River of Perfumes

Chapter Two

Chapter TwoJAKE ROARK AWOKE EACH NEW MORNING and took to pacing. It was always so; stalking, circling...the same thoughts imploring, his tongue too full of tomorrows.

He prepared for this night, his night, and strode down the town’s main street toward certain death. Lightning flashed, thunder clapped. Umbrellas from the audience shot up like flares.

Thirteen years old this very day, Jake looked up at the sky and let the rain rake and pummel him. He loved the wrath of nature and loved defying it. From the corner of his eye he saw the skittishness of the audiences’ discomfort.

Even at 13, Jake had a stride and a swagger to him. He planted his feet, Matt Dillon-style. Sonny Beavers, playing the villain, snarled with disdain.

Jake was the marshal of the small-scale town, built of lumber from a construction site. He was the final hope in a white hat going up against all odds.

Sonny cleared his holster when Jake flashed his gun and shot him dead, ridding the town of his evil.

Applause from the parents and neighbors erupted, as much from wanting to flee the rain as from the climax of Jake Roark’s play. Then they quickly rose and funneled inside.

Jake bit his lip at the spectacle of Sonny’s over-acting. Sonny still flailed like a fish when Jake walked up to him, twirled his Fanner-50 and slipped it smartly back into its holster, a la Shane.

When Sonny finally rose he swiped gobs of mud off his sleeves and britches. “This is the third play we’ve done. How come I always gotta be the bad guy?”

Jake stepped back and laughed aloud. “Hey, you want to be the hero, you write your own dang play!”

Jake couldn’t remember the first time he knew, but he couldn’t remember not knowing. He was going to be an actor, to set the world on its ear. Blessed from the beginning, he was the only child of a mother who loved him and a father who worshiped him. His father once told him the happiest moment in his entire life had been when Jake was an infant, dressed in yellow overalls with red suspenders. He tossed his son into the air and caught him in his arms and thought his heart would burst into pieces.

Even as a child, Jake bristled with a sense of hope and expectancy, though it was sheathed in an armor that others saw as unsettling. With riveting blue eyes, red hair and high cheekbones, he was far too intense to be thought of as handsome. He cherished his friends, though the girls his age shied away from him. There was something restless and brooding about him, something they mistook as troubling. Yet Jake simply wanted to rush through childhood.

It was the outcasts at school who sought him out most. Jake’s manner attracted or repelled at once. Yet even the two bullies who had once beat him up were discouraged in defeating him. Poised and inaccessible, he made no effort to avoid them when they met again at school.

His early cowardice spread through him like a stain. He had learned to distrust authority. Rex, Jake’s collie, followed him to school one day when Jake was in the fifth grade. Jake heard him barking outside the classroom. He asked his teacher to be excused to take Rex home, but the teacher refused. Jake never saw the dog again.

He was a natural athlete and competed with a fury. The lessons came hard, but they lasted. “Safe!” the umpire yelled as Jake slid into second base after hitting in the bottom of the ninth to tie the game. He slid high, his cleats clipping the second baseman’s thigh. The second baseman cursed, threw off his glove, backed up several feet and egged Jake to come at him. Jake lunged off the base and was tagged out to end the inning. The other team exploded in the top of the tenth. Jake’s haste had cost his team the game. He could still hear the second baseman laughing.

His early influences were rarely his peers. He loved playing ball but avoided organized leagues and much preferred the pickup games with ragtag groups. They took place in the summer when Sonny Beavers’ older brother returned to Los Angeles. There were few freeways then, and orange groves still scented the San Fernando Valley. Each summer, Sonny’s brother would round up his friends, because his friends were still there and because few people left L.A. His friends called him Bumper. Jake didn’t know why, but nobody wanted to ride in a car with him. A ne’er-do-well, who was estranged from his family, Bumper drifted between the Beat Generation and the dawning Age of Aquarius.

But Jake Roark liked him. Bumper was a wild, smooth, cool cat who had been here, there, practically everywhere. If someone mentioned a little shanty bar in the middle of nowhere, Bumper described it because he had been there. Bumper was a rambler, what they called hep, with the roguish airs of being one step ahead of the guys with the girls—and one step ahead of the law.

Following Bumper’s lead, everybody climbed the fence at North Hollywood High School. It was an odd collection of guys and saucy girls, and Jake and Sonny always tagged along. The game was slow-pitch softball and there were plenty of extra mitts. No walks or strikeouts, just stand at the plate until you hit the mother. Bumper’s local girl, Deanna, was at his side, with her huge bazooms she aimed at everyone.

It was exhilarating being out in the broiling sun, snatching grounders, dodging tags, turning effortless exercise into spirited feats. Bumper jammed a finger on the second ball hit to him, diving for a ball and skidding on his face, though he could care less about the score. By the third game he was a holy sieve and agreed to catch behind home plate to minimize the damage, or so his team thought. But the first two games he was as feisty as anyone, though everyone saw why. Every time he got a hit and reached a base, if a girl covered it, he made sure he got a handful of tit in the process. That the girls didn’t mind wasn’t lost on Jake and Sonny.

They took a 20-minute break between games and the older guys and girls gulped down beers.

Paddy was the group’s bleeding heart. During a breather someone mentioned the space race with the Russians, and Paddy took the opening to politik. His furtive eyes looked everywhere but straight as he delivered a sermon about all the money being wasted instead of spent on the world’s starving multitudes.

Everybody had heard it before, and Bumper asked him why he always reduced things to money. “There’s things more important than that,” Bumper said. “You want to give something useful, how about your eyes?”

“Huh?” Paddy balked.

“There’s all sorts of people blind as bats. You’re so concerned about the unfortunate, how about giving up an eye? You don’t need two, do you?”

“Don’t be stupid,” Paddy countered, “you can’t do that.”

“Can too. Read it in the newspaper.”

“Well, I don’t know about that, but I got a card here to donate my organs if I die.”

“Let me see that.” Bumper ripped the card from Paddy’s paw. “Dig it, man. Now this is for me!”

“Well, I’m proud of you,” Paddy stood. “That’s probably the only moral thought you ever had.”

“Moral, hell!” Bumper contested. “When I go, I plan to take ten others with me! Can you imagine transplanting my lungs into someone? Christ, he’d be dead of cancer in a year! And pity the poor sucker who ends up with my ticker. Or my balls! Wait’ll some bastard needs a genital replacement. Is he ever gonna have to break out the excuses.”

After the second game, they started playing something called Windy City ball. Bumper had learned it in Chicago. Played by the same rules as baseball, the ball was twice the size of a regular softball, but no mitts were allowed. The ball was spongy, and to catch it you needed soft hands to reel it in like a football. Everyone was really sloppy from beers and there was practically no defense at all. Bumper played catcher. The score was tight, 15-14 in favor of Bumper’s team, bottom of the ninth, and the other team batting. Jake and Sonny were on Bumper’s team, with Jake at shortstop. There were two outs and still enough time for Bumper to come through like a charm.

A chunky little thing named Sybil was at the plate. She had a bladder problem and was always wet in the crotch. “No sweat,” Bumper grinned, and flashed a bunch of stupid signs that meant nothing to the pitcher. Sybil missed a couple pitches, then popped one up behind home plate. “This is it!” Bumper pantomimed tearing off a catcher’s mask and circled wildly under the sun. “I got it!” When the ball hit him on the bean, he crumpled to the ground in a dizzying heap and made broad, flailing movements and Tweety Bird sounds.

Picking his moment, with everyone crowded round, Bumper covered his eyes with one hand and pawed out with the other, until he felt Deanna’s knee, then patted his way up to her shorts. Jake and Sonny’s eyes bugged. “Oooh!” she squealed, pressing his fist to her crotch.

Bumper yanked his hand free and sprang to his feet. “Hussy! We got no time for that. There’s a game on the line, and Bumper means business. Batter-up!” Bumper took his position behind the plate, and sneered. “Play ball!”

On the first pitch, Sybil dinked a squibber with so much English on it that both the pitcher and third baseman flubbed it. There wasn’t even a throw to first. Sybil was on base and their best hitter was coming up. He promptly sailed one over the right field fence. That was that. Bumper was the goat, his record intact.

Jake always felt a little sad when he walked home these afternoons. It was a brave new language and a bold new world he glimpsed with this crowd. He didn’t resent his childhood. No, he was content. But he ached to grow up, to wrest his future from the Now. He was here and alive. He was going to make a difference.

School started and it bored him more than usual now. To his mother’s dismay, his grades declined. Acting is what he was interested in. To what end did school or good grades play a part? His parents had instilled in him a love for reading, and his mother’s heart lightened when she saw him with a book. He read plays and the normal offerings for his age but discovered other works as well. He read The Catcher in the Rye and On the Road, and even Albert Camus’ The Stranger. He had heard of Henry Miller, and wondered what his mother would think of him. But Miller was banned in the U.S., so it didn’t matter anyway.

But the passions of his youth were mad and fanatical, flourishing in the hours he spent alone in his room. He shared this tumult with no one, and it was there he held fast to his poses.

One day after school, Jake was at his desk. “What are you writing about?” his mother asked. But it was a different story each week. He continued to write plays to perform for the neighborhood, and of course he was always the hero.

Another day, there was a racket in Jake’s bedroom.

“Jake, are you in there?” His mother knocked at his door.

“Wait a minute.” Jake hid the sword his father had given him and stood in front of the wall he had thrust full of holes.

“What are you doing?” his mother entered.

“Writing about knights.”

His mother looked around and Jake tapped his temple. “In here, Mom, in here.”

On weekends and summer vacations he walked a mile to the movies and sat in the theater all day. He saw North by Northwest 11 times over the stretch of a week, spending hours sitting in the darkness.

One evening as the family sat together eating, Jake’s mother asked, “Did you hear about Angela Sedaro? The newspaper said her father came home and found her dead. She hung herself. You knew her, didn’t you?”

Jake’s stomach churned. Angela Sedaro was the first girl he ever kissed.

They were in the fourth grade and he and some schoolmates were playing in Angela’s backyard. They ran, she tripped, and Jake fell on top of her. It was out of a movie, as seemed much of his life, spinning in slow motion. She calmly looked up at him, inviting him, as no other girl her age had dared. There was something anxious and yet vulnerable about her, and he kissed her. The other kids crowded around and applauded. Angela’s girlfriends mocked her afterwards, however, and she never returned Jake’s interest again.

Her death puzzled Jake. He didn’t understand how someone could not relish the miracle of being alive. He remembered her lips, her panting breath on his cheek and how she smelled of lavender.

Jake continued to spend his free days at the movies. He yearned to act, and he wanted to even more after a local TV channel ran Rebel Without a Cause five nights in one week.

James Dean electrified him, and Natalie Wood entranced him. Everything about the dramas and adventures he watched in the dark was locked away in his mind.

Over time, he was drawn less to James Dean and more to Marlon Brando. It wasn’t a contest of talent, but style. They each had a presence, but while Dean just wanted to be understood, Brando was a force, he was dangerous. James Dean would come at you from underneath, but Brando stood right in your face.

Jake acted in a play in junior high school and during a pivotal scene, summoned tears beyond his years. Where did they come from? Jake didn’t know. He certainly hadn’t any great tragedy to draw upon.

Soon, it was more than the process of performing that seized him. Hungry to taste and ingest these different lives, Jake studied his roles and read extensively. Of the period plays, he wanted to know more than the words on paper. He was curious what they ate and how they lived, how they earned their calluses, how they held the reins.

Still, history was a class that was taught in school, a timeline of events that happened in the past. He accepted it, yet he couldn’t comprehend a world without him. What every young man must think, he reflected. But if the world didn’t know him before he arrived, it was going to know him soon.

One day, near the start of summer vacation, Jake was walking along a street when Joyce Fite stepped in front of him. She was the hottest girl in school and always unapproachable. Her eyes inquisitive, she tilted her head. “Everybody thinks you’re so intense.”

“I don’t know,” Jake said. “What do you think?”

But Joyce only smiled, then laughed and walked away.

A few days later, Jake was waiting for a bus after seeing a movie. A bum staggered towards him. Ragged and unkempt, his breath reeked of alcohol.

It wasn’t his uncleanliness that made Jake turn away, but a sickening sense of pity and a fear of contagion.

“Hey!” the bum yelled as Jake boarded the bus and the doors closed. “Don’t be so f*****g smug, you s**t! I was you when I was young.”

The other passengers looked at Jake, wondering what he had done to the poor man in the street. As the bus pulled away, the bum pounded on the windows.

Why did Jake hold onto that incident? He didn’t know. But he knew there was something important to be grasped.