The Hotel Eden(45)
We took the machine south on State Street. It was exhilarating to be in the rushing air, but the lane changes and a few of the stops made me feel even more tentative than I already did. I held Betsy’s waist gingerly, so that at the light on Ninth, he turned and said, “Doug, this is a scooter, hold on for god’s sakes. We’re friends. Don’t start acting like a god damned man.” And she clamped my hands onto her sides firmly, my fingers on the top of her hipbones.
That was good, because it made me feel comfortable resting my chin on her shoulder too, as half a joke, and I could feel her smiling as we passed under the streetlights. But the joke was on me, nuzzling a woman of the future, who was I kidding? She smelled fresh, only a little like bread, and though I didn’t know it, this was the very apex of my romantic career.
We passed through the rough darkness on Thirty-third South and could see the huge trucks working under lights removing the toxic waste dump where Vitro Processors had been, and then on the rough neon edge of West Valley City, Betsy pulled into Apollo Burger Number Two, a good Greek place. When we stopped I felt the air come up around my face in a little heat. I quickly sidestepped into the bathroom to adjust myself in my underwear; at some point in the close float out here, holding Betsy, my body had begun acting like a god damned man.
We ate pastrami burgers and drank cold milk sitting at a sticky picnic table in front of the establishment. It wasn’t eight o’clock yet and Betsy assured me we had plenty of time. She knew where we were going because she had asked the driver of the van who had pulled up at their apartment two hours ago. He had come in looking for Mitchell and had told her: Granger High School, eight o’clock. She knew something else, but wasn’t telling me.
“He’s got to stop taking these stupid nickel-and-dime jobs,” she said, as she made a tight ball of her burger wrapper.
“All work has its own dignity,” I said—it was one of Mitch’s lines.
“Bullshit, it’s exploitation. I’m through with it.”
“You’re not going to sing anymore?”
She stood and threw the paper into a barrel. “I didn’t say that.”
On the scooter again, I didn’t nuzzle. The dinner and the little lesson had taken the spirit out of it for me. I just squinted into the wind and held on. Thirty-fifth South widened into a thick avenue of shopping plazas separated by angry little knots of fastfood joints. Betsy maneuvered us a mile or two and then turned left through a tire outlet parking lot and around a large brick building that I thought was a JC Penney but turned out to be Granger High. We cruised through the parking lot, which was full, and she leaned the scooter against the building. The little marquee above the entrance read: Welcome Freshmen, and then below: Friday, Mack’s Mat Matches, 8:00 p.m.
We stood in a little line of casually dressed Americans at the door and paid four-fifty each for a red ticket which let us into the crowded gymnasium. A vague whomp-whomp we’d been hearing in the hall turned out to be two beefy characters in a raised wrestling ring in the center of the gym slamming each other to the mat.
“Wrestling,” I said to Betsy as she led me through the crowd, searching for seats.
“Looks like it.”
I followed her, stepping on people’s feet all the way across the humid room. There were many family clusters encircled by children standing on the folding chairs and then couples of slumming yuppies, the guy in bright penny loafers and a pastel Lacoste shirt, and sprinkled everywhere small gangs of teenagers in T-shirts waving placards which displayed misspelled death threats toward some of the athletes.
Betsy and I ended up sitting well in the corner of the gym right in the middle of a boiling fan club for the Proud Brothers. Two chubby girls next to me wore Proud Brothers Fan Club T-shirts in canary yellow (the official color) and on the front of each was a drawing of a wrestler’s face. The whole club (twelve or so fifteen-year-olds, boys and girls) was hot. They were red in the face and still screaming. Over in the ring, one man would hoist the other aloft and half our neighbors would squeal with vengeful delight, the other half would gasp in horror, and then, after twirling his victim a moment, the wrestler would hurl his opponent to the mat and ka-bang! the whole room would bounce, and the Proud Brothers Fan Club would explode. The noise wanted to tear your hair out. Finally, I noticed that one of the participants had entangled the other’s head in the ropes thoroughly and was prancing around the ring in a victory dance. The man in the ropes hung there, his tongue visible thirty rows back, certainly dead. The referee threw up the winner’s hands, the bell gonged about twenty times, and the Proud Brothers Fan Club screamed one last time, and the whole gym lapsed into a wonderfully reassuring version of simple crowd noise.