February 7, 2007 (revised August 18, 2007)
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He said we could call him Spiv. �That�s a slang word in Britain, for someone who earns a living by shady means,� he would explain with a high-pitched laugh that compounded his preciousness.
And he always had a ton of talcum powder on his face, for some reason.
And I may have still worn sweater vests, but he wore tweed overcoats (with elbow patches!) and baroque loafers.
And maybe my fourth or fifth day at the dorm, I was in the bathroom by myself, peeing into a urinal, when he walked in, stepped up to the urinal to my right, and unzipped his pants. I looked away out of urinal etiquette. After a few seconds, he said �Hey look....Hey look, Gerald.� I turned to look. He had both his hands around his penis. Just the head stuck out, so I couldn�t tell how endowed he was. He started staring into my eyes and smiling. �Take a ride on the stream of life,� he sang in a fruitier-than-usual voice as he started peeing. �I�ll be your man, you�ll be my wife.� He was singing the chorus to �The Stream of Life,� that Elderberry Jam song from the early Seventies; you might have heard the original version during the mid-Nineties in that campy movie about the menstruating teen werewolves.
Anyway, he continued his performance, staring into my eyes and smiling. �There�ll be no stress, there�ll be no strife / Take a ride on the stream of life / Sha la la la, la la, la la!� He kept repeating �Sha la la la, la la, la la!� for about half a minute, more and more softly, until he stopped peeing. If I�d had balls, I would have stomped his head into, well, jam. Instead, I watched him zip himself up and leave.
I�d managed to avoid all contact with him after that.
That is, until now, when I saw him sitting in a chair in the TV room, watching some soap opera in which a doctor told a nurse �It�s not too late. It�s not too late. Do it for Harriet. It�s just not too late.� For such a cheap college, we had an expensive-looking color TV, with a 28-inch screen and a column of push-button channels. (My family also had a color TV, but a 24-inch one with those primitive devices known as dials.)
I sat down in the chair next to Spiv. �You staying here for the break?� I asked.
�Indubitably.�
One word, and I already wanted to kill him.
�Me too,� I said.
Five seconds later, the commercials began. First up: a young blonde woman in a short beige dress, and in what looks like dark beige pantyhose, wandered through some meadow on a sunny day. �Pantyhose with the panties knit right in,� a female voiceover said. �So you can look fine��
�How nice,� I said.
��without a pantyline,� she said over a close-up of the blonde�s flat ass.
�Take a look at that great arse!� Spiv said. �I wouldn�t mind having some fun with that!�
So he wasn�t light in the loafers, apparently.
�It�s �ass,�� I said. �She has a great ass. We say �ass� in America.�
�Aw, don�t spoil my fun. As the Bard of Avon said, an arse by any other name would smell as sweet.�
We started watching the next commercial, in which a housewife standing in some kitchen asked us where she could find instant coffee that didn�t taste like instant. I certainly didn�t know.
�Would you like to do something later on, in the afternoon?� Spiv asked.
�Uh, thanks for asking, but I�ve already made other plans.�
I had made other plans. That afternoon, I walked from my dorm to downtown Henning, specifically to the town�s only movie theater, the Henning Twoplex, which I had never visited. I needed something to do; everything else was closed, except for a few restaurants and Spiv�s mouth.
The Twoplex was a ten-minute walk from campus, but then everything in downtown Henning was a ten-minute walk from campus. The Twoplex sported a gray-brick fa�ade and a basic two-tier marquee�no neon, no exotic flourishes, not even any velvet-rope poles. Totally unlike small-town movie theaters in the movies.
Theater one showed The Fish That Saved Pittsburgh. Theater two showed Jack Justice. I hadn�t heard of either movie. I decided to see Jack Justice because it was a little over two hours long and would kill more time, compared to the other movie�s hour and 44 minutes. I�d asked the mousy cashier in the ticket booth for the running times. Maybe I should have thanked her, or wished her a happy Thanksgiving. And maybe I should have flashed back to Frances�s comment at the graduation party that the movie Grease was just a way to kill two hours.
Anyway, I saw Jack Justice. I�ve seen ten thousand movies, and I remember this one, my first R-rated one, the most. And I�ve seen it only once. It takes place in Texas, 1879. A former outlaw named Jack Justice is now a rancher living near the Rio Grande with his wife Polly. You can tell he�s gone straight because he married a schoolmarm with small boobs. Goopy acoustic guitar plays as Jack and Polly sit on the porch, holding hands, silhouetted by a blinding reddish-orange sunset that didn�t remind me of the one airbrushed onto both sides of Greg�s van.
Jack and Polly�s luck runs out later that night, when his former partner�sorry, I mean pardner�Mose Wilder and several other bad guys invade their house. Jack had grown sick of the outlaw life, and of Mose�s violent behavior, so a few months ago, Jack ratted him out to the law and ran off with Polly to get married. Now Mose has broken out of the hoosegow and wants revenge. �You do need to learn about loyalty, Jack old pal,� he says in the cultured way of most Hollywood psychopaths. Mose�s men beat Jack nearly to death. Then they make him watch as Mose rapes Betsy. Mose, or his body double, takes her from behind on the floor, his pants around his ankles, his bare ass visible for a few seconds, while she remains fully clothed. After he�s done raping her, he stands up, pulls up his pants, says �Much obliged, ma�am,� removes his pistol from his gun belt, and blows her brains out. Close-up of Jack�s bruised, bloody face�he looks peeved.
�Well...it�s been fun,� Mose tells him anachronistically. Mose knocks him out with the butt of his, Mose�s, pistol. The bad guys go outside, set Jack�s house on fire, and ride off, leaving him to die.
But he doesn�t. He regains consciousness and crawls out of his house a second before it collapses in flames on the fuzzy rear-screen projection behind him. Fade to black.
Fade in on him riding his horse. Jack has recovered from his injuries and now wants, you guessed it, revenge. He rides around for a long time until he tracks down Dan, one of Mose�s men. Dan�s bailing Styrofoam-looking hay near a Styrofoam-looking barn. Jack shoots him to death, the blood spurting out of Dan�s stomach like a lawn sprinkler.
Jack rides around for a longer time. He visits a saloon and sees Blade, another of Mose�s men. Blade's slapping around a woman. Jack and Blade have a saloon-destroying brawl. Having helped destroy the saloon, Blade reaches into his vest and pulls out his signature ninety-inch knife. Jack wrestles the knife away and plunges it into Blade�s back, killing him. �Thanks�I was tired of keeping him company,� the woman says. She also says she�s Faith Wilder, Mose�s sister, and that she knows Jack�s looking for him, and that Mose is holed up in the desert a few hundred miles away, and that she can take Jack to him.
So they ride off together. You can tell they�ll have sex because she�s the only other woman in this movie, and because she has large boobs. Indeed, after he shoots a few more of Mose's men in gory detail, Jack and Faith do have sex, and you can tell they�ve fallen in love, because they have slow-motion, soft-focus, golden-lit, missionary-style sex in a canopy bed, with goopy violins playing. Faith, or her body double, shows her bare boobs for a few seconds, but we don�t see anything on Jack below his eyebrows, not that I wanted to see him naked.
The next day, our loving couple arrives at Mose�s hideout. Mose and his gang greet them out front, guns pointed. Faith walks up to him. �Nice to see you,� he says. They embrace. They kiss for a pretty long time. She clearly enjoys the experience.
�I�m very close to my brother, heh heh,� she tells Jack. Oh no, the old incestuous siblings double-cross!
I doubt I�m spoiling the plot for anyone by revealing that Jack shoots all the bad guys to death, saving Mose for last. Then he points his pistol at the lone bad girl, Faith. She�s pointing a pistol at him. �It was hard for me to betray you,� she says. �I do love you, Jack!�
�Yeah. I love you too.�
He blows her brains out.
�I love you too.�
He walks away from her body. He gets onto his horse. He rides off into the distance as goopy electric guitar and keyboard blare. Roll credits.
I watched the entire credits. Might as well kill as much time as possible.
TO BE CONTINUED
"'What a Lovely Couple (Part 2)' makes War and Peace look like Puffy Duck's Journey to the Island of Bindleby-Boo! Yeeeah!"--Garrett "Smashmouth" Gunderson, The Lit Minute, WTDE-FM, public radio with that extra TUDE, dude!--Fiction, Home.
� 2007 David V. Matthews