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We walked through the sharp, cold air to where Dwayne's car was parked in a lot surrounded by snow and woods. Dwayne wasn't talking.
"Sorry about jizzing on you," I said, "and sticking around, too." "Doesn't matter. I was getting tired of her anyway." He opened the driver side, grabbed the scraper and threw it to me. While the car warmed up, I scratched frost off the windows. Dwayne sat behind the wheel with his hands between his legs, his chin tucked in his collar, his eyes staring at the dash.
We tooled up and down the hills of Elm Grove Road, past The Red Mill where Dwayne and I sometimes took women for fish fry, past Linfield where we went to grade school and where Dwayne was the king of full-court murderball.
"Remember last year?" Dwayne said.
"Not really."
"Now that was a great party." Dwayne made a gesture with his right hand that reminded me of the Statue of Liberty. "Me and Cheryl — man! I'll never forget that."
Cheryl was Dwayne's steady for two whole months, until she wanted a rock.
Nostalgia in a guy like Dwayne is never a good sign. I thought I'd bring him up to date with a humorous story.
"Hey, remember that ad in the Journal for the forklift operator at Krueger? I forgot to tell you what happened.
"I hear about you sucking your dick one more time, I'm moving out."
About a thousand guys showed up but it turned out some new guy put through a two-year-old job req by accident." I laughed a start-up laugh.
"I'm sick of getting fucked over."
Dwayne wasn't moaning over nothing. UPS didn't need anyone, the breweries didn't need anyone. Allis-Chalmers would never need anyone again. We couldn't do what they needed at Allen-Bradley. That went for a bunch of places. I was lucky to get my job at Todd's Pizza Mountain. Meanwhile, I was checking out every men's department in the Milwaukee metropolitan area, trying to become a salesman. I hadn't had a single decent interview. A matter of appearance, I thought.
"Have you ever thought of selling men's clothing?" I asked Dwayne. "You sort of look like a mannequin."
"Listen, I'm not working any job where I have to tell other guys their seat is too tight or their crotch is too low, or shit like that."
"I'd like it. Especially working on commission. You'd sort of be your own boss. The better you do, the more money you get. Can't get laid off if you're self-employed."
"They could still fire you," Dwayne said, racing down 124th Street. Then he gave me a look like he just noticed I had a horn on my forehead. "You would like it. I hear about you sucking your dick one more time, I'm moving out. I'm not living with a fag."
"Everybody masturbates."
"Christ, Rudy! Do you always have to come out and say shit like that? Jesus."
Maybe I'd gone too far. Like the time a bunch of us were over at Red Carpet Lanes, and I said that it'd be great if we kept score just by writing down the feelings we had as the ball rolled toward the pins. It was one of those moments when you feel people looking at you and you think, "Are they for me or against me?" It's not a great moment.
New Year's Day we got tanked on beer and chips and watched the Rose Bowl. The game was a see-saw battle. Every Michigan touchdown had Dwayne throwing his fist in the air, and then holding his palm up so we could do a "high five." Every USC score confused and angered him. "Fuck!" he'd yell.
I was rooting for Michigan as well. I couldn't resist a team named the Wolverines.
When Michigan lost, Dwayne broke his hand on the coffee table.
I didn't know what to do, so I sucked my own dick.
"Fuck! I bet two hundred bucks on that game!" He cradled his hand and groaned. His face was twisted just like the face of an injured Michigan player who'd been pulled out of the game. I thought of pointing this out to Dwayne, but it was hard to talk over his howling and swearing.
I hustled him to the emergency room, but then I had to rush off to work. He resented that. After they set his bones in order, I picked him up on the way to one of my deliveries and took him home. He got me in trouble by opening the box and grabbing a piece of pizza as he bailed out of the car. Todd always said, "No friends in the delivery car."
"Some friend," I thought, as the bastard made off with the slice.
Being unemployed had understandably put a bug up Dwayne's ass. But even with medical bills on the way, he kept living the high life, wining and dining the ladies, loading his credit cards. Finally I had to let him go out by himself sometimes, because I didn't have the cash, even though I was dying to find a girl who would go with my new trick, a girl with a certain look in the eye.
The odd thing was, even though we'd been laid off for months, I was dreaming more and more about the freezer, mainly variations on one dream where I was made to wear an embarrassing hairdo. I would try to undo it, but it was frozen. On warmup break, it would almost thaw out — sometimes I could even work with it a little — but the bell always dinged and I had to go back in. The freezer would be deserted. I'd search for people up and down the frosty aisles, but I always ended up trying to look in a tub of ice cream. My fingers would freeze to the lid and then I knew I was caught and then I'd wake up.
Dwayne said my dreams showed a secret desire to be trapped and frozen to death. I said the opposite, and we also argued about what the embarrassing hairdo meant. Then I came home from the Pizza Mountain one Saturday night in late February and all of Dwayne's stuff was gone. He just packed up and left. No note or anything. We were behind in phone, gas, electric, and rent. I'd put the bills out for him to put in his check, but those envelopes were still stuck to the refrigerator with magnets. The last phone bill had a lot of Los Angeles calls on it. He'd told me once that in L.A. it was very easy to get beautiful women, plus there was no winter to cut into ice-cream consumption. Maybe he went to California, was all I could think. I didn't know what to do, so I went into my room, took off my pants, flipped my hips over my head, and sucked my own dick.
