The Lankville Daily News

By Ric Royer

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I pulled into the parking lot of a large institution– might have been a University, might have been a Pappy’s Chicken.  It was impossible to tell.

There was some mail on the passenger seat.  Bunch of fat bank statements, bills, important-looking notifications– I rolled down the window a bit and dropped these out.  There was also a large brown envelope.  I tore it open violently to find an old wrestling magazine.  I hadn’t remembered ordering it but was pleased nonetheless.  As the sun came up, I read an article on small motel girl wrestling.  I found myself rooting for Kendra but, as it turned out, she was vanquished in the end.  I threw the magazine into the backseat.

I walked across the parking lot and entered an anodyne brick and glass structure.  There were some tables and the pungent odor of biscuits wafted over me but there were also some classrooms. I had no idea what was going on.

I noticed a brunette in the corner reading an oversized textbook.  There was something familiar about her.

And I thought: “How can I make her love me?”

Time passed.  I was brought some biscuits.  “Do I pay you?” I asked the waitress.  She said nothing.  It seemed, for all intents and purposes, that I was invisible.

A man-boy walked through the door.  He was carrying a gigantic skateboard.  He sat down next to my brunette.  He was loud and raucous but she seemed impressed.  They went outside together and she watched him perform a series of little stunts with a wood box and an orange cone.  I threw up into the biscuits.

The waitress came back.  “She will suck him,” she noted suddenly.  She seemed to stare at nothing at all, not even the incredible tableau of vomit, biscuits and wax paper.  “You could take her textbook as revenge.  It’s just sitting there on the table.  There is a grand assumption that it will be safe, a grand assumption made by these lovers.  You could teach them a lesson far greater than anything learned in a classroom.”  Then, she walked away.

I took the textbook.  It was worth $50.

By Ric Royer

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Once, I got a job as a tire salesman.  I decided on an aggressive approach.

A man walked in.

“Hey, asshole.  You want to buy these tires?” I yelled.

He looked shocked, amazed.

“I…I’m just looking.”

“There ain’t no looking at these motherfuckers, chump,” I yelled, patting a nearby set of white walls.  “You either buy or you are no use to me.  Tire Garden can get along fine without your bullshit money.”

He asked to speak to the manager.

I approached the door of Gary’s office.  Gary was in there playing solitaire on a laptop.

“There’s a rapist out here, wants to talk to you,” I yelled loudly.

Gary said nothing.  Just looked at me with those weary red eyes.

They let me go that afternoon.

By Ric Royer

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You had to drive about seventy miles until you found a town with a reasonable selection of titty bars, Dwight opined. There’s always Lawrence but I find that to be bush league, he said, without irony. Never was Dwight so eloquent as when he talked of titty bars.

We stole a comfortable car, a ’78 Dodge if I remember and Dwight drove, making the town in about 40 minutes. It was a series of one-story brick structures, all painted black with opaque windows in their doors and garish color posters at street front. There was a hawker too, who idled on the concrete steps until he found a prospective customer.

Dwight parked on a dark side street. He had reasons for this, he said. I found the comment mysterious at the time. Later, I would come to the conclusion that that was the moment when Dwight began planning his own suicide.

We walked to the half-deserted main street. You could hear saxophone music from somewhere. We had a choice of four clubs– there was Skippers Go-Go, The Urban Tiger, Kitty Korner and Gelsinger’s French Toast.  Dwight leered at them, hands in his pockets, his hunter’s jacket covered with the stains of many a spreadable cheese luncheon. “One’s as good as any,” he said. Skippers Go-Go was first along the line.

The club was painted baby blue with a pole and a four-piece band off to one side. Dwight selected a table near the back and I followed.

Almost instantly a man with an enormous face and a ragged mane of hair grabbed Dwight by the shoulder. “My friend over there doesn’t like you. And I don’t like you neither.” I knew then there would be trouble and I bolted for the bathroom. I hid behind a locked stall door for what seemed like hours.

When I went back to the main room, the place had been partially burned to the ground. Only the simplest of architectural rudiments had been left. The floor had been cleared and a series of slop buckets had been placed to collect the blood. It was horrible.

I stumbled out onto an empty street. The rest of the clubs seemed still operating but there was nary a soul about. I tried desperately to find the old Dodge– I was convinced of the street but the car was gone. An old lady on a dilapidated shack porch, quite near where I felt the car to have been, smiled at me. Then she said, “Take a bus home. There ain’t no other way.”

I made the Greyhound station in just under an hour, despite having no sense of direction. It was painted the same baby blue as the club. I bought a ticket for Lawrence and the bus was near empty at that hour– there was a guy in the back wearing a t-shirt that read, I don’t need an encyclopedia, my wife knows everything. There was a browning Sunday paper all over the floor.

I never saw Dwight again.

By Ric Royer

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For hours, Dwight would sit in his lawn chair beneath the bug-zapper utterly motionless, not even shifting his heavy frame once, staring languidly towards the eerie savannah. Then, he would turn towards me abruptly and say something like:

“Let’s go down and beat up that fellow that built that little piano.”

I’d agree and the next thing I know, we’d be heading down there in Dwight’s old pickup. The front was now benchless and it was necessary to squat awkwardly or attempt to position oneself on the squalid collection of fetid blankets that lined the floor but that became moist from ceiling leaks. The pickup was lampless now too and Dwight would often have to veer off the road to avoid an aggregation of tumbleweeds or a dead body.

We finally arrived at the derelict bungalow. It sat off on its own behind a series of low, dead hedges. The front picture window was boarded up with cardboard boxes– you could still read the advertising on their sides. Condor Alights Beer, Buntz Mallows, Magnanimous Boys’ Horn of Comfy Hotel Bedding, standard really. Dwight parked the pickup across the dirt road.

The eccentric was there, we knew it. It was said he had constructed a tiny piano that could read your mind, pick up any melody there, play it back to you. The story was all over the county. But no one had ever seen it. Dwight decided to remedy that.

He kicked in the door with one simple forward exertion. The front room was lit somberly and the eccentric sat crouched at a desk, writing. Papers and books littered the surface. He didn’t look up.

The piano was there on a little shelf. Dwight stared at it. Suddenly, it lurched into action and began playing the “Barberie Pound Soaps” jingle. Dwight let out an abbreviated laugh of self-satisfaction. “Guess it works, huh.”

“Of course it works,” said the eccentric, still not turned in his chair. “Now, I must ask you to leave.”

Dwight had violence in his veins that night, I could tell. But he also felt a measure of respect for the little piano that could play the Barberie Pound Soaps song and its inventor. He wordlessly beckoned me out and even replaced the door using only some old wood screws in his pocket and a dime as a screwdriver.

Then we drove out to a trailer park and beat up some Island People.

By Ric Royer

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