Chapter 2:

A party had been raging next door. The neighbors were a kind couple in their 30s. Successful stockbrokers. They’d even left his dad a flyer: 

Hey Fisher! We’re having a party Thursday night. You’re invited! Please join us for some cocktails and disco. If you have any issues with the noise or with our guests, please don’t hesitate to call us. 310 459 8300.

A big yellow smiley face was drawn on the flyer. Fisher was well aware the party shouldn’t be an issue because houses were big in Brentwood. Fisher went to his dresser and pulled on the sleeve of a sparkly silver shirt hung next to some tight bell-bottomed pants. He shoved himself into the outfit and regarded himself angrily in the mirror. His appearance was scary because of how fat his face had become. He tore it off and decided not to attend the party. Fuck them. 

   Fisher became increasingly perturbed with the celebration. He glowered down into the nearby garden. Purple, orange, blue, and green lights reflected off his face from a disco ball. Everyone was so happy it may as well have been a fuckin’ musical. It sounded like Saturday Night Fever. Fisher went to his dresser and grabbed a blue can. It was topped with a round metal pin and read RIOT CONTROL in the remorseless font of the US military. He pushed his window to get a wider view of the people below. Women with huge earrings and men with fake afros were line dancing to Earth, Wind, and Fire. ‘One. two. Three.’ Fischer ripped off the pin and threw it toward the lit-up dance floor. “Hyuh!” It began spewing fog before it smacked someone’s back and hit the ground. It was like a rabid rottweiler had walked out onto the dance floor and started attacking people. First, confusion, then fear, then panic. People screamed and ran toward the house. 

There would have been a stampede if the dancers hadn’t kept tripping over one another from their ridiculous platform shoes. This caused more gas inhalation, more panic, and more terror. Fisher was pleased. He shut the window before his maniacal laughter gave away his position. The party was evacuated. When the police came to question him, he simply ignored his doorbell and pretended to be asleep. I’m an old man. (He was only sixty-two.)

In the morning, he filled his car with clipboards and folding chairs. Some good friends were still recounting the previous night and comforting one another by cursing the fiend who brought about its tragic end: “What a Nazi. What a psycho. He’s evil. I hope he dies TO-DAY,” said one young woman in a sparkly disco-blouse whose face was red and puffy. 

“Aw, don’t say that,” said a male companion in a rainbow-striped jumpsuit. “I’m sure that guy is in way more pain than we are.” Fisher, who had been waiting in his driveway by his car’s open driver’s side door, decided these hippies didn’t get the message. Another pin pul. Another toss. Another thud. Inching away, he watched as the neighbors shrieked and ran again, forced to relive the trauma of only hours before. “Where does he get all the tear gas? he heard one guy ask.” 

Fisher got out of his car miles away outside of an elementary school in a middle-class suburban neighborhood, took a deep breath, and smiled. He was wearing a green, retro soldier’s helmet, a horsewhip tucked under his arm. He wore tight khakis and a dark green jacket. Looking like General George S. Patton holding a wooden folding table and a clipboard, Fisher somehow made it onto the outdoor recreation area. No one tried to stop him. The teachers thought he was demonstrating something about World War II. But as soon as the kids ran outside to play during recess, he started shouting at all the boys to “line up and enlist for the US Marine Corps. We need every swinging dick ready to bring the fight to the Orientals before they bring it to us.”

      The PE teacher responsible for the schoolyard marched up to Fisher. “Who are you? What’s the meaning of this?” he asked. But Fisher’s impassioned speech was drowning out the burly PE instructor. She blew her whistle to catch his attention. It worked, but he blew his own whistle back at her. For a minute, they were two brow-furrowed adults blowing whistles at each other like angry pigeons. Then Fisher noticed an Asian American boy staring at him behind a red rubber handball. 

“Oh my god, it’s too late!” yelled Fisher. You’ll never establish a beachhead in my city, you yellow—” But as he charged towards the boy, knocking over his makeshift recruiting station, the sixth-grade social studies teacher tackled him to the ground. The PE teacher helped him restrain Fisher, and they ushered him toward the school fence. Once they got him outside, he wrenched the horsewhip hand free and started whacking the teachers with it. So, they pushed him away from the fence and locked the gate. Fisher backed away from it and addressed the fearful school kids while holding his whip in the air like a conductor.

“We will never surrender,” he said as he took a step backward onto the street. “And, you better believe we will…” But Fisher never finished the sentence. A garbage truck had just pummeled him, then swerved and crashed into a tall tree, which keeled over into the schoolyard. 

“The students scattered, barely avoiding a tragic death at the hands of a maniac.” That’s what the anchor said on the 10 pm news. 

Allen had watched coverage of his father’s death biting his nails, pulling his hair, and scrunching up his face in an odd attempt to alter reality. “And so concludes the tragic latter years of Fisher. Once a respected titan of industry, now deceased in a frightful display appearing old, crazy, and evil.” That’s what Allen feared the most. Those words tormented Allen over and over in his head as he tried to fall asleep that night. Why me? He thought. This is going to be such an awkward funeral.

Allen noticed he had stopped driving and was sitting with the engine running in his driveway. He had disappeared completely into the flashback of his father’s humiliating demise, yet still managed to drive home on autopilot. I could have killed somebody! He noticed that tears had run all the way down his cheeks and advanced toward his upper lip. He started to take shallow frightened breaths and wondered if anyone had seen him so far. There was the sound of wind and a motor. Allen looked around and saw a Hispanic man in a sun hat absentmindedly blowing leaves and trying to see what was happening through the windshield. He waved a hand holding the tip of his thumb and pointer finger together: ‘Are you ok?’

What wasn’t ‘ok’ was that this impoverished illegal immigrant was concerned for Allen’s wellbeing at the moment he was about to drive into his large house while that man baked in the sun all day doing manual labor and eating poisonous tacos from a food truck. Allen waved back at the man, smiled, then proceeded to do a three-point turn. He wasn’t going home. No way can I be alone right now. He pressed a couple of buttons on the car’s dashboard. The phone started to ring.

“Hello?”

“Do you still want to play tennis?”

“I knew you’d come crawling back,” said Steel. Allen could hear a rolling and rustling motion as if Steele were on his hands and knees eating those M&Ms he kept in that big glass brain. Allen heard him say, ‘Oh, a green one!’ followed by a shuffling and clanking motion. 

“Do you want to play tennis or not?”

“Sure,” said Steele. “I’ll meet you at the club in fifteen minutes.” 

The two friends flung the yellow ball back and forth at one another on a warm court surrounded by trees and the sound of birds, which gave the whole day a relaxing tropical feel. Only Allen was mostly standing in place or jogging a few steps away to hit the ball back at Steele. The chubby doctor was throwing himself side-to-side across the court, gleefully waving his racket like every time the ball came back over the net was an opportunity to prove his value. He looked like a fat child trying to catch bubbles in a net. The ball went out of bounds. Steele was sweating profusely. The two men hadn’t spoken in minutes.

“Do you want to call it?” asked Steele, panting with his hands on his knees. 

“C’mon, man. I haven’t even broken a sweat. Don’t you want to score at least one point?” said Allen.

“I’m pretty tapped. Besides…I think you needed this win.” Steel started to walk off the court, unusually satisfied.

“But I always win,” Allen called after him. Steele kept walking and smiling.

Bossa Nova music was playing throughout the locker room. Allen closed his eyes to bask in The Girl From Ipanema. There wasn’t much talking between the other men timidly toweling off or stumbling in covered in sweat, trying not to push themselves into other freshly-showered men. He closed his eyes again, rubbed his temples, and smiled, drifting inward to some peaceful memory. Dr. Steele, however, had just emerged from the shower and exchanged a loud joke with a man near Allen. He then whipped off his towel and danced while whistling the song Allen was enjoying in a high and fast pitch. Allen was easily perturbed. But if there was one pet peeve that rattled him more than others, it was when some asshole started whistling a song everyone else had previously been enjoying. At this moment, he could forget the years of friendship with Richard and kill the squishy bastard.

“Richard…Richard. Richard!” The doctor briefly stopped to look at Allen, swinging his unimpressive penis as he did. “Can you please stop whistling?”

“How come?”

“I like that song.”

“I do, too!”

“Well, you’re fucking it up for me,” Allen said softly, trying to seem reasonable and avoid making a scene in this den of dicks. What Allen really meant was, ‘Could you please shut the fuck up for a minute?’ But Steele understood it as ‘I want to talk.’

“Hehe. You really don’t need to worry so much, buddy. I really think you have what it takes to overcome your condition,” said Dr. Steele, smiling broadly in front of Allen with his hands on his hips. Steele surely thought this was meant to be genial and comforting. But all Allen saw was an annoyingly naked man who had just outed him to a dozen other naked middle-aged men who now offered Allen pitying glances as they made assumptions about what the ‘condition’ was.