drunkard playwright/actor in front of him at the bar, volley vapid gossip and self-impressed quips with a few prep school girls to his left and argue whether "Black Peter" and "Wharf Rat" were about the same figure with a couple hippies to his right. Seamlessly, with actual knowledge. Where a lot of people would scan a scene and decide who to talk to based on the person's clothes, age or attractiveness, Charles would talk to anyone. He didn't like everyone; in fact, he disliked most people. He was just curious, and appeared to consider life a series of interviews with the goal to absorb as much disparate information from as many angles as possible. Where as we aged most of us aimed to consort tribally, narrowly and generally socially upward, Charles broadened the scope, figuring a bar back might have better stories than the average orthopedist's kid. His musical tastes were even impossible to pinpoint. The mix tapes he'd throw in Nolan's stereo jumped from Slick Rick to Moby Grape to Frank Sinatra. I couldn't argue with his "Eclectic Sponge" approach to life. No one would ever accuse Charles of being a bore. We were sitting in a friend's home, maybe a decade ago, drinking, wasting a day. Charles picked up a guitar, fiddled with the tuning, coughed and ripped off a perfect "Redemption Song."
"Where'd you learn that?"
"I don't know... Taught myself a little while ago. I've done open mic nights in a few bars. I can't read music yet or anything."
I didn't know he could play. He'd never mentioned it. That wasn't a surprise; things just came to him. I'd no doubt the peanut butter in the armpits torture just popped into his head - a collection of random images from the day snapped together by the creative powers of vodka. It was hot. There was a massive tub of peanut butter in the kitchen. Billy was a sweaty fat kid. In hindsight it all makes sense.
To Be Continued...
Posted by PhilaLawyer at 9:20 AM