A 74 MERCURY MARQUIS

Roman Ramsbottom, Esquire

(Dec 22/05)
I knew this other kid called Roman Ramsbottom. Like his name, he was incorrigible, incalculable, seemingly invincible, and had a peculiarly large head for someone not yet 12 years old. For me, and perhaps me alone, the name Ramsbottom conjures up images of wholesale inviolability, a tacit reminder that not all things seek entropy without a long drawn out battle in between. Roman, or Rhombi, as he was referred to in impolite circles, had a predilection for strippers, Vodka with Lime Ricky, and a concupiscence that only the likeminded and those up to no good see as a way of life, a raison d’être, should you prefer.

Roman left scuff marks wherever he’d been. The grocery store where he went to pick up six-packs of Lime Ricky, or the old folks home where he went to steal money from his amnesiac grand mama’s beadwork purse, the very one he gave her for Christmas the year before her last stroke. Roman’s father was an unassuming man with few talents for anything other than lawn bowling, which he did with a religiosity broaching on madness, who wore serge gray suits with a neatly pressed handkerchief in the left breast pocket that his wife ironed flat for him each night before bed. Roman had what he referred to as a ‘cursed lisp’, which was actually a cursedly annoying speak impediment that made him sound like Daffy fucking Duck on PCP. No one ever dared make mention of it, as Rhombi would stick his pencil in your leg or cough up an oyster and lay it into your face like grouting. Sad pathetic bastard that he was, Roman couldn’t spell the name of his street, which was Fourth Avenue (he always forgot the u) or remember what day it was without first looking at the calendar on his watch, a gift from his grand mama the Christmas before her first stroke. I only hung out with Roman because he always had cigarettes and was good at stealing.

I had a hard on for cashew nuts and those soft black licorice pipes with the hard red candies on the bowl that were suppose to make it look like it was lit. After school or hockey, or sometimes after ripping off the Gazette box, a bunch of us would go to the Perettes store to steal stuff. Not being a good stealer, or brave enough to steal had I been good at it, I would bribe Roman to steal cashew nuts for me, sometimes the licorice pipes if they were displayed on top of the counter and within reaching distance. One day Roman stole me a bag of Beaver brand cashews, my all-time favorite. On his way out of the store they fell out from under his skidoo jacket, where they were reefed up between the lining and the sheath where the tightening string was housed, and landed on the floor in front of the door. Quickly I skipped them over the lip of the entrance and onto the sidewalk with the toe of my sealskin boot, which was soggy wet with slush and ice salt and some frozen dog’s shit I’d stepped in earlier on in the day. Most everyone had sealskin boots, and those that didn’t wore those vulgar looking mukluks with the yellowing crepe soles and leather laces that you had to double wrap around your ankle because they were always too long and ended up getting soaked and stuck on things. My parents bought me a pair, so I speak from experience.

Roman hung out at the Source de Sex on Hymus Boulevard next to the industrial park where my friend’s father owned a furniture store. The doorman, who we figured made a fucking killing collecting coat check money for a coat check that didn’t exist, was about 248 pounds, shiny bald, and square as the door he stood sentry at. He worked out at the Diamond Gym on Sources road and Salisbury, and drove a 1974 Mercury Marquis with one of those half-roof leatherette tops that were always curling up at the edges and carped with roof rust. The car fishtailed wherever it went, and you could see the metal latticework spooling beneath glabrous rubber. The one time I went there with Roman I was fearful that I would get a hard on, drink way too much beer, then have to figure someway to get to the men’s room without drawing attention to myself. In school it was much easier, as you could hold your binder in front of your crotch and sidle out of the classroom virtually undetected, save for one idiot who figured you had a hard on, cause he did, and tried to knock the binder out of your hands.

The doorman ended up getting a bit part in the movie Jesus of Montreal, as a gladiator or a wise man or one of those imbeciles holding a fake lancet in the scene where Jesus does himself in. Of course nobody tries to stop him, so Jesus, or the guy playing him, gives up the ghost and snuffs it. If it weren’t for the odd wavy shot of a breast, and the hope there would be more, I’d have given up on it after the opening titles. Roman ended up getting a slugger in the back of the head; right were the brain cord attaches to the lower part of the skullcap. So the story goes, he grabbed one of the dancer’s asses, a particularly chubby one with a chipped front tooth. And when he refused to make an apology, which meant paying the dancer and the doorman a touching fee, he was escorted out the backdoor, by the garbage bin, and whacked upside the back of the head with a full-swung baseball bat. My friend’s father, the one who owned the furniture store, was having his usual cheap businessman’s hip of beef and all you can eat spaghetti lunch special, but claims he didn’t see a thing. As he was preoccupied with his lunch and an increasingly warm ginger ale with no ice.