Transreal Trilogy: Secret of Life, White Light, Saucer Wisdom Read online

  “Are you always so deep, Conrad?” She was smiling into his eyes. He’d caught her fancy.

  “I think I’m different from other people. I think maybe I can—”

  “Can what?”

  “I think I might be able to levitate. You know? Fly.”

  “Let’s see.”

  Conrad strained, and rose up maybe an inch from the rock they were sitting on. But he fell back right away, and then it wouldn’t work at all.

  “You just stood up a little,” laughed Dee. “You’re wild, Conrad.” She paused and gave him a pert look. “You know what I thought you were going to say at first? When you said you’re different from other people?”

  “What?”

  Dee’s voice grew flat with tension. “I thought you were going to tell me that you…masturbate.”

  “Uh, well, I do, as a matter of fact.”

  “So do I. Most girls do.”

  “You do?”

  “I do it every night.”

  This was incredible. “So do I, nearly. We call it ‘beating off.’ I found out about it when I was twelve. I’d be lying in bed, and for some reason I’d start thinking about naked women with big breasts. A whole stream of them—each woman would march into my room, smile, and march out. One after the other. And my bee would get real hard and I’d rub it.”

  “Your what?”

  “We called it a bee. What did your family call your…your…”

  “We called it the cushy. I used to rub my cushy way before I was twelve. I did it even when I was real little. I used to think of it as ‘my bestest spot.’” They both giggled wildly.

  This was just incredible. Conrad grabbed Dee and pushed his tongue deep into her mouth. He took one of her hands and pressed it in his crotch to feel his boner. She drew her hand back, but she kept kissing him. They kissed for so long that Conrad came in his pants. Dee noticed the stain.

  “Is that what I think it is?”

  “I like you, Dee. All trillion of my sperms like you.”

  They joined the others for lunch. For the whole lunch, Conrad was on a cloud. Dee knew he had a dick, and she’d seen him come. Maybe he wasn’t going to have to wait for nuclear war after all.

  When Conrad got back to Louisville and told Hank about his new girl, Hank made fun of him.

  “Decca? That phony? And you didn’t even get tit off her?”

  “Look, Hank, I made out with her for a long time. I even came in my pants. And she’s read Nausea.”

  “Bo-way. I heard the cops caught her naked with Billy Ballhouse in a car last fall.”

  “Oh, shut up. Do you know what pantheism is?”

  “Sure. It’s a bunch of dumb shits kneeling in front of a rock.” Hank began laughing uncontrollably, and offering salaams to his radio. “O voice from sky, please speak me heap truth.”

  Conrad waited for his friend’s laughter to die down. “What if I told you I could fly, Hank?”

  “Is this one of your Twilight Zone stories? Remember the one you made up about coming from a flying saucer?” Hank’s mood of mockery had passed. “I’m all ears, Conrad. For my money, you’re a fucking genius.”

  “It only lasted a second. It was on the way down to the conference center—we all stopped for food, and I was walking to the supermarket. I tripped on the sidewalk, and instead of falling, I just hung there. Maybe I’m some kind of mutant, Hank.”

  “Did you tell Decca?”

  “I mentioned it. She was excited, but she didn’t believe me.”

  “That’s just as well. You know, if you really did turn out to have any superpowers, Conrad, it wouldn’t be a good idea to tell everyone. People hate mutants.” Hank was laughing again. “Gunjy mue.”

  Chapter 5: Saturday, May 4, 1963

  “Blatz beer, I don’t believe it. I thought that was only a kind of beer in comic books.” Conrad threw back his head and laughed. God, he felt wonderful. Drunk on the first Saturday in May.

  “We’ve got Falstaff, too,” said Jim Ardmore with his dark sly smirk. “Not to mention Mr. Leggett’s liquor cabinet.”

  “You all stay out of the liquor,” cautioned Donny Leggett. “Somebody stole a bottle of peppermint schnapps last week, and my father was really—”

  “That was Bunger on a rampage,” chortled Ardmore. “He came up here with his friend Hank Larsen and stole a bottle from your house. It’s the gospel truth. The good word.”

  Conrad shrugged and opened his beer. It didn’t matter. Nothing mattered. It was Derby Day, and all the grown-ups were at the track. Conrad and a bunch of Chevalier guys were getting drunk together at Donny Leggett’s house, a hilltop estate with a swimming pool.

  “This is only my third beer,” said Conrad. “And I already feel plowed. You know where I feel it first?”

  “In the backs of your thighs,” groaned Ardmore. “You’ve told me that a dozen times, you wretched sot.”

  “When I know I’m going to have a chance to get drunk, I get all twitchy, like a junkie, and then after the first drink, I’m so relaxed.” Conrad grinned. “This is great. I’m going swimming.” He chugged the rest of his beer, stripped down to his underwear, and dove into the Leggetts’ pool.

  Some of the cooler Chevalier boys were there, too. Billy Ballhouse, Worth Wadsworth, and Custer Buckingham. They didn’t like the way Conrad was acting. It was ungentlemanly.

  When Conrad lurched out of the pool and began trying to open his fourth Blatz, Ballhouse spoke up.

  “Take it easy, Bunger. You’ve got all afternoon.”

  “You want money for beer, Ballhouse? Maybe you should make a run. Where’s the beer opener?”

  “I mean, Donny’s parents live here, Bunger. You can’t just throw up all over the place and act like a wino.”

  “Eat shit, Billy. You’re a goddamn candy-ass. You don’t know about death.” Conrad walked over to where Ardmore and Leggett were sitting. He remembered having seen the beer opener there.

  He put all his attention into getting two triangles punched into the top of his beer can. But then someone was shoving him. Ballhouse.

  “You can’t talk to me that way, Bunger. Apologize.”

  “Sure, Billy. I’m sorry you’re a dipshit.”

  Ardmore howled with delight, and Leggett burst into giggles. Ballhouse shook his head and gave up.

  “Come on,” he called to Wadsworth and Buckingham. “Let’s go pick up some stuff.”

  “Would you get me a half-pint?” put in Conrad.

  “I’m sorry, Conrad.” The contempt on Ballhouse’s face was profound. “Girls don’t come in half-pints.” Pause. “I’m surprised Dee would have anything to do with a drunk like you.”

  There was a whole fridge of beer, and the three remaining boys spent the rest of the afternoon working on it. At some point the Derby was on TV. Watching it, Conrad realized he was seeing double. It was time to leave. He and Ardmore decided to go to Sue Pohlboggen’s house.

  “Can you drive?” asked Ardmore.

  “Sure, Jim. I used to race these things in South Korea.” Conrad revved the VW’s engine to a chattering scream.

  There was a long gravel driveway leading downhill from the Leggetts’ house to River Road. It felt like a crunchy sliding board. So that he wouldn’t have to use the brakes, Conrad began slaloming, swooping back and forth from left to right, faster and… Everything was wrong. The steering wheel jerked like a living thing, the wheels locked sideways, Ardmore was yelling and—

  WHAM!

  A sound that Conrad felt, rather than heard, a sound and a brief moment of frenzied motion. His power. Jerk-stop to blank. Black. The horn was blowing. The horn was stuck. He was in a barbed-wire fence and the car was wrapped around a black locust tree and Jim was lying still.

  “Hey, Jim,” Conrad screamed. The horn wouldn’t stop. The bleat of that stuck hor
n was driving him nuts. “Jim, wake up!”

  “Don’t get hysterical, Conrad.” Ardmore sat up and looked around. He hadn’t been thrown as far as Conrad had. “Let’s tear out the wires to the horn.”

  They did that, and things got a little better. Some time passed. Conrad’s parents came, and they took him home. So that he wouldn’t have to face them, he went to bed early, but it took him a long time to go to sleep. It was the black space that bothered him the most, the black space when he’d been unconscious.

  If I had died, thought Conrad, it would have been just like that—except I wouldn’t have woken up. Dead black nothing with no time left.

  He flinched away from that and began struggling to reconstruct the details of the accident, trying to fit it into some rational frame.

  The tree had been on the right side of the road. The VW’s left front fender had hit the tree. Momentum made the car slew to the left, and Conrad had been thrown out of his door. He’d flown past the tree and landed in that barbed-wire fence.

  The funny thing was that the tree had been blocking the path from the car to where Conrad had landed. By all rights, Conrad should have sailed into the tree and broken his neck. He struggled to remember the details. How had he managed to miss the tree? The power. Somehow he had levitated his way around it. Yes.

  Just as he was dropping off to sleep, Conrad realized he was floating above the mattress again. He flash-jerked, and jolted back down. All night he dreamed about the flame-people.

  “You should thank God you’re alive,” his mother told him the next morning on their way to church.

  “I don’t think God has anything to do with it,” said Conrad, trying to keep a quaver out of his voice. “I made sure to stay alive. Like a cat landing on its feet. I think maybe I have psychic powers, Mom. What does God have to do with it?”

  “Plenty. God is everything, Conrad. God takes care of us in different ways. You should stop imagining that you’re so great, and thank Him for saving your life.”

  “If He’s so wonderful, then He doesn’t need my thanks, does He?”

  “No, God doesn’t need your thanks. Praying is something you do for your own self.”

  “But what good is praying? There’s no afterlife. I saw yesterday. When I hit that fence, everything just got black. It wasn’t like dreaming or like being asleep. It was just black nothing. I think that must be what happens when you die, no matter what. Nothing. You don’t believe in heaven and hell, do you, Mom?”

  “I think heaven and hell are right here in our own lives. And that’s enough. What happens after you die doesn’t matter.”

  Conrad was surprised that his mother had such definite opinions about these questions. But why did she bother going to church if there was no afterlife? Praying is something you do for your own self.

  Conrad’s father took him for a walk after lunch.

  “I’m sorry about the car, Pop. It’s practically totaled.”

  “I don’t care about the car, Conrad. I care about you.”

  When the Bungers had moved to Louisville, Conrad’s father had started calling him Sausage. “Where’s my Sausage?” he might shout when he came home from work. That first Louisville summer had been hot, and old Caldwell had bought Conrad a giant wading pool. On Saturday, the two of them would soak in it, Conrad with the hose, and Pop with a long-necked bottle of Oertl’s beer. The old man’s amazing bulk took up most of the pool, but happy Conrad would splash in the empty spaces, yelling whatever popped into his head.

  “I don’t care if you don’t go to church, Conrad,” his father was saying now. “You’re free to rebel and think whatever you want to. But don’t get yourself killed. If you’re too drunk to drive, then phone me up.”

  “You’d get mad at me.”

  “Conrad, I was a teenager, too. I got drunk and made trouble. But my father always told me, The main thing is don’t get killed. Call a cab if you have to.”

  “Did you ever call a cab?”

  “Once or twice. There was one morning when I woke up and I didn’t know where the car was. My father was waiting for me at the breakfast table. He was the kindest man, Conrad; I wish you could have met him. That morning he just looked up at me and said, ‘Well, son, let’s go find the car. What’s the last thing you remember?’” Mr. Bunger’s distant gaze wandered back to Conrad. “Don’t do this again, Conrad. Don’t get killed. All my and Mom’s relatives are dead. It would destroy us to lose you.”

  “OK, Pop. It might not look that way, but even yesterday, I was careful not to get killed.” Conrad wondered if he should try to explain about his power. But why bother, it would only sound like crazy bragging. “You really don’t care if I don’t believe in religion?”

  “You wouldn’t be much of a person if you believed everything that grown-ups tell you, Conrad. It’s natural to rebel. But you’ve also got to learn to control yourself, instead of wrecking cars, and spouting this silly stuff that you wish the Russians would blow us up. You can’t just tear down. If you’re going to rebel, it’s up to you to find something better than what the grown-ups have.”

  “I guess that makes sense,” said Conrad. This was not the time to say what he really thought, to say that nothing made sense at all and that it would be better for everyone to admit it. This was not the time to push his father any further. “I guess I should be grounded for wrecking the car?”

  “Three weekends.”

  “Counting this one?”

  Chapter 6: Friday, July 5, 1963

  “You do know who Bo Diddley is, don’t you, Dee?” They were in Conrad’s mother’s car—repaired to the tune of $700—and on their way to a holiday-weekend rock and roll show at the State Fairgrounds.

  “He had that hit on the radio. ‘Hey, Bo Diddley.’”

  “And the new one. ‘You Can’t Judge a Book by Lookin’ at Its Cover.’ He’s the best. He even builds his own guitars. You know I have four Bo Diddley albums at home, Dee?”

  “That many! Tell me about the deeper meanings of Bo Diddley, Conrad.” Dee looked pretty good tonight. She wore a thin white cardigan, and a print dress with a Villager collar. Usually she wore sweatshirts.

  “Well, my favorite song of his is called ‘Crackin’ Up.’ It goes like this.”

  Conrad proceeded to sing the first few lines of the song, capturing the sense, if not the exact sound of Bo Diddley.

  He sang it loud, with just the right number of dit-duh-duh-dit-duuh-dit-dit-dits, his voice rising to a hoarse shout on the last line “You crackin’ up.”

  “What’s buggin’ you?” said Dee repeating the line from the song. “I should play that for my parents.” Dee’s father was a career engineer for GE. He and his family were due to be transferred out to California in only one month. Conrad’s family was moving at the end of the summer. It was all ending fast.

  “I first got that record when I was fourteen,” said Conrad. “I remember listening to it one day; it was the day that I really got the idea of rock and roll. I was alone at home, and I put on ‘Crackin’ Up’ real loud, and I went and stood in front of my parents’ full-length mirror and danced a little, singing along, you know. As I watched myself, I realized that someday I’d be cool.”

  “Are you cool yet?”

  “I thought people might think I was cool after I wrecked the car. But no one outside my parents cared, not even Ardmore. And my parents didn’t exactly think it was cool.”

  “How about your friends at St. X?”

  “Oh, them. Thank God graduation is over.”

  “Sue Pohlboggen told me you took her to the senior prom. She said it was awful.”

  “She said that?” Conrad paused, remembering the prom. Normally he never socialized with the St. X boys. It had been strange to see them all at a dance, probably with girls they were going to marry and not use rubbers with. A mixture of hope and cynicism had led Conrad
to bring Sue Pohlboggen instead of Dee. Sue was supposed to be easy. “Are you good friends with her?”

  “She was in my humanities class. She’s smart, you know. Did you make out with her?”

  “Well, I—” Conrad broke off, unable to tell the story. On the way from the prom to the St. X breakfast, he’d parked with Sue Pohlboggen. She’d put up a struggle, but he’d gotten his hand down naked in her crotch. The problem was that she was wearing such a tight girdle that his hand had gone numb before he could figure out where her cunt actually was. He’d given up on that, and dry-humped her for a while, which was OK until the end, when her body started making strange, wet lowing noises. Ugh! Was this how grown-up sex worked? And then at the prom breakfast he’d thrown up after about three beers.

  “The thing about Bo Diddley is communion,” said Conrad presently. “You can lose yourself in the music, you can be Bo Diddley, instead of all lonely and cut off. I like Flatt and Scruggs, too. Anything but Muzak.”

  “Inauthentic,” Dee agreed and lit a cigarette. “Who else is going to play tonight? Besides Bo Diddley.”

  “Lots of people. The Shirelles, James Brown, Avalon—or maybe it’s Fabian, and I think U.S. Bonds is coming, too. It’ll be great.”

  The stage was in the middle of the big arena-auditorium at the Kentucky State Fairgrounds. When he was ten, Conrad had come here to see the Shrine Circus. Today they had a lot of flags up, since it was the day after the Fourth of July.

  Some people had reserved seats down on the coliseum floor, but everyone else was up in the bleachers. It was a very mixed crowd. There was a middle-aged black guy with baggy pants right behind Dee and Conrad, and when the Shirelles came out, he danced so hard that you could hear his dick slapping his leg. Some lesser-known black groups played next, and then some white singers came on. One of them was Dee Clark.

  “Same name as you,” observed Conrad.

  “Let’s go over there in the empty part of the bleachers,” said Dee. “I want to really listen.”

  The song was It Must Be Raindrops. Over in the empty seats, Dee and Conrad got into a kind of follow-the-leader game, balancing along on the seatbacks, childlike and free. The wonderful music spread out to fill all space and time, music for Conrad and Dee alone, centered in the eternal Now. Conrad felt like he could fly Dee to the top of the coliseum, if he wanted to. Fly up to the top where the flashing circus acrobats had whirled, years ago.