The Last Projector Read online

  “Equalizer.” Billy loved that word.

  But Billy’s plan backfired a little bit, after it became clear what he was up to all along. For the next slam, Bully bought herself a “Pee-Qualizer” in protest, the shirt where cartoon puppies urinated in an arc up to her shoulders when certain audio levels were reached, much like the fountain at the Bellagio Hotel in Las Vegas (there were many other possibilities for shirts that gauged emotions, but she had no interest in the much classier “T-Qualizer,” since it didn’t feature critters pissing to the beat of the music). And after she showed up on the 4th of July wearing her boyfriend on her arm again and that particular T-shirt, tight and black of course, the spiky-haired human accessory had no choice but to trade up shirts himself a week later.

  It was his last mistake. The Zeee-Qualizer, or “Tanzfruedig Sprengstoffspürhund!” (which Billy later discovered translated to the baffling “dance-crazy, explosive-sniffing dog”), the rarest in their line of battery-powered clothing, featured a spiraling red swastika.

  The spiky-haired boyfriend probably should have put the battery in to test it out before he got to the bar because he quickly discovered that getting your ass righteously kicked while wearing a T-shirt that flashed to the beat of your pummeling was pretty much the most embarrassing thing that could ever happen in front of a girl. And, lucky for Billy, it was also the quickest way to lose one for good.

  So Billy wasn’t too shocked when he offered to get more supplies while setting up for the final open-mic night (the desk light they used to illuminate the poets got smashed in the brawl), and she said she’d tag along with him. He reset his watch to noon when she got in his car, figuring he had about three hours to get her interested. He worked better with self-imposed deadlines.

  “Bully for me!” he couldn’t help whispering when he walked around to get her door.

  He’d made it an hour before he pulled that stupid power play with the cop and the horn, so he cranked his watch back to start over.

  “I hate when they do that,” Billy said as he sat in his car, stewing. “You’d think they’d try a little harder after what happened on the South Side.”

  “What happened on the South Side?”

  He didn’t answer the question yet. He was pouting too much to enjoy spinning a story. “I wasn’t ready to tell you that stuff about me,” he grumbled. “And cops know that tricky shit. That’s why they ask so many questions.”

  “What tricky shit?” Bully asked, half-smiling at his efforts to impress, but never looking at him when he did it. He looked at her another second before pulling back into traffic. She wasn’t even his type anymore. That was the crazy part. She’d dyed her hair that morning, now suddenly an icy little blonde, something out of Hitchcock. Even her eyes seemed lighter. Steel-blue and dilated. Foot always tapping impatiently. You’d think those pupils would mean you could get a good look into her head, but damn if it didn’t always seem the other way around. If she stood in a line-up with the rest of his black curly-haired ex-girlfriends, someone would protest, “Get that albino jackrabbit out of there!”

  “It was subtle,” he explained to her. “But everything that cop asked was geared to show how incompatible the two of us would be in a relationship. There’s too much shit on a license.”

  “Really? I think he was just being an asshole. My hair color on there probably says ‘Any.’”

  “And what was all that about an ‘oldest trick in the book?’” he muttered. “Glorified dogcatchers, all of ‘em…”

  “Oh, that. Well, it’s common for ex-cons or terrorists to stick their tongue out in their driver’s license photo to distort their features and make them less recognizable.”

  “Come on. Even when third graders do it?”

  Instead of answering, she started digging through her purse and came up with a stack of cassette tapes, buried under some 8-tracks. He hadn’t seen one of those since forever.

  “What are those for?” he asked.

  “You just reminded me! I use ‘em to get people to come to the poetry readings. Like advertising. I leave them everywhere: bushes, gas pumps, drive-thrus. Call ‘em ‘Tape Bombs.’ Or ‘Luck Bombs.’ Like a photo bomb? You know, like when you fuck up someone’s picture.”

  “What’s on the tapes?”

  “Just the last few people we had at the readings. The best of the bunch, which ain’t saying much…”

  “Did you see that cop’s tattoo? On one of his forearms, it read ‘In God We Trust, But...’ something.’”

  “But what?”

  “Exactly. His other sleeve was rolled up. I couldn’t see it. I think that’s where the answer was hiding.”

  She looked around his car, disappointed and suddenly bored. “So, what’s all this then?”

  She flicked the tangle of necklaces, air-fresheners, and feathers that hung off his rear-view mirror. The motion erased his new smile.

  “Huh? Oh, it’s a dreamcatcher.”

  “A what? A dogcatcher?”

  “No, you know, dreamcatcher? A circle? Bunch of shit hanging off of it? Catches dreams.”

  “Right,” she snickered, going back to her purse.

  He felt like she was judging the authenticity of his dreamcatcher, or even worse, its size. He was frustrated, as he mistakenly assumed everyone knew the ratty little counterfeit versions hanging from rear-view mirrors were at least daydreamcatchers, and they did help your concentration while driving, as important as turn signals as far as preventing traffic fatalities.

  He wanted to bring up the boyfriend, find out if the T-shirt competition had vanquished him for good, maybe talk some passive-aggressive shit about him disguised as helpful brotherly advice. But she put out this vibe that made him want to steer clear of the subject. Of all subjects actually. And the more he thought about the cop asking those questions, screwing up his moves before he even made them, the angrier Billy got.

  Right then, Billy thought maybe he could kill one for her. Or at least convince her he could do it. Maybe she’d like that. He checked his watch again. He still had a couple hours with her as a captive audience in the passenger’s seat. It might be enough to convince her. Then he remembered that incident on the South Side again, and he thought maybe it would be much easier to get her to imagine murdering a police officer, too. Easier than it would be to imagine being his girlfriend.

  Once someone gathered the pages back up, Larry tried to get the blue vein on his forehead to sink back into his brain while he blocked out the rest of the scene. Around him, his cast mingled, impatient but still groggy from partying the night before, all four of them with their bathrobes open but still over their shoulders, the same robes they’d stolen from their last shoot at the Ritz-Carlton.

  The robes always cracked him up. It made Larry feel like a cult leader. Until the robes came off anyway. Then every tattoo would ruin the fantasy.

  He hated the tattoos. Always with the tattoos lately.

  Nothing against tattoos as a concept, he’d tell himself. It’s just that they were a distraction. And they fucked up his movies. And there seemed to be so many of them these days. How could you believe what you were seeing on the screen was real (and by real, he meant “fiction”) if space monsters, jagged signatures, and the smiling faces of strangers inked all over the bodies shook you right out of the illusion? In real movies, a bit of tattoo peeking out of a collar or shirt-sleeve was a little dose of character, a bit of sympathetic mileage or free characterization, like a wandering eye, a broken nose, or a chicken-pox scar on someone’s forehead. It could be incorporated into the story fairly easily.

  But not in porn. In porn, the entire body was visible.

  It could be an all-nighter to fix the continuity. On those nights, he wished he only had sleep apnea.

  “Places!”

  They dropped the robes.

  Impossibly, it was worse than he remembered.

  For hours, they drove behind a shimmering lake of heat they never seemed to catch.

  “How
long do you think before he notices we’re back here?” Bully asked.

  “Not for a while,” Billy said, then reconsidered. “At least not till he gets off the highway.”

  “Why are we following him again?”

  “Again?” Billy almost jumped.

  “No, I mean tell me again while we’re following him so that… never mind.”

  Billy felt like he was losing her, so he told the story, the one he’d been saving. He unloaded it all at once, in an ugly brick of words that actually made the car squeak from the weight.

  “So there was this cop who was driving home from a bar on the South Side, and these other two guys, big dudes, were walking across the street and stepped in front of his car. So this cop, also big but sloppy big, started running his mouth to these two guys to impress his wife, a woman who I know little about but will consider a dumb fuck for marrying a cop. So she’s in the seat next to him, I forgot to tell you that, dutifully impressed with his display of plumage. The cop is drunk, by the way, a regular occurrence on his days off, but we don’t find that out until later. So, one of the two legitimately big dudes gets tired of the cop talking shit and walks over to the car… and punches the cop right square in the mouth. Big dude doesn’t know he’s a cop, and he finds it so easy, this particular punch, that he decides to special-deliver about ten more into this cop’s mailbox before the bastard can do anything about it. The cop tries to roll up his window at one point, as if it’s the weather blowing in on him, as if it’s a literal rain of fists that he’s happened upon…”

  Billy cranked the handle of his window for effect, winding himself up to talk even faster:

  “…then the big dudes are gone, the cop is stunned, and the wife is still stupid. The cop’s fuming now, bleeding a bit, feeling ashamed that his wife saw all that, feeling like a fucking citizen of all things, God forbid. So he pulls into a nearby parking lot and scurries back to his trunk to get his gun. Then he leaves his betrothed in the car and runs down the street to make his drunken arrest, and the wife hightails back to the bar they were getting sloppy at earlier to try and get other off-duty cops to come to the rescue. The inebriated cop is stumbling up and down the street with his bloody nose and his gun and comes across this kid all by himself, minding his own beeswax and walking home. This kid has nothing to do with anything, of course, and not even a drunken fuckin’ cop could reasonably claim he resembles a dude who would ever punch someone in the face once, let alone ten times, but for some reason, the cop decides he’ll have to do. Now, if I was to take a moment of vacation in this idiot’s brain, I would guess he thought an arrest would redeem him with his idiot wife, but who knows. So he runs at the confused kid and screams for him to put his hands in the air. The kid complies, protesting a bit. Then the cop is grabbing one of the kid’s hands on the back of his head when the gun goes off and blows a hole through… hold on. Is that car gonna let us get over?”

  Billy’s neck cracked like knuckles as he leaned back to look for a hole in traffic.

  “Guess not. Anyway, what was I saying? Oh, yeah. Gun goes off. Blows a hole through the kid’s hand. But it could have been his head, right! You thought it was his head, didn’t you? But drunk cop still handcuffs the kid because he’s gotta maintain appearances and stick to his story, of course. And the kid is on the ground with the cop’s knee in his back, trying to get a hold of his own bleeding hand, when the other cops from the bar finally arrive, see this fiasco, and call for an ambulance. Long story short, the kid is still arrested, but of course the kid is cleared of all charges because, guess what? Cop was drunk. Did I mention that? And even though his court date is pending over this shit, the cop’s already back to work apparently, as if this wasn’t enough reason to lose your fucking job. So, here’s what I want to do. Ready? I want to send a series of postcards to this cop and claim I’m the dude who punched him in the face ten times. And I kind of want us both to do this postcard thing, if it’s okay with you, for the rest of our lives.”

  She didn’t answer, but he could tell it was the most romantic thing she’d ever heard anyway.

  “Oldest tricky shit in the book?” he joked, hoping for something.

  And when she smiled, he finally took a breath and the car’s shocks raised back up.

  “‘Betrothed’ means ‘engaged,’ by the way,” she said.

  But she was in.

  Billy had so much swagger now, he would go home right after this and dust off the seat of his dirt bike and maybe exceed the speed limit on some of those back roads without stop signs. Maybe.

  “How funny does the word ‘cop’ sound when you say it too many times?” she giggled. “Hold on, what does this have to do with…”

  “Okay, I wasn’t gonna say it, but that cop who pulled us over, the one I honked at… that was the same cop.”

  “How do you know?” she laughed.

  “What do you mean how do I know?”

  “How do you know?”

  “Same blue shirt.”

  Larry took a different route home that night. The drive was so uneventful, he almost wrote it down so he’d remember it. His new way enabled him to barely slow at a new crossroads, an intersection without any stop signs at all to hinder him, and 100% fewer red-faced bastards. It felt like a second chance, but the lack of stop signs was even more exciting. Besides potentially reducing the opportunities of him being punched in the mouth, he hoped it also meant less chance of drivers performing that infuriating four-way Mambo of, “Are you going? No? Okay, I’ll go. Wait. No? Fine, I’m going. Okay, you go… Argh!”

  Larry swished his mouthwash a little bit longer on this new route, too, which was fine by him. He had a tiny travel bottle of Scope tucked next to the driver’s seat for the way home, originally his wife’s idea. After work, his mouth was much more sensitive, and he relished the heat, the sting. He wished he could blame this fetish on his germophobic ex-wife (You’re gonna catch something), just like when she would yell and he would absently picked at the deep itches around his elbows until he was sure they were bleeding. But he’d grown to enjoy both. And if his elbows were bloody, he didn’t need to know.

  Okay, maybe his elbows freaked him out a bit these days. Invisible and numb. One of the few places on your body you’d have to break a bone to ever get a peek at it.

  Anything could be growing there, he thought.

  To distract himself, he slapped in Captain Beefheart’s debut, Safe as Milk. A 20-year-old Ry Cooder on guitar? Impossible. Larry had no choice but to listen to older tapes like this lately, as every time his stereo ate a new one, he ended up going back a decade into his personal soundtracks. He didn’t like to be reminded of music he liked when he was young man. It never made him feel nostalgic, only mortal. It also reminded him of his previous job, which was enough mortality for a lifetime.

  He gargled some more, nervous now, like someone watching a cat play with a balloon of bumblebees. He’d heard once that stereos only ate your tapes when it was humid outside. That might explain it. He lived on a part of Florida Street that even real Floridians considered swampy. Humidity was terrifying enough. He thought about creeping things growing on his elbow again before he could stop himself.

  Then he shook it off, turned up the music, and slowed down a bit as he neared the new crossroads, tipping his head back for a last-second gargle.

  Safe as Milk, my ass, Larry thought, then went to crank up the window a little bit for extra protection against the blowback. For years, after he first got his license, he used to drive with an elbow hanging out, like everybody else. Then some snarly little dog jumped up and snapped onto his arm like a gator. For months after that, people would mistake the wound for one of those horrible spider web tattoos, the kind white-trash sported like associate professors flashing the patches on their new tweed jackets. He’d just started hanging his elbow out again and felt weird with the window up too high. And there was the itching…

  A dirt bike was coming up fast. It looked like it was going to arrive at
the intersection at the exact moment Larry did. He sighed, realizing that even without a stop sign, he’d have to do that stupid stutter-step dance of vehicles after all. But without a blinker on the bike, Larry decided the kid on the bike probably wasn’t turning. In fact, the kid didn’t seem to have a headlight either, just a tiny, red-reflector-covered boombox that was duct-taped to the handlebars. He cocked an ear and heard it belting out Billy Squier’s “Who’s Your Boyfriend,” which the kid was in the process of turning up louder. Billy Squier competing with madman Don Van Vliet?

  Seriously, kid? Larry smiled at this sad little Battle Of The Bands where youth really stood no chance at all, especially when Larry was armed with a 20-year-old Ry Cooder on guitar.

  So Larry took the initiative, having been taught the dangers of idling too long the previous morning at the Virgin Mary’s house. He hit the gas and the volume, then rolled down his window to spit some music and mouthwash before the wind had a chance to give everything back.

  He was shocked to see the kid give his handgrip a snake bite and gun his engine at the exact moment the green fluid vaulted Larry’s swollen lips and arced across the white line. The spray caught the rider full in the face, filling the poor whelp’s nostrils and washing up over his aviator glasses like a steaming, toxic wave. Larry flinched right along with him and almost said, “Sorry,” but decided to crush the accelerator instead.

  He glanced up at the rear-view to see the kid hanging off the side of his bike, hacking and hawking at the ground, desperately trying to clear his nose and his eyes, yelling protests not quite indecipherable, then awkwardly tripping over his kickstand in a tangle of anger to finally pitch over into the drainage ditch on the side of the road.