Door Surprises

We are going to slice right through the top of that car racing along the highway.

It holds two couples. In front is a young man with a mop of light brown hair wearing a white sweat shirt and khaki pants. He looks very much like a college student. Next to him in the passenger seat is a nicely rounded girl with dark curly hair and a good tan.

In back is a sturdily-built girl with big, kinky hair, and a boy with… you guessed it folks, blood-red hair and a very wild look indeed. It’s the boy whose brain is always churning, looking for new ways out. Phoenix Wagman.

They are coming from a WondeRock concert.

It was a great concert. Outside in the college stadium. Four guys and a pumped up girl in a Wonder Woman costume. A lot of the kids in the audience don’t know that the Amazon princess being portrayed is collecting social security. They think she’s new.

Diana Prince, in her sprayed-on star-spangled shorts and red and gold corset, does a fantastic job of waving those bullet-bouncing bracelets, and once in every show, she lassoes some guy and brings him up on stage, with the golden rope pinning his arms to his sides, and makes him tell the truth.

The music’s not bad either. Heavy rock with an abundance of harmony. Almost sweet at times. Something for everyone. A guitarist wearing rotting jeans and a holey T-shirt, with a triangle of shoulder-width curly hair, and a bass player in a tuxedo. The keyboard player’s a gnarly old man who was their music teacher in high school. You laugh until you hear him play.

On drums – Keith Howler, seven feet tall, gawky, shaved head, expression like a Munster. Towering over his drum set. Everybody loves to love him. “Keeeeith! Keeeeith!” erupts periodically at every concert.

And Diana Prince. What does Diana play? Diana plays Wonder Woman, for all it’s worth, and it’s worth a lot.

This group is the professor’s absolutely favorite music in the entire world, which is why Phoenix put all his ingenuity to work to get her to this concert. She is not here with Phoenix, and his friend, Phil. She is here with Sheba, and if you’ll excuse us, Sheba’s cousin Phil, obviously highly trusted by Sheba’s parents. Sheba is here with the professor and the professor’s cousin Phil, obviously highly trusted by the professor’s parents.

And so would he be. He’s a nice kid, a geek who had a lot to do with the electronic side of putting together this concert. He’s a friend of Phoenix’ from an on-line computer game, Halo 3. The two only met tonight. They arranged all this on-line.

Brenda is busy with a firehouse buffet. Zeke is staying at a classmate’s. Jason sees his chance for a night out, something he and Danielle have never had. That’s what gets into people in their position. They want their lust to encompass the world. They want it to have everything everybody else has. (Plus what they have.)

So he doesn’t pay too much attention when Sheba tells him Brenda said she could go to a concert with Rowena (the professor’s real name), who was coming by with her cousin Phil to pick her up. Phil’s a college student, no it isn’t a date, silly, but he can drive and the girls can’t, and he volunteered to take them. He’s involved with the concert, so they’re all getting in free. How can he say no? Easy. Who the hell is this guy? Drive? Where? What concert? The correct answer to any of these questions would elicit from a sane father, “You’re not going.”

But Sheba doesn’t have a sane father. Sheba has a mentally ill father. His evening, his surprise for his lady love, dominates his brain. It absorbs and uses all the input Sheba is outputting. “Be home by twelve,” he says.

Sheba runs out to the car when it comes. Jason is up in the bathroom preparing to rush right over to Danielle’s, as soon as the coast is clear. When he emerges, Sheba is gone.

He slips out and into the car. He’s all revved up. He’s going to be a normal man out on a date with his woman.

He rings the bell. It takes a while for it to buzz back and let him in. She’s on the top floor of the two-story garden apartment house. He’s never had to do that before. He’s come here only with her, and only in the afternoon.

Finally, it buzzes. He opens the door, and takes the stairs two at a time, ready for her to thrust herself out her door and into his arms.

The door is open, but only a crack. He sees her face through it. A very serious face. The lips come to the crack. She whispers, “Not now.”

Jason has trouble registering the words. Not now? What can that mean? “Not now,” she says again, this time with a warning in her voice. He stands there, not knowing how to respond. “Go home,” she says. Then the door closes. But not before he hears the water turn on in the kitchen sink.

There’s someone here! He is shocked. Mortified. Humiliated. She’s cheating on him. Disbelief turns to anger. It’s either bang down the door, or get the hell out of there.

He pounds down the stairs, flies back to his car, gets in, starts it and squeals off. He’s pulled over for speeding on the way home, but is let go with a warning.

Like he’s so anxious to get home to his empty house. Once there, he’s miserably, monstrously jealous. He loves her ten times more than he ever did. And he hates her besides. She’s a devil. A bitch. A fucking whore.

He spends the evening alternately fuming and trying to keep from crying. He will not sink that low. Because folks, he doesn’t love her that much; it’s something else that’s been aroused. His manly pride, God bless it. How could she do this to him?

When Brenda comes home at 10:30, he’s fast asleep on the couch. She’s exhausted, goes upstairs and flops down on the bed with her clothes on.

For two days, everywhere she goes, a group of young conservatives has been following her with signs that say, “Stop Missiles, Not Babies.” They wear white shirts and black pants, embarrassing for her; she looks like part of their act. They are very well-behaved. They just stand there, with that one sign, replicated over and over and over.

She falls asleep and dreams she’s being chased down an alley by ghouls, waving scalpels, knives, and other medical paraphernalia she’s seen on PBS. In the background, bombs are going off. They look like firecrackers.

She wakes up when one of the ghouls reaches her and starts screams in her ear, “None of your business!”

It’s Sheba and Jason, yelling at each other downstairs.

Let me tell you what happened, folks. It’s what usually happens. Things go right up to a point, you relax, and they explode in your face. The four young people had an excellent and innocent evening together. Talked all the way home, about the band, the concert, school, parents… And when they reached Sheba’s house, Phoenix, who was in the back seat with the professor, suddenly remembering that his father had taught him to do this, popped out and opened the front door for Sheba. Once there, it seemed natural to walk her to her door.

But the car pulling up had awakened Poppa. When Sheba opened the door with her key, Phoenix was standing right behind her.

All the fury Jason felt for Danielle and her other man, was forced into one word. “YOU!” as he looked – up, actually – at the tall boy with the blood-red hair.

Phoenix ran. Not a very chivalrous way to treat a lady, but her father looked like he wanted to kill him.

Sheba brushed past Jason, into the house, and stood in the middle of the living room waiting for the axe to fall.

It did. He ranted. He raved. He revisited the party, and the pot. He finally said his say about the mall. She stood there and let it pour over her. At last, it stopped.

“What have you got to say for yourself, young lady?” Right out of the Book of Fathers.

“I found your stash,” she says.

Desperate times. She’s playing her trump card.

It falls flat. “Stash?” he says. “What are you talking about?”

“I found it. You’re a hypocrite, just like Mom.”

“I don’t know what you found,” he says, “but I don’t have a stash.”

Let’s go around that corner, so we can see the lady on the stairs. A bit disheveled, she’s recently up from sleeping on the bed in her clothes, and has come out to see what the commotion is. But she is now wide awake and horrified.

She knows Jason doesn’t have a stash. He never liked pot. You might say she gave it up for him. She remembers that she put some away, just in case, someday, maybe… But she does not remember where she put it. It’s sitting in her house, and she’s in politics. A bad, bad, bad combination. The only way she can get rid of it is to ask her daughter where it is.