Teaching Randy to Drive
Mary, this one is all your fault.
Dex—
“C’MON, RANDY,” Dex wheedled, smiling playfully at the big teenager through the door with the chain on it. “You know me. We’re friends. I’m your boss, for heaven’s sake. We agreed to do this weeks ago. You don’t want to quit after one try, do you?”
Randy was turning twenty in less than a month, and the look he gave Dex was agonized. “I’m sorry, Dex,” he said, his long-boned face crunched up like a little boy’s. “I don’t want to let you down, but I can’t!”
“But Randy,” Dex said, using the voice he’d used to cajole Frances to visit the doctor, get shots, even try on new clothes. “It didn’t go badly last time. We just ran into a—”
“ You yelled !” Randy shouted through the gap between the door and the frame; then he clapped his hand over his mouth. “You yelled,” he said through his hand. “You promised not to yell.”
Dex sucked air in through his teeth. “It’s true,” he acknowledged. “I yelled. And I’m sorry. But it was an unusual circumstance—”
“But you were mad at me, and you yelled,” Randy told him, almost tearful. “Dex, I can’t deal with you yelling at me. I… you’re always so nice, and you can’t yell!”
Dex let out the air he’d just sucked in and gave up. “Okay,” he said. “Understood. I violated a trust. Would you like me to get Henry instead?”
“Can I drive his minivan?” Randy asked hopefully.
Dex stared. “The ugly brown thing?” He would have thought that, if nothing else, Dex’s new Forester would have made Randy eager to learn to drive.
“Yeah,” Randy said, sounding much more relaxed already. “If I ding that thing on a light post, nobody will know but me and Henry.”
Dex squinted a little, thinking. “It’s… well, you know the minivan is technically Rivers’s vehicle, right? Henry gets use of it a lot, but I don’t know if he has it today .”
Randy’s face fell, and Dex—who had promised Randy months ago to help him get a driver’s license so maybe he could become more independent, and, hey, get a job not porn , which Dex had to admit, would be a lot healthier for this kid, even though Randy made the company Dex helped run scads of money—felt the sweet sweat of desperation dew his brow.
“Let me talk to him,” he said, and gave Randy’s completely naked—and admittedly magnificent—ginger-furred body a once-over through the crack in the door. “I’ll be back in an hour.” Because Dex felt like he deserved an hour to talk to his little brother. “In the meantime, you need to go put on some clothes. You knew I was coming, Randy—it’s forty-five degrees outside.”
Randy glanced down at himself. “D’oh! You’d think I’d learn not to answer the door like this!” he said. “Sure thing, Dex.”
He closed the door, and Dex closed his eyes. Eight-and-a-half-inches long when erect, and three— three —inches in diameter, and that thing showed zero shrinkage in the cold. And yet, Dex could not in good conscience keep this kid in porn any longer than necessary. Dear God, this kid needed to find his head with both hands and position it firmly on his shoulders.
With a sigh, Dex clattered down the steps of the flophouse apartment building and knocked on his brother’s apartment door on the ground floor.
Henry answered while pulling a sweatshirt over his bare torso, scowling. “Lance isn’t here,” he muttered. “I was sleeping in.”
Dex said, “Do you have breakfast or coffee? Can I come in and beg a favor?”
Henry’s eyes popped open. “You want breakfast?” he asked, sounding excited. “As in, if I cook you an omelet , with cheese and some sour cream and salsa, you’d eat it? Coffee with cream and sugar? A fruit salad? Yes! Come in! Please, God, do you have any idea what it’s like trying to feed those fuck-monkeys upstairs? Every goddamned one of them has an eating disorder—I can barely get Lance to eat enough to fuel his insane schedule, and Jackson and I have been learning to cook . Get your ass in here, big brother. I’ve got such plans!”
Dex found himself at the small kitchen table of the two-bedroom apartment, drinking coffee and looking around at a blessedly adult living space. No blowup mattress on the floor, no, uhm, stained couch or love seat in the living room, a television on a stand and not on a stack of cinderblocks and 2x4s, and artwork—actual artwork —on the walls.
“I’m old,” he said, taking a satisfyingly cinnamon-sprinkled sip of some first-rate coffee. “But I like it.”
Henry chuckled. “Who were you visiting upstairs?”
“Randy.” Dex slumped in his chair. “I was supposed to take him for a driving lesson today, but he was not going.”
Henry chuckled. “Well, that’s what you get when you yell.”
Dex scowled. “Yell? Is that what he said? I yelled ?”
“It’s all we’ve heard for days —how ‘Dex yelled at me!’ and I had to assure him that the one time you’d yelled at me was when I fell in the pond and then hadn’t called for help, so you probably had a good reason.”
“Oh, I had a good reason, all right,” Dex muttered grimly. “Did he tell you what I yelled?”
“Just that it was a yell,” Henry said. As he spoke, he was deftly cutting up vegetables and some leftover pork chops and onions and putting everything in little bowls. Tomatoes, Dex thought dreamily, and chives. Oh, this was going to be a beauty of an omelet.
Dex pulled his attention back to the matter at hand. “Sure—it was a yell that sounded like, ‘Turn left here and don’t hit the two garbagemen in the middle of the road , and don’t hit the can behind their truck either !’”
Henry barely missed slicing his finger while dicing a mushroom as Dex relived the “yell,” and he turned around to laugh at his brother. “So that was the yell?”
“It was hardly unwarranted!” Dex said, hurt.
“Well, yeah—a very necessary yell,” Henry agreed. “But, you know, Randy—”
“He won’t go with me,” Dex said miserably. “Henry, this kid needs a driver’s license. He needs a way out of porn. And I know people can ride the bus for years, but—”
“But he needs to know he can do it,” Henry said, nodding like he got it. He turned to whisking a bunch of eggs cracked into a glass bowl, added some milk and some garlic salt, and then whisked them some more.
Dex was at the place now where he needed to man up. “He wants you to do it,” he said. “And he wants you to do it in Jennifer.”
Henry almost fumbled the bowl and the whisk. He set them both down and stared at his brother in bemusement. “He wants me to teach him how to drive in Jackson’s haunted minivan?”
“It’s haunted?” Dex asked, surprised.
“Oh my God. The other day, it almost dumped Galen on his ass in front of the office because Galen… well, he said one of those mean, dry things that I won’t repeat about how Jennifer isn’t a lady. Anyway, she didn’t take it well, and Jackson’s been detailing her upholstery and oiling all those little hinges on the disappearing back seats this weekend. He says it’s like a smudging, except Jennifer’s a practical girl.”
Dex groaned, and not even the smell of the amazing coffee could make it better. “Will it kill my top-billed adult film actor?”
“He’s top billed?” Henry asked in shocked. “ Randy ?”
Dex grunted. “Have you ever seen his porn?”
“No. God no. It feels wrong.”
“Yeah.” Dex nodded glumly. “But that’s because we know him. If you just randomly watched him in a scene, you’d be saying his name as you came.”
“ Davy …,” Henry whined.
“Look, I know,” Dex acknowledged. “It’s wrong when you know him. You know him and you’re like, ‘Wait— that kid is an adult film star?’ But on film he’s a powerhouse. So here I am, trying to get my powerhouse out of the business, where he is making me lots of money, by the way, because the little kid in his heart is not going to do well in this business much longer. And apparently, I can’t teach him how to drive because I yell !”
Henry grimaced and nodded. “Okay,” he said. “Okay. I get it. Hold on a sec, let me get this started, and then I’m gonna call my boss.”
Dex groaned. “No….”
“Yeah. Sorry, Dex. My specialty is in telling them bluntly that they’re fucking up. I am not who Randy needs. We’re gonna need to bring in the big guns, okay? And you are going to need to sit this one out.”
BY THE time Jackson showed up at Henry’s with a giant box of doughnuts, Henry had finished his very healthy omelet.
Jackson sighed and sat down to eat, admitting Henry’s choice had probably been wiser, while Henry ate three doughnuts in front of Dex and Jackson and they agreed that killing was too good for him.
“Metabolism,” Dex muttered. “Wait until he hits thirty.”
“Little asshole,” Jackson agreed, but he was agreeing through a face full of egg, cheese, and sour cream, so he couldn’t be too mad.
“So,” Jackson murmured, wiping the egg off his face (heh), “where’s our victim?”
“Not my victim,” Dex told him, still harboring a grudge. “My car’s so nice it scares him, and apparently I yell.”
“Not my—” Henry started, but Jackson shook his head.
“Oh no. You’re in the back seat, chief. I’m not doing this alone. Besides, Jennifer will get all bent out of shape if we let somebody else drive her and we’re not both there.”
Henry stared at him. “You know that how?” he asked.
“Ernie told me,” Jackson said grimly. “As in, he called me at two in the morning to tell me specifically not to let somebody besides us drive the minivan without both of us inside her.”
“When?” Henry asked, right to be suspicious. “On what day did he call?”
“ This day,” Jackson said, standing up and taking his plate to the sink. “This morning. Didn’t make any sense to me until you called. But I was up early, double-checking her engine, in case.”
Dex stared at them both. “Have I met—”
“No,” they both said.
“Billy and K-Ski have,” Jackson told him. “Just… just don’t. Don’t question it. Let me go upstairs and tell Randy we’re going to the mall.”
Dex frowned, obviously feeling left out. “What do I do? I blocked out all sorts of time for this!”
Henry shrugged. “Listen, we’re going to be gone for at least two hours. You know, I’ve got an empty house here, an entertainment system… do what you gotta. I swear I won’t tell your husband.”
Dex got a sort of dreamy expression on his face. “I could watch football uninterrupted…,” he almost sang, and Jackson knew he was now fine with it.
At that moment there was a knock on the door. “I’ll get it,” Jackson said, setting his plate in the sink before glancing at Henry. “You go change.”
He opened the door to a giant muscular chest, pale as marble, covered in hearty ginger fur.
“Dear God,” Jackson said, raising his chin a little. “How tall are you now?”
“Six five?” Randy guessed. “Six six? Why are you here?” He paused, his angular jaw working as he remembered his grown-up words. “I’m sorry. Good to see you, Jackson. Are you coming driving with us?” He followed that up with a hopeful smile, and Jackson nodded.
“Yeah, kid. But first go upstairs, put on a T-shirt, and then put on a sweatshirt over that.” Jackson glanced down at the knobby knees poking out from under a pair of cargo shorts that went mid-thigh. “And maybe find your own pants.”
Randy grunted. “To drive?”
“It’s forty degrees outside,” Jackson pointed out, reasonably, he hoped. “Your nipples could cut glass. Go! And hurry—I need to be done in two hours.”
“What’s in two hours?” Randy asked, and Jackson grimaced.
“Well, right now Ellery’s watching Meet the Press and throwing toast at the screen whenever the Republicans talk, and as soon as that’s over, he calls his mother for a blow-by-blow breakdown of everything that’s happened in politics in the last week.”