July 1999

Graham Weeks

Thirty-five years back, before he went to Hollywood, Jelly was a little fat kid with bright blue eyes that everybody said were like Steve McQueen’s, and he was stone crazy. Sometimes we played this game we called Dead Man. We’d sneak into my old man’s garage, where he kept a pair of short-barrelled Smith & Wessons wrapped in an oily rag and hidden under some wood. They were big, black revolvers, heavy and greasy, and smelled of metal, and danger. They were loaded, too. We took out the shiny, blunt-nosed slugs in the half-darkness and laid each one on the workbench with a tiny, important click. We handled them like something precious, slow and easy. Then, two-handed, we cocked back the hammers, pointed the guns at each other’s heads, and slowly squeezed the triggers. Those moments stand out. I watched Jelly’s blue eyes get bright and round, felt my heart pounding, my pants pushed out with a terrified hard-on. Then the hammers cracked down on the empty chambers, and we sat, frozen in the quiet of the garage, staring at each other with stupid faces.

On the morning of our seventh birthday (I was born here in Buffalo, Jelly in L.A., but on the same day), we snuck off to the garage. After we pulled the triggers, Jelly showed me his gun. He’d left one bullet in and spun it, like in Russian Roulette. He looked up at me and I saw he was shaking. Then he flung the gun on the bench and ran out to the blinding early sunlight, whooping like a wild man. We never talked about it again, and we never played the game again either.

"Tell me, what do you remember about Buffalo?" Harvey Charleston’s asking Jelly.

"Well I don’t know what I can tell you, Harvey," he says. "It’s, like, I don’t really remember a lot about it, you see I was young, only about four years old, when my folks took me back to California." Then he thinks for a minute, maybe sees that this isn’t a good thing to say, because he goes on, "But I do remember being happy here. I remember it as a swell place"

I guess he has to say that, but it makes me mad. If it’s such a swell place, how come he’s never been back here?

You don’t get to keep many secrets and you don’t get a lot of peace if you live on a trailer park.

Nine o’clock this morning, and Mrs Paez from the next trailer comes busting in here holding my boy Jamie by the ear, and screaming in Spanish. ¡Éste niño es un diablo, está fuera de control! The kid had been fighting with Paco Paez. They do that, they’re only seven years old, it’s no big deal. Mrs Paez is a very straight woman though, and dignified, even if she does have a voice like an air horn. Anyway, when she came in I was still lying on the couch from last night, in my shorts and with an empty bottle of whisky on the floor beside me. The TV was still on, and she marched right over, shut it off, and started in on me. Just what I needed, I tell you. What you doin’ here? Livin’ like a animal? How your boy gonna grow up a decent boy with his father like a animal? She doesn’t pull her punches, but she never loses her dignity. She stomped into the bedroom, kicking bottles and cans out of her way, and came back with a pair of jeans. She threw them at me. ¡Fuera! Out! And you don’t come back before a couple hours at least! She shoved me through the door while I was still trying to climb into my pants.

So we drove up to Lake Erie, Jamie and me, to do some fishing. Wasn’t much else we could do really, and the rods and lines were in the back of the pickup. I spent all morning watching him playing on the sand-hill way over at the other side of the beach. Climbing up the ridge and sliding down in his yellow T-shirt, over and over, like a tiny yellow flame against the red earth. He’s a good kid.

I never wanted to call him Jamie. It was my old man’s name, see, and it’s mine too. I never liked it. It was Nicole’s idea. Now she’s gone, maybe I could call him something else.

She lit out, what, a week ago, took all the money that was left in the bank, all seventy-five dollars, along with everything she could carry. She’s gone to work in New York City in some all-night beanery with a guy named Aslan. He’s a born again Christian and will most likely buy her fake diamonds and beat shit out of her on Friday nights. Maybe that’s what I should have done. The whole week, Jamie hasn’t asked about her, or said anything. He has a shoebox under his bed that he keeps tied up with this complicated knot he thinks nobody else can unpick. Inside is a picture of Nicole, and a couple of other things to remember her by, a busted toy car with no wheels and a torn-off piece of paper that says, Goodbye, be a good boy and always do what your Daddy tells you. He does, too.

My old man used to hit me. Not always, just sometimes when he got drunk on a Friday, Saturday night. Coming home from his bowling league, laughing and singing and falling over the trashcans. If I was awake, I’d get whipped. He said I had to remember I didn’t have a Momma, and if he wasn’t careful I’d turn out bad. He said I was his son, and he’d make damn sure I turned out to be something in the world, because no son of his was going to be a nothing, a nobody. When I was old enough, he’d put me in the army, and they’d make a man out of me, like they had with him. Then, sometimes, he started to cry, big, drunk tears, so big that he hardly could seem to get them out, and he’d say he was sorry, and that everything he did was only because he loved me so much. And he’d come up to my room and tell me his story about the army and the war. That was World War Two. I used to like the story, never got tired of it. But later, when he put out the light and stumbled off down the stairs, I lay awake in the dark, rubbing my bruises. I told myself I was never going to be a soldier, and that if I ever had a kid then I’d love him for real and treat him right and not whip him, not ever.

When Jamie got bored with the sand-hill, he came over to see what I’d caught. I hadn’t caught anything. He wanted to talk, but my head was too full of whisky and memories. I need to get them out, all these memories.

Jelly’s telling Harvey Charleston about when he was a kid. What he’s really happy about now, he says, is how he’s escaped from poverty, and made sure his own kids will never have to go through it. He’s talking about when he used to collect old newspapers to sell, and how his Mom had to work on the supermarket checkout to make ends meet, and still never had enough for the rent. None of it is true. They had their own house. They weren’t rich, but they sure weren’t poor. His Mom never saw the wrong side of a supermarket checkout. And he wasn’t four when he left Buffalo, either. Why’s he telling these stories?

We were nine or ten when Jelly’s folks left Buffalo for California, where they’d come from originally when Jelly was just a baby. We wrote out a pact that we’d always remember each other, and stuck our fingers with a sewing needle to seal it with blood. On the morning they left, his folks stopped by the house. I remember, we shook hands, shivering in the cold, punched each other’s shoulders, and I watched his face pressed up against the back window of his old man’s Buick, getting smaller and smaller as they pulled off through the snow down Alexander drive.

For a while we wrote each other just about every day, but after a time it was only me writing. The last I heard from him was maybe a year after he left. I got a New Year’s card with a note on the back. It said he was going to Hollywood for a while, he’d got a part in a movie through someone his Dad knew. He was going to be rich and famous, and I had to watch out because pretty soon I’d be hearing his name. At the end he said that when he was famous he’d come back for me and get me in the movies too. We used to write stuff like that, but now I could see he didn’t mean it, not like before. It sounded kind of hollow, like the letter had seemed a good idea, but he found out halfway through that it wasn’t. I threw it away, but later I fished it out of the garbage, flattened it and put it with the others. I still have those letters. They’re locked in an old tin box under some clothes in the closet, along with our pact. It’s where I keep the Smith & Wessons too, and a couple of other things I got from my old man when he died.

I must’ve been twenty-four or -five when I first saw Jelly’s face on a movie bill, so that would be around the end of the seventies. One hot summer’s day I was walking down Kennedy, and those blue eyes caught mine, big and round and bright, just like I remembered them. His face had changed though. It was a man’s face now, strong-boned and slim, not like the dumpy kid I used to know. He wore a blonde moustache and was dressed in combat gear, dirty with mud and stained with blood and sweat. The movie was called Lost Hero, and underneath in red letters was Jelly’s name, Gerald Kustar, his real name.

Jelly was this grunt who was left after the rest of the platoon had been wasted. He had about five hundred bullets in him, and still got round to blowing away half the gooks in Korea or Nam, or wherever the hell he was, and laying this incredible chick who kept sewing his wounds and telling him he was only doing what was right.

The movie stank, but I didn’t see that then. It was like a miracle to me, his face up there the size of a house. I sat through it three times, and twice more the next day. I found out he’d had bit parts in other movies, and I went to see them all, over and over. He was a gladiator, a pirate, a spaceman, a cop. I saw him laugh and cry and make love and kill guys. And I saw him die, again and again.

He doesn’t get killed in his pictures any more. He’s a big star now, lives in a mansion on the Heights outside L. A. with his third wife and a couple of guys with black Dobermans walking the grounds. I drove down there with Nicole one summer, to see Hollywood and L. A. That was before Jamie was born. We sat outside his house one night for a while, smoking cigarettes and looking up at the big iron gates.

One moonless night in the spring of 1944, my old man parachuted into northern France wearing black civilian clothes and carrying a sub-machine gun and twenty pounds of plastic explosive. His orders were to blow up the Paris-Rouen railroad, but almost as soon as he hit the ground he was picked up by German soldiers. With them was a small, bearded Frenchman, his contact in the Resistance. He had betrayed the operation. They took him to a Gestapo house and tortured him for two days, but then he escaped from the truck that was taking him to Paris for more interrogation, and eventually made it back to England.

The only person I ever told about this was Jelly, who thought it was really something to have a father who was a genuine hero, and I guess that’s right. I don’t know why I never told anyone but him. At that time there were a lot of kids mouthing off about what their Dads did in the war. But I didn’t.

That was the story my old man used to tell me, that I never got tired of hearing. I guess it stuck in my mind in different ways, because I tell Jamie a story too, about when I was a cop.

It’s a pretty violent story, about busting down doors, laying down rubber on the highway and facing of bad guys with Uzzis. He never tires of it either, every time his eyes get big and he says things like, Wow, Pop, didja really kill ‘em? And I shrug and look sorry, and say, Well, sure, son, it was them or me. Sometimes I see him looking at me out of the corner of his eye when he’s watching some dumb cop show on TV, and I think maybe he’s weighing me up, seeing me there on the screen. I stare into space, pull in my belly a little, and I feel... well, pretty good.

When we got back from the lake, Mrs Paez wasn’t there, but the trailer was a different place. All the whisky bottles were gone, even the full ones, and everything was cleaned from top to bottom, and smelling of some kind of lemon air-freshener. In the icebox was an unbroken six of Miller’s that I hadn’t bought, so I guess the message was clear: drink a beer but bring your boy up right.

Mrs Paez thinks her daughter Lola works nights at a canning plant, but I know different. When old man Paez hit the road, leaving her with the five kids, Lola quit school and went to work. Now the whole family lives on what she makes. Mrs Paez doesn’t see that you don’t pick up that kind of dough canning corn, or maybe she doesn’t dare to see. I found out by accident when I was out one night with some guys from the 7-11 where I had a job for a while stacking shelves. We stopped by this downtown singles bar just to check out the action, and there was Lola. At first I didn’t recognize her, I mean, she’s only seventeen, but she was done up like a chick of twenty-five or thirty. She looked real... sophisticated, but you could see that she was just hustling tricks. One of the guys walked right up to her and asked straight out, how much for the four of us. That really got me. She didn’t let on she knew who I was, but I just about had to fight those guys to keep their hands off her.

Next morning, early, she knocked on the trailer door. Nicole was knocked out from her tranks, so I crawled out of bed, still woozy from the night before, let her in, gave her some coffee. She was dressed in her regular clothes again. She sat at the table, her hands around the cup, staring down into it. Then she looked up at me; man, some eyes she has, big, black Mexican eyes, like pools of oil, but there’s something cold in them too, something that doesn’t belong in a seventeen year- old girl.

"You don’t... you don’t say nothing," she said.

"Huh?"

"Last night. You don’t say nothing to my mother about what I do."

"Listen, Lola..."

"No, you listen. Don’t give me no crap about what I gotta do and what I don’t. I got a family, and they gotta live, gotta eat. Last night you come later, right, and you don’t see me and nothing changes. Or you go to another bar with your friends and fuck some other girl like me, no? I don’t want no trouble. You keep your mouth shut, OK?"

It’s a funny kind of feeling when you’re going on forty and a seventeen year-old kid makes you feel small. She fucks for money or her brothers starve is what it comes down to, and who’s to say what’s worse. For a minute I wanted to take that little girl and give her the whipping of her life. Then I wanted to take her in my arms and tell her everything’s going to be all right, and kick Nicole out and marry her and take care of her and her whole family. Crazy thoughts like that. What I did, I let her finish her coffee in silence, and she left. I said nothing to Mrs Paez. One day she’s going to find out though, and I bet she sees things clearer.

When my old man died I didn’t cry, and there’s something there that still doesn’t feel right. Nicole and I had only been married a few months, and we’d just moved in here, but I used to go up to the house every evening and sit with him for a while. Then when he got so bad that he couldn’t even get out of bed, I’d go and visit him in the hospital. Sometimes he’d be awake and we’d talk, but near the end he was asleep most of the time, or coughing up blood, or he just didn’t know who I was. I’d sit there anyway looking at him, but it got to be like I was looking at a photograph, or watching a long, slow movie. He didn’t seem to have anything to do with me, no connection. It was just somebody I had to sit and stare at every day. I watched him slowly die, and I thought, why didn’t they kill you in the war? That would have been better than this endless dying, one hero’s bullet.

I’d seen it a year or more before he died. I was lying on the couch drinking a beer and half watching this old Ward Bond movie on TV; and suddenly there it was, in the picture. My old man’s story. The little Frenchman, the Gestapo colonel with the monocle and the twitchy mouth, the escape from the moving truck, the whole thing, exactly the way he used to tell me. At first I thought it was just some incredible coincidence, or that they’d somehow gotten hold of his story and used it. I checked. I sent a letter to the records department at the Pentagon, saying I was writing a piece about local vets for the Buffalo Herald. Turns out he spent the whole war checking stores in a training camp in a place called Tidworth, somewhere in the south of England.

Maybe my old man died a little easier thinking I believed he was a hero. Or maybe he didn’t even remember what he told me; it was all a long time ago. Either way that story is still a part of him somehow. Things can be true even when they’re not real, I guess, or real when they’re not true.

I was never a cop. I tried to be, before Jamie was born, before I even met Nicole, but I flunked out of the Police academy. They said I lacked personal stability. That’s a killer. I’ve been pretty stable on welfare these last six years. And Jamie has never believed any of it, that story I tell him about shouldering down doors and putting away bad guys, my big bust. He likes to hear it because it makes me feel good, that’s all. What do you do when your kid’s better at living life than you?

I don’t think I can make myself tell him the story any more, but maybe one day I should tell him where I got it from. I got it from one of Jelly’s movies.

"You never play bad guys," says Harvey Charleston, "now why is that? Can we expect to see Gerald Kustar as an evildoer anytime soon?"

Jelly thinks about this for a moment.

"Well, Harvey, you know the world of pictures isn’t real. It’s made, it’s manufactured by the people who work in it, and everybody just does the job they do best. The job I do best is to play the kind of role I play. I don’t get asked to play bad guys. Maybe I’m too pretty or something..." The audience laughs. "Seriously though Harvey, I like to play good guys, I like to play heroes, though you have to remember not to take it all to heart. My characters there on the screen are fiction, I couldn’t do those things in real life, nobody could. But that doesn’t make any of us any less. I believe we’re all heroes in our own way, at different times."

Sure, Jelly, we’re all heroes. This trailer park’s full of them.

Harvey Charleston has run out of time. The titles are rolling, and he’s thanking Jelly, and talking about tomorrow’s show.

I leave Jamie sleeping and drive downtown. I know he’ll be staying at the Radisson, where else would someone like him go? It’s a cold night outside and I’ve put on a thick, military overcoat, my old man’s, that he kept from the war. In the pocket I have the gun. I hope it’s the same one Jelly used all those years ago... I’ve finally gone crazy, I shouldn’t be doing this, but nothing’s going to stop me, nothing.

There’s nobody around at this time of night. I pull up opposite the Radisson, and sit in my car waiting, shivering, fingering the short, hard stub of the pistol barrel, spinning the chambers, spinning and spinning. I have to wait a long time, and the whisky bottle is nearly finished before I see Jelly’s cab pull up on the other side of the street. He gets out. He’s wearing a long coat and a wide-brim hat, and there’s a girl with him, not his wife. They’re talking and staggering, half drunk. While he pays the driver I take a long pull on the bottle, and when the cab edges away, I slide out of the car, point the Smith & Wesson at the back of Jelly’s head and squeeze the trigger.

The hammer comes down; an empty click, echoing loud in the quiet night. Jelly hears it, and he turns, but I have the gun back in my pocket before he sees it. He looks, goes to turn away, then looks again and takes a couple of strides across the street towards me.

"Hey, man! Hey, I know that face. How the hell are you? Hey, you OK?"

"Remember me, Jelly?"

"I sure do. I sure do. Hey, you OK? What happened to you, man?"

I think of how I must look to him, standing there with a week’s growth on my face, in a World War Two greatcoat and smelling of whisky.

"I... I’m not so good, Jelly."

"What the hell happened to you?"

"What happened? I guess... it’s hard to... my wife ran out. I don’t know. I guess... nothing happened."

He looks uncomfortable. I see the girl reach out and touch his arm. She’s real class, beautiful as a princess and covered with diamonds. She doesn’t want to be talking to some bum on a street corner.

Jelly reaches inside his coat, into his jacket pocket.

"Listen, here, take this. Maybe it’ll... Here, take it." He presses some bills into my hand, says something stupid about us getting together sometime, and then he’s gone. The two of them walk through the glass doors of the hotel without looking back.

In the car, I take the single bullet out of the Smith & Wesson and turn it over in my fingers. Then I drop it into the empty bottle and throw it out into the street. I flatten out the bills; Jelly’s pocket change comes to a hundred and sixty dollars. I drive home with the thought in my head that I’m going to give it all to Lola. I drive home slow, on the seat next to me the money, the empty gun.

© Graham Weeks 1999

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