chequeing account (just having one of those made me feel disquietingly adult - the feeling, I suppose, wears off), and held onto twenty in cash.
Arnie drew all of his in cash.
'Here,' he said, holding out a ten-spot
'No,' I said. 'You hang onto it, man. You'll need penny of it before you're through with that clunk.'
'Take it,' he said. 'I pay my debts, Dennis.'
'Keep it. Really.'
'Take it.' He held the money out inexorably.
I took it. But I made him take out the dollar he had coming back. He didn't want to do that.
Driving across town to LeBay's tract house, Arnie got more jittery, playing the radio too loud, beating boogie riffs first on his thighs and then on the dashboard. Foreigner came on, singing 'Dirty White Boy.'
'Story of my life, Arnie my man,'! said, and he laughed too loud and too long.
He was acting like a man waiting for his wife to have a baby. At last I guessed he was scared LeBay had sold the car out from under him.
'Arnie,' I said, 'stay cool. It'll be there.'
'I'm cool, I'm cool,' he said, and offered me a large, glowing, false smile. His complexion that day was the worst I ever saw it, and I wondered (not for the first time, or the last) what it must be like to be Arnie Cunningham, trapped behind that oozing face from second to second and minute to minute and . . .
'Well, just stop sweating. You act like you're going to make lemonade in your pants before we get there.'
'I'm not,' he said, and beat another quick, nervous riff on the dashboard just to show me how nervous he wasn't. 'Dirty White Boy' by Foreigner gave way to 'Jukebox Heroes' by Foreigner. It was Friday afternoon, and the Block Party Weekend had started on FM-104. When I look back on that year, my senior year, it seems to me that I could measure it out in blocks of rock . . . and an escalating, dreamlike sense of terror.
'What exactly is it?' I asked. 'What is it about this car?'
He sat looking out at Libertyville Avenue without saying anything for a long time, and then he turned off the radio with a quick snap, cutting off Foreigner in mid-flight.
'I don't know exactly,' he said. 'Maybe it's because for the first time since I was eleven and started getting pimples, I've seen something even uglier than I am. Is that what you want me to say? Does that let you put it in a neat little category?'
'Hey, Arnie, come on,' I said. 'This is Dennis here remember me?'
'I remember,' he said. 'And we're still friends, right?'
'Sure, last time I checked. But what has that got to do with - '
'And that means we don't have to lie to each other, or at least I think that's what it's supposed to mean. So I got to tell you, maybe it's not all jive. I know what I am. I'm ugly. I don't make friends easily. I . . . alienate people somehow. I don't mean to do it, but somehow I do. You know?'
I nodded with some reluctance. As he said, we were friends, and that meant keeping the bullshit to a bare minimum.
He nodded back, matter-of-factly. 'Other people - ' he said, and then added carefully, 'you, for instance, Dennis don't always understand what that means. It changes how you look at the world when you're ugly and people laugh at you. It makes it hard to keep your sense of humour. It plugs up your sinuses. Sometimes it makes it a little hard to stay sane.'
'Well, I can dig that. But - '
'No,' he said quietly. 'You can't dig it. You might think you can, but you can't. Not really. But you like me, Dennis - '
'I love you, man,' I said. 'You know that.'
'Maybe you do,' he said. 'And I appreciate it. if you do you know it's because there's something else - something underneath the zits and my stupid face - '
'Your face isn't stupid,' Arnie,' I said. 'Queer-looking, maybe, but not ' stupid.'
'Fuck you,' he said, smiling.
'And de cayuse you rode in on, Range Rider.'
'Anyway, that car's like that. There's something underneath. Something else. Something better. I see it, that's all.'
'Do you?'
'Yeah, Dennis,' he said quietly. 'I do.'
I turned onto Main Street. We were getting close to LeBay's now. And suddenly I had a truly nasty idea. Suppose Arnie's father had gotten one of his friends or students to beat his