The Lankville Daily News

By Ric Royer

File photo

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

File photo

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

File photo

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

File photo

By Ric Royer

File photo

We hired a girl to man the candy counter.  She had come down out of the hills a few days ago.

At the end of the first week, I asked her if she was enjoying the job.  She said that yes she was, that she enjoyed helping people pick out which candies were best suited for their own personal needs.  She did have one complaint though.

“What is that?” I asked.

“Well, Mr. Octotris, it’s this stool.”

“It’s Mr. Royer,” I corrected.  My bowels released a little.

“Mr. Roysticks, look at this stool.”

I looked at the stool.  I was lost for a moment.  I looked past her, out the picture window and saw some bushes suddenly disappear.

“Mr. Roypacks, the stool has no cushion left.  See?”

She showed me how the upholstery had been torn down to the plywood base.

“By the end of the day, Mr. Octotris, my…well…my backside (she said the word with extreme embarrassment) is red and sore, chafed even.  I’m wondering if we could get another stool.”

It was impossible.  I knew it.  But I was slowly falling in love with the girl and I knew I had to do something.  I muttered some platitude and got the hell out of there.

That night, in my apartment that had become a dark, dangerous trash-maze of my own creation, I found a seat cushion.  It had been a promotion item I had received at a baseball game and had the team name– “The Balloons” written in script across its front.  It was designed, I supposed, to help fans deal with the hard, unforgiving steel benches that passed for seating at the stadium.  I squeezed it into my knapsack and fell asleep right away in an old child’s swimming pool.

The next morning I got to the soda fountain early.  She had not arrived yet.  I tried the seat cushion on the candy counter stool.  It did not fit well but I did not want to believe it.  I wanted to believe that it hugged the stool, providing a pillowy barrier that would last forever.  Outside, I saw that the building across the street had been demolished at some point during the night.  A cordon had been fashioned to a tree and a mailbox.  I threw up a little.

I wanted her to understand that I could take the Balloons seat cushion away and that, without me, she would have no comfort.

Things moved very slowly that day.  An enormous shipment of tri-colored gums had arrived and it took hours to remove them from their cardboard boxes.  Mr. Jipps, the owner, had assigned his son Duke candy counter duties for a few hours.  I was standing right there when Duke first noticed the cushion.  He fingered its edges and almost picked it up.  But then his father barked at him and he forgot all about it.

It was after lunch when she took her place behind the counter.  The after-lunch candy crowd can be brisk and for nearly two hours she did nothing but push gummy drops into special paper sheaths, engage in restrained pleasantries, explain chocolate to nougat ratios.  I was starting to feel moist with rage.

Finally, at three, there was a lull.  She sat down and I could see the look of surprise on her face.  Then she slipped off the chair and fell forward into the display case.  I heard the sound of shattering glass, the screams of the idle women at the fountain.  Mr. Jipps shouted CALL A FIREMAN!  In the chaos that followed, I was able to slip out the back.  A billboard that had once framed the parking lot on the east side had disappeared.  I ran blindly through the alley.

I went into a fever dream.  I could see, in extreme close-up, the Balloons cushion fitting snugly across the top of the stool and people standing around commenting on it.  “Look at that fit,” they said.  I awoke at one point and was mindlessly gobbling the cans of a fat hooker in a fleabag hotel room.  She had the Balloons cushion on her head, was wearing it as a wig.  It looked beautiful.  She said, “My ex-husband followed the Balloons.  Do you remember that big brown Islander they had?  Herrera?”  I stared at her.  Then I blacked out again.

Next morning, I ended up in front of the soda fountain.  It was closed now.  They had put up a sign but someone had stolen it.  You could see the drill holes in the front door.  The candy counter was covered by a thin white sheet.

That was just the beginning of my odyssey.