The Last Open Road Read online

  He would, too.

  I watched the Jag squeal away up Pine Street, leaving the smell of burning rubber and six months' worth of clutch lining behind it, and then I was standing all alone with two crisp ten-spots in the palm of my hand and Big Ed's Caddy keys dangling from my fingertips like a live baby water moccasin. Truth is, I think I might have been just a little nervous. After all, inviting Julie out on a real live date was a lot different than just goofing around with her at the station. I mean, what if she turned me down? I swear I must've dialed her number and hung up two dozen times before I finally got the nerve up to let it ring through. And then I spent a long time hemming and hawing and beating around the bullshit before I gathered up the gonads to ask her point-blank if she might sorta possibly be interested in a sit-down dinner and then maybe a show or a cruise over by Palisades amusement park in Big Ed's white Cadillac convertible. I made sure to mention that car twenty or thirty times, and, to my everlasting surprise, Julie said yes. In fact, she sounded real eager to go. "Oh yeah, that sounds great, Buddy," she just about gushed. "Pick me up around seven."

  Oh boy!

  "And, Buddy ..."

  "Yeah?"

  "Wash your hands real good, okay?"

  So I hustled like mad to finish the muffler job I had up on the lift (muffler jobs are the dirtiest!) and afterward took a good quarter inch off a bar of Lava soap trying to get all the rusty, gritty exhaust-pipe grunge off my hands. Then I spread an entire Sunday edition of the New York Times across the front seat of Big Ed's Caddy and headed over to my folks' house, since a date with Julie required a real family household—type bathroom with shampoo, clean towels, and underarm deodorant (not to mention clean socks, undershorts, and a freshly ironed shirt) and not one of those items was regularly on tap in the apartment over my Aunt Rosamarina's garage.

  I felt pretty damn smug wheeling Big Ed's Caddy into the driveway by my old man's house, and I was actually a little disappointed that I didn't see his car in the garage. I was kind of hoping the rat bastard would be home, you know, just so's I could see the expression on his face. Nobody answered when I knocked, so I circled around back and found my mom at her usual station, leaning up against the kitchen window with her field glasses pressed against the glass. She was watching a squadron of her dirty brown twitterbirds flitting around the garbage cans (real exciting, huh?) and stuff like that got my mom so wrapped up she wouldn't even hear the phone ring. So I sneaked along the outside wall like Jimmy Cagney in one of those old black-and-white gangster movies and crouched myself down under the windowsill. When the timing seemed right, I just sort of popped up in front of her binoculars and went into an exotic little bird dance of my own, flapping my arms and scratching for worms and making noises like a duck caught in a hydraulic press.

  It got a pretty good rise out of her, no lie.

  Like always, my mom seemed real happy to see me, and of course nothing would do but that I try some of her famous Dutch apple pie (a la mode, natch) while she told me all about the nice young couple of Baltimore orioles who were building a nest right in our own backyard! To hear my mom tell it, this was the biggest news to hit our neighborhood since old Mr. Pasquinelli had a heart attack and died in his living room window. I think he was about eighty-five or ninety at the time, and the poor guy had been living all alone in this big stucco house on Monroe Street ever since his wife passed on. You'd see him there all the time, sitting in a big overstuffed chair in his living room window with a blanket over his lap and a glass of iced tea at his side, watching the grass grow and the kids playing and the neighborhood dogs peeing on the fire hydrant. A whole week went by before anybody much noticed how he just sat there in the same exact position—morning, noon, and night—without moving or changing his pajamas or getting up to take a leak or anything. Finally, the postman saw how the mail was backing up in the chute and tiptoed around the bushes to see what was up, and he couldn't help noticing how old Mr. Pasquinelli was all sort of puffy and purplish and didn't even blink when he tapped on the window glass. So the mailman called the cops, and next thing you know, a bunch of medical-emergency types in white uniforms showed up and carted poor old Mr. Pasquinelli away in an ambulance. Naturally, they had the lights flashing and siren wailing (not that there was any particular hurry anymore) and since it happened on a Saturday afternoon in the middle of August, all the neighborhood kids swarmed around like that ambulance was a Good Humor ice-cream wagon or something. Only the smell was more like bad hamburger meat than butterscotch sundaes or toasted almond bars.

  But we were talking about my mom's Dutch apple pie, weren't we? Well, it was better than scrumptious, and my mom would've happily kept feeding me fresh slices and filling me in on all the latest hot bird gossip until my gut burst and my ears fell off. But I had to get ready for my big date with Julie, so I excused myself in the middle of a story about three sweet little wrens and a cantankerous blue jay and went upstairs to shower, shave, and sneak some of my dad's Old Spice aftershave out of the medicine cabinet. He never used the stuff anyway. Besides, I'm the one who gave it to him for Christmas every year.

  Speaking of my old man, I heard his Mercury pulling into the drive just as I was buttoning the shirt my mom ironed for me, and I couldn't wait to see the look on his face when he got a load of Big Ed's Caddy parked in his driveway. But the weasel didn't so much as lift an eyebrow. "Who the hell left that kikey road barge in front of my garage?" was all he wanted to know, looking around the kitchen like there was maybe somebody besides my mom and me in the room. What a jerk. But then he was still pretty burned about how I blew off his stupid chemical plant job. You know how parents can nurse a grudge.

  Anyhow, I left my folks' house in time to cruise over by the liquor store on Fremont and wait for one of the wobbly regulars who'd pick you up a little something in return for a small monetary consideration. Being Saturday night, it didn't take long, and pretty soon I was tooling my way over to Julie's mom's place with a smile on my face and a fresh pint of Bacardi dark in the glove compartment. Along the way, I kept thinking what it would be like to kiss Julie Finzio—right on the lips, you know?—and this lady in a blue DeSoto caught me at a stoplight with my eyes half closed and my lips all puckered up, and I had to pretend I was whistling along with Bing Crosby singing "Count Your Blessings" on the radio.

  Julie and her mom lived on the second floor of an old frame house over on Fourteenth that really could've used a little fixing up. Or at the very least a fresh coat of paint. But the guy they rented from was one of those two-bit, broken-English real estate tycoons who are mortgaged up to their assholes in two or three shitty buildings and clawing for every last nickel so they can someday get it up to four. Which made me feel like some kind of knight in shining armor when I pulled up front at the wheel of Big Ed's freshly waxed Cadillac. I beeped the horn, of course, just so's everybody on the block would take a gander out their windows, but then I walked up the steps and rang the bell, too. I mean, I didn't want Julie's mom to think I was one of those greaseball hoods who wait for a girl out in the car.

  Luckily, Julie answered the door (thank goodness) and boy oh boy, did she look great! Her face was so fresh and bright it seemed to glow, and she was wearing this sleeveless yellow angora sweater that really, you know, clung. And believe me, Miss Julie Finzio had some really interesting stuff for a tight sweater to cling to! Her mom was hovering in the background (you know how girls' moms do), giving me the hairy eyeball like I'd just bitten the head off a live chicken. Julie's mom was a short, tough-looking Italian woman with penciled-in eyebrows and a big hairdo that was stiff and shiny as patent leather. "Yooda boy from my brudderenlaw's gas station?" she wanted to know.

  "Yes, I—"

  "What kinna future you ever gonna have inna lousy job like dat, hey? Workin' in alla'dat grease and filt'?"

  "Oh, Mom!" Julie groaned, hustling us out to the car.

  "You takecarra my girl Joolie, you hear?" Mrs. Finzio hollered after us. "She gotta be home by eleven."
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  Jee-zus! She sounded just like my old man, you know?

  "Sorry about my mom," Julie said once we were safely on our way.

  "Aw, that's okay," I told her. "My folks are the same way. Sometimes I think they have secret meetings just to find new and better ways to embarrass their kids."

  Julie laughed and squeezed me on the arm. Boy, it sent a charge through my system like I'd stuck a couple straight pins in a wall socket.

  Thanks to Big Ed, I had enough ready cash to take Julie just about anyplace in Jersey. New York, even. But all she wanted to do was cruise over by the Doggie Shake and show off a little in front of the other girls. And I had to admit, Julie and me looked pretty damn sharp in Big Ed's Caddy convert, sitting there on all that creamy-soft leather with the top down and the breeze rustling our hair and Nat King Cole coming in so loud and clear you would've sworn he was in the back seat.

  When I fallll in love, it will bee foreverrr...

  About two blocks from the Doggie Shake, Julie almost caused us to have a serious accident. Without saying a word, she slid herself across that huge front seat so she was sitting right next to me. I mean right next to me. I felt the heat of her all up and down my body, my nostrils filled with the scent of her perfume, and next thing you know, I damn near drove us into the back end of a bus that was stopped to pick up passengers. "Hey!" Julie yelped, "be careful, willya?"

  "S-Sure, Julie. You know me..."

  "Yeah," she snickered, "suuure I do. My uncle says Big Ed's gonna use your head for a bowling ball if you hurt this car."

  "Aw, that's just what he said...."

  "You think he really would?" Julie giggled.

  "Well, Big Ed's never given me reason to believe he wouldn't do something he said he would, so let's just say I'd rather not find out."

  "Sounds like a wise plan."

  "Besides, I don't think my head would make too good a bowling ball."

  "Yeah, you'd probably hook to the right. And your holes look a little too small for Big Ed's fingers."

  "We could always use a reamer."

  "A what?"

  "You know, a reamer. Like you use on valve guides. To open up the holes."

  "That's disgusting."

  "And we could use an orbital sander to take down some of the high spots."

  "Like your nose, for example?"

  "Yeah, like my nose."

  "No, I think I like your head better the way it is," Julie said through her best movie magazine smile. "It's a nice head."

  "It is?"

  "Yes, it is," she whispered in my ear. All by itself, Big Ed's Caddy picked up eight or ten miles per hour, and I knew there was no way I'd be able to climb out of that car and walk into a damn restaurant. Not for awhile, anyway. But we were in luck and found a curb-service slot, and you should've seen all the pointing and tittering going on inside the Doggie Shake when the other girls got a load of Julie and me in Big Ed's Cadillac. Sure, I was in love with his Jaguar, but there's a lot to be said for a white-on-white Caddy convert parked center stage in front of the local burger shop on a warm Saturday night. Especially with somebody as pretty as Miss Julie Finzio sitting there beside you— smiling like a prom queen—holding an olive burger with all the trimmings in one hand and a root beer with a quarter-pint of rum in it in the other. Everything seemed so damned perfect, you know? Which, I have come to learn from bitter personal experience, is almost always the way things feel just before they go straight to hell.

  After the Doggie Shake, Julie and me cruised up the parkway to the Palisades amusement park, polishing off the last of the rum-laced root beer along the way. I had my arm around her shoulder and she let her head lean over so I could feel her hair against my cheek, and even though I'd filled Big Ed's Caddy clear up to the top out of my own pocket, I would've gladly kept driving like that until the very last drop drained through the fuel line. But all too soon we arrived and had to get out. That was a hard thing to do, if you catch my drift.

  With Julie by my side and Big Ed's greenbacks burning a hole in my trousers, nothing would do but that we rode all four roller coasters—one right after the other—not to mention the Flying Turns and the Flash Gordon Sky Scooters, and stopped at every concession stand along the midway for caramel corn and peanut pralines and chocolate fudge and even a butterscotch ice-cream sundae shoveled in on top of the olive burgers, onion rings, and spiked root beer we'd already packed away. We were having a swell time, and I kept asking Julie if she wanted to maybe go on the Tunnel of Love boat ride with me. I figured I might get a kiss off her back there in the darkness where nobody could see. But Julie wasn't having any part of it on account of one of her girlfriends told her she'd seen a rat in there once. Heck, it was probably just a mouse, you know? But there was no changing her mind, so I switched tactics and steered us over by the Ferris wheel. I thought perhaps I could do some good when it stopped up at the very top, high over the midway. Just the two of us, all by our lonesome up there in the nighttime sky.

  It didn't quite work out that way.

  Now you've probably been to an amusement park yourself and noticed how stately and graceful a Ferris wheel looks from a distance. In fact, you'd swear they were powered by the world's smoothest-ever fluid drive. But climb aboard one of those suckers and you discover that they clank and creak and scrape and shudder every time they move. And the damn things have to start and stop every twenty seconds to load and unload passengers. So it takes absolutely forever to go all the way around. Which leaves a person entirely too much time to look down at the ground—waaaay down at the ground—and likewise glance around at all the rust-infected rivets, guy wires, clevis pins, and turn-buckles that hold your average Ferris wheel together. Confidence inspiring they are not. In fact, if you have any sort of mechanical aptitude whatsoever, they can get you very nervous indeed. To make matters worse, there was a stiff breeze blowing in off the Hudson that night, making the gondolas sway back and forth, baack and forth, baaack and forth....

  About fifty feet up, Julie's face suddenly turned the same shade of green the Hudson River gets in summertime. "Hey, Julie," I asked her, "you feelin' okay?"

  She opened her mouth to answer, but all that came out was this sickly sort of groan. Followed shortly thereafter by approximately five dollars' worth of olive burgers, onion rings, rum-laced root beer, and assorted candy snacks. Fortunately, she managed to blow most of it over the rail. Unfortunately, it landed on the gondola just below. Jee-zus, you should've heard all the yelling and screaming. Those people were very unhappy. Pretty vocal about it, too.

  After she was finished, Julie's face changed color again (this time to a chalky off-white) and she sagged back the seat, not looking well at all. "Hey, Julie?" I whispered gently (while making sure her head stayed pointed in the opposite direction), "you feelin' all right?"

  She half-nodded, wiping off her chin.

  "Do you think you can walk?"

  She looked at me with this blank expression.

  "How'bout run? Huh, Julie? You think you can run?"

  Julie didn't understand, but the instant we hit bottom, I grabbed her arm and took off lickety-split down the midway—fast as I could go!—dragging her behind like a coaster wagon with a busted wheel. We sure didn't want to be around when that next gondola car hit ground level. Not hardly.

  Poor Julie got sick again out in the parking lot (before we sat down in the Caddy, thank goodness!) and, needless to say, that first date with Miss Julie Finzio didn't quite turn out the way I'd planned. In fact, I even took a pass on a good-night kiss. You would have, too.

  I remember Julie made herself pretty scarce around the Sinclair for a few weeks after that. Embarrassed, you know? And I can't say as I blamed her. For sure it was a long, long time before I could kid her about that night and get a laugh instead of dagger eyes. Not that it stopped me from doing it. But Julie was a good sport—she could take it—and that's one of the reasons I got so excited when she said she'd think about going out with me again. Even if I
didn't have Big Ed's Caddy to tool us around. Wow! Of course, I never knew if it was because Julie really liked me or just because there wasn't much of anybody else around for her to date. But, whatever the reason, Julie and me started going out to the movies and stuff pretty regular on Friday and Saturday nights.

  As you can imagine, Old Man Finzio wasn't real keen about me dating his niece, and he made it clear he'd knock one of Big Ed's Caddies off the jack stands while I was working under it if "anything happened." And nothing did. But that wasn't for lack of trying on my part. On the other hand, the Old Man would borrow us his scruffy Dodge tow truck every now and then when I couldn't get my hands on Big Ed's off-season Caddy. But I had to beg and plead and crawl on my belly like a reptile anytime we wanted to use it, and the Old Man made me fill the damn thing with gas, too (out of my own pocket, natch), and you can bet your ass the needle was stuck on empty anytime he felt like letting us use it.

  Saturday-night dates with Julie usually started off with a movie show or maybe a round of miniature golf, and afterward we'd head over to Weedermen's for Cokes or malteds and a couple orders of fries. Julie didn't especially want the girls at the Doggie Shake to see us in her uncle's beat-up tow truck. But every now and again, when I'd fixed his Jag up extra nice, Big Ed would lend me one of the Caddies so Julie and me could hit the Doggie Shake in style. Maybe even take in a movie at the drive-in. No way would she consider anything like that in Old Man Finzio's truck.