“You’re the naked guy by the side of the road,” Mike said to me as we settled in. I grabbed what I thought had been my abandoned beer and chugged it greedily, grateful for the lukewarm liquid to help my poor, dry tonsils.
“Yeah. I’m the guy in the song.” Darla squeezed my thigh and kept grinning. I loved it.
“No, I mean you’re the naked hitchhiker I picked up back in Albany.”
My jaw dropped. “What?” Darla stared at Mike with her mouth hung open. We must have looked like twins.
He laughed. “You were standing by the side of the road where I-90 and I-87 join, wearing only a guitar and something around your neck, sucking on a baby pacifier and holding a chicken under one arm.”
“A chicken? Like a rubber chicken? A rotisserie chicken?” Joe asked, leaning forward casually and propping his chin in his hand.
“No. A live chicken. I wouldn’t let you bring it in my cab – chickens can be nasty motherfuckers when they’re enclosed like that – so you kissed it on the lips and called it Mavis. Started crying and said you’d be back to marry it someday.” Mike completely ignored Joe.
“Chickens don’t have lips,” Darla pointed out.
“Don’t get technical. The man kissed a fucking live chicken and proposed to it in front of me, Darla.” Mike drained his water and the waitress popped in with a new one, as if telepathic.
“Marrying a chicken isn’t legal in New York. Not even Massachusetts,” Joe deadpanned.
“Not yet,” Mike added. That made Joe cough up half the beer he was chugging, his chest wracked by hacking coughs. Darla climbed out of the booth and began pounding on his shoulder blades. It didn’t help. Batting her away, he stood and hacked his lungs out, trying to get some relief.
The waitress cruised by and Joe ordered another Rolling Rock. Red-faced from coughing, it didn’t stop him from finishing what he had as he recovered and sat back down, except this time he slid into the booth, just past where I’d stood in case he needed help. Darla got in the booth next, turning this into a Darla sandwich as Joe made her and me squeeze in.
“Once you picked me up, did I say anything? Tell you where I was from and what I was doing?” Unfuckingbelievable. How the hell did I get from Sudborough to Albany? That would mean getting to I-495, down to the Mass pike, and out to Albany – about a 5-6 hour drive. And then to make it to Ohio by nightfall? Wha?
“You were naked and crying about the love of your life. Hell, I thought your name was Mavis at first, but then you told me, with tears running down your cheeks and a straw hat that came out of nowhere covering your,” Mike gestured vaguely at my crotch, “privates, that Mavis was the best damn lay you’d ever had and how you couldn’t really talk right now.”
“Lay? I would never call it tha – and I don’t fuck chickens!”
We all burst into laughter, though mine tapered off fast.
“Chickenfucker,” Joe gasped.
Darla wiped the corners of her eyes with the backs of her hands and took a sip of a soda. “I hope you bought her dinner first!”
“And sprung for something nicer than KFC,” Mike added.
New round of giggles. Fine. Let them laugh at my expense. It wasn’t the first time. I just wanted to know what happened to me.
“Give the man a break,” Mike said, drinking the rest of his coffee. “He was prepared to make an honest hen of her.”
“Don’t egg him on,” Joe added.
“Maybe Trevor got on the road because he didn’t want to be cooped up,” Darla choked out.
“How were her breasts, Trev?” Joe sputtered.
That did it. No one could talk for three solid minutes.
“Alright, alright, simmer down,” I said to everyone at the table, pushing my palms down through the air in a quieting gesture. “You’ve all had your laugh at my expense.”
“Oh, we’re not even close to done,” Darla said. “We’re madly hatching more puns.” That started a new round of sputters and snickers. What could I do? I just shrugged and waited them out.
My body buzzed from the injection of power that being on stage gave me. This, though, was different, it was gentler than how it felt to play with my full band. Just me, a guitar, and a rapt, focused audience once I got over their initial skepticism. That felt good – that felt great, a victory you couldn’t quantify with a test, or a perfect social skills interview, or some sort of dry run through a law school internship day at the office where they were feeling you out to decide whether to let you join the team or not.
All of those things, now, paled in comparison to the fact that with my voice, with my presence, and with my music ability I had gotten an entire barroom full of people who wouldn’t look at me twice on the streets of Southie, to cheer for me. And it was all thanks to Darla. No way was I going to get up on that stage and she chided me, nudged me, practically blackmailed me. As we sat there, my body half in the booth, my leg pointing out, my whole left side pressed up against her body, Joe on the inside looking loose, a little drunk, and very, very calm.
A crack inside me widened. On one side, there was the person that my parents insisted that I had to become and on the other side, there was the person my soul was begging me to let loose. In the middle, that crack, that’s where Darla stood, pushing as hard as possible on either edge. At some point, though, she’d falter and slip down so I needed to make a decision damn fast so I could pull her out and rescue her the way that she was rescuing me.
I had had enough of this chicken talk, though. “I did not fuck a chicken,” I declared.
“How do you know? You have no memory of anything,” Mike challenged.
“I just know I would never fuck a chicken. It’s not even biologically possible!”
“I didn’t see scratches anywhere on his hips,” Darla added. Mike narrowed his eyes and she smiled wider, raising her eyebrows.
“Because I don’t fuck chickens!” Now I was getting mad and desperate, turning to Darla with a deep plea inside me that she know that I’m not a hen fucker. “You believe me, right? I just wouldn’t.” A shudder ran through me, disgust and anger and a tinge of fear in there.
“Let me get back to my story,” Mike insisted. He was definitely sobering up while Joe polished off his beer and ordered yet another one. I decided to switch to soda like Darla because if that BMW could be fixed tonight somebody would have to drive, and no way was it going to be Joe at this point.
“Leaving Mavis behind, possibly pregnant and a disgraced chick – ” Mike’s statement couldn’t go unchallenged.
“Pregnant!” I shouted.
Joe came to my rescue. Or so I thought, at first. “Trevor would never do that!” he insisted.
“Right!” I charged.
“He would use a condom,” Joe added. A sucker punch to the throat was the least he deserved, but he used Darla as a human shield. Asshole.
“ – was just the beginning of picking up Trevor here,” Mike said, smirking.
“So what happened next?” Darla asked, nudging me. I hated everyone at the table right now, with the exception of her.
“Well, we got back on the road and I told you that I was going all the way to Chicago.” Mike looked at Darla and said, “You know, that long New York to Chicago route they got me on sometimes.”
She nodded. “So I was coming up New York from the city and I hit that juncture and found you and I told you I’m going to Chicago when you asked me where I was going and you said….well, actually, you didn’t say it. You started singing it. Some song about Old Lady Leary and a lantern?”
“Old Lady Leary left the lantern in her shed,” Joe sang, cackling. Oh, man, he had a lot of beers in him.
“Yeah, that one,” Mike pointed, nodding. “And then I told you that’s as far as I can take you and please don’t get any body fluids on my seat. You let me give you a towel which you put under your ass, leaving your body completely naked, not understanding at all what I was asking you to do but I did appreciate that you were polite enough to make sure that no fluids got on my seat.”
Darla started shaking with silent laughter, making her chest bob and my body bounce a bit too; it was simultaneously annoying and erotic. I tried to focus on Mike, licking my lips which were dry. I drank most of my glass of water and the waitress came over with a pitcher, filling everyone’s cups sloppily, little puddles of water now dotting the scarred tabletop.
Mike clearly enjoyed his audience and he continued. “So, we got through Syracuse, headed into Erie and that’s when you announced you were hungry. Now, I could tell you had nothing on, completely barefoot, had some straw hat, a collar and a guitar…that was it. Any money you had was pretty much in the form of Mavis, which you might have been able to trade for a cup of coffee and a sandwich somewhere so not only did I make you give up the love of your life back there in Albany but I also made you lose your only form of currency.”
“Was it a German chicken?” Joe asked.
“What?” I turned to him.
“Because maybe if it was a German chicken you could have gotten deutsch-bwaks for it.”
We all groaned. “That was really bad.”
“I know,” he laughed.
“No, that was really bad, Son,” Mike said and cut his eyes back to me and Darla. “In Erie we stopped at a truck stop and got you a grilled cheese sandwich with thousand island dressing and Maraschino cherries.” That made me gag. Darla made a gurgling sound in her throat and Joe was blissfully unaware.
“Maraschino cherries and Thousand Island dressing?” Darla asked me. “Ew!”
“I don’t remember it.” My stomach chose that moment to growl, which made everybody chuckle again. I guess my stomach liked it.
“So, what made you stop here in Peters?” Darla asked. “That has to be the only way Ass here-”
“What?” I shot her a look that said why are you calling me names?
“You don’t remember that? That was my first nickname for you.” She slapped my bicep lightly in jest. “I was Chippy Pete and you were Ass.”
“We have pet names for each other already?”
“They’re not very good,”Joe said. “You can do better.” He turned to me and said, “What was your pet name for Mavis?”
Groan. The whole table sounded in unison.
Mike rolled his eyes and said, “So, I stopped in Peters because I needed to go to the bathroom and then you announced that you needed to go and spray the perimeter of the truck stop so you could declare yourself emperor and I told you I did not think that was a good idea. But, I had to go to the bathroom so I went and when I came back you were gone. You just up and disappeared.”
Darla reached across the table and covered Mike’s hand with hers. “Uncle Mike, at what point did you think to give him some clothes or ask for a phone number?”
“I asked for a phone number and he just kept singin’ 8-6-7-5-3-0-9.”
“Eight-six-seven-five-three-oh-ni-e-ine,” Joe sang.