Trapdoor: Chapter 1

A week later, Volley Santino would stride into Tony’s Barber Shop and get his head shaved.

“Volley?” his boss at the plant would exclaim, the Monday morning after that. “Zat you?” Volley’s live-in girlfriend would move out, citing certain unspecified “irreconcilable differences” but unable to hide a final shudder of distaste at his pale, stubbled noggin. His kid brother would bark his kid-brother laugh and tell Volley that it really did not look that bad but he’d never find a rubber big enough. And Volley’s Ma wouldn’t be able to speak at all; she’d just stand there, wringing her hands, blinking back tears, uncomprehending. (After all, it had not been even four months since she’d “loaned” him the seven hundred fifty bucks he’d needed for the Ultra Membership in Head’o’Hair, Limited.)

Like, who the hell cared? They didn’t have to live with what he’d been trying to live with, did they?

But all that would come afterwards.

Now, at this moment sometime after midnight on a warm Saturday in May, Volley Santino was possessed of this marvelous thatch of thick black curly hair, ever so slightly gone gray at the temples. Volley was sitting on a barstool in McGarrity’s Pub in New Brunswick, New Jersey, at the end of the bar closest to the heavy oaken door, and whenever the door thwupped open and shut, a fringe of bangs tickled his narrow forehead in the sudden breeze.

This place had a great selection of jukebox oldies — currently The Drifters and “Up on the Roof” — but, sadly, lacked a mirror behind the bar, which would have allowed Volley to marvel at all dimensions of his tonsorial splendor. Limited as he was to the tactile, his fingers ran ceaselessly through his hair; and with the full force of his mind, he was attempting psychokinetically to manipulate the fingers of the auburn-haired woman at his right to do the same.

Pssst — yo! whispered Volley’s mind, all sibilant urgency. You wanna, like, touch my hair? Go ahead. Come on. Touch it. Touch it. You know you want to….

But it wasn’t working. The woman’s fingers remained curled obdurately around the stem of her wine glass, and she remained deep in superficial conversation with a guy to her right. A guy, as it happened, with a thick mane of wavy, straw-colored hair. He also had a nice mouthful of straight, white teeth that kept flashing at the woman — on, off; on, off — like the guy got a firefly-butt transplant in his jaw or something.

The woman turned to her left a bit to sip at her wine. Not for the first time, Volley glimpsed a corner of the self-adhesive name tag plastered to the saffron fabric of the blouse over her left breast. Hi, Volley knew that it said, My Name Is APRIL.

Volley ran a hand through his hair, took a swallow of his Bass ale. His own name tag lay in shreds on the bar’s surface, torn and re-torn victim of his awkward, nervous-fingered attempts at conversation.

He and April had walked to McGarrity’s together from the Hyatt a couple blocks away. There, they –plus nearly a hundred of Volley’s fellow Ultra Members — had convened for the first day of a weekend Head’o’Hair seminar on the topic, “Managing Your Hair Future.” April, of course, was not herself a client-member of Head’o’Hair but rather one of the seminar leaders. Her specialty was a series of exercises which, she maintained, would “stimulate and revivify the vital oils and natural proteins of your scalp.”

“Okay guys!” she’d exhorted them, repeatedly, from the little platform at the front of the seminar room. With a telescoping steel pointer she’d drawn their attention to a flip chart which depicted, in ovoid plan view, a generic male scalp (the nose pointing to the left, sniffing at April’s armpit); a dozen blue Xs and black Os were scattered, apparently at random, across its surface. The generic male scalp reminded Volley of his own scalp immediately after the Head’o’Hair Ultra Implant treatment — like a parched tan lawn dotted with plugs of optimistic zoysia.

“Okay guys!” April tapped a couple of the Xs and Os for emphasis. “Listen! These” — tap, tap — “are your scalpic neurosensory nodes.”

Scalpic? The whole seminar was full of gibberish bullshit like that. But with his Ultra cohorts Volley went dutifully through the motions of massaging the Xs with his thumbs and fingers and the Os with the heels of his hands. He (or, okay, his Ma) had, after all, paid good money for this thing, the complete Head’o’Hair package. And April had, after all, been very persuasive, muscles rippling authoritatively beneath her glossy-black Spandex leotard as she leaned from side to side, puffing her cheeks in and out in histrionic exertion, probing, pushing, rubbing her own head. From the seminar room’s speaker system had chorused, raucously, that Olivia Newton-John hit song “Physical,” as covered by Richard Simmons and the Head’o’Hair Ultra Glee Club….

Volley glanced at his watch. After one o’clock already. They ought to get back to the hotel; they had to be downstairs in the seminar room by nine-thirty for April’s morning Scalpisthenics session.

“Yo, April,” he said, tapping her on the shoulder and breaking into Mister Teeth’s monologue of anguish about the first (Volley gathered) of his four failed marriages. “I’m gonna head back to the Hyatt, you wanna come or what?”

April twisted her head around just far enough so that she could glance back into Volley’s mournful eyes. “Nah. Think I’m going to stay and finish my wine first. But thanks for walking me over here though, Wally!” She turned back to Mister Teeth, patting his forearm and signaling the bartender for another Chardonnay.

That’s Volley, thought Volley. An ounce or two of Bass still lay in the bottom of his glass, in a little two-inch pool the defeated hue, it occurred to him now, of rusting metal. He poked at the scraps of his name tag, heaped them up in the puddle of condensation that ringed the base of his glass. The blue ink in which his name had been written leaked out of the little pile of wet-paper mush onto his fingertips; reflexively, before he caught himself, he wiped them on his t-shirt which was, alas, both new and white, imprinting upon it a pair of concentric pale-blue arches. Jesus Mother Mary. He downed the last of the ale, dropped a five on the bar, and left.

No (he would soon be telling the police), he didn’t know why he didn’t return to the hotel right away. What they think, anyhow — he go through that whole thing just for his peace of mind or something, for chrissake? It was just a nice night for a walk, what they want?

But in fact, well yeah, that was right: it was for something like peace of mind. He was restless, not really ready to hit the sack yet… and dogged, a little, by memories — memories triggered by The Drifters.

The last time he’d been in New Brunswick had been, what, like twenty years ago: the tail end of a disastrous first (and only) semester at Rutgers, when he’d quite literally partied till he puked and flunked every one of his four classes.

“A family record,” the old man had croaked with a characteristically disgusted curl of his lip, rolling his eyes and holding his hands over his ears as though to stem the eruption of lava. “The first kid to go to college, the first to flunk out. Way to go, champ. Watch out Ripley’s, here he comes.”

But what Volley now recalled most poignantly about that December was not his shame, but the girl he’d met a few weeks before.

Lindy. That was her name. A junior (and Volley just a freshman, which made him swagger a bit even now, headed down George Street in the direction of the main Rutgers campus), and she had been in all probability nuts. The movie “Cabaret” was then still in its first run, and Lindy — she told him while silvery pinpoints of mania glittered in her eyes, like broken glass — had already seen it eight times. Sally Bowles this, Sally Bowles that, Liza Minelli-Michael York-Joel Grey the other thing; moneymoneymoneymoney — none of it had meant squat to Volley’s unworldly eighteen-year-old mind. He hadn’t seen the thing even once yet.

McGarrity’s in those days had not stood in the center of downtown, as now, but here, at this spot up ahead: a block in from Albany Street, alongside the railroad underpass, a spot now occupied by a tiny corner of Johnson & Johnson’s monster headquarters.

Volley stood now at the crosswalk at George and Albany Streets. Not much traffic out tonight, not at the moment anyhow. An old brown Honda civic, vomiting smoke, clattered by, the only vehicle in motion. Rutgers regular school year probably over by now; probably the break before the summer session. To Volley’s left, across Albany, was the train station, watched over by a couple of dozing cabbies. Above, in the glass of the J&J building, gleamed the ripply reflection of the full moon. Volley stepped off the curb, crossed over Albany….

“C’mere,” Lindy had said back then, dragging Volley by the hand out the door of that old McGarrity’s (where, then, “Under the Boardwalk” had been the jukebox fare) and into the underpass’s shadow. She placed his hand flat against the stone wall. “Feel it? Train’s coming!”

“Yeah, I feel it. So?”

Lindy leaned back against the wall and swung Volley around to face her. She closed her eyes. “In ‘Cabaret’ there’s a scene where Sally takes her lover to a railroad underpass. To scream.”

“To, uh, scream? No shit, you kidding me?” His heart had been thudding inside his chest (as it was thudding now, with the memory).

Lindy’s eyes opened again; her mouth twisted, demented. “Mm-hm. No shit. The train roars over the track overhead and Sally screams her guts out. It’s like, it’s orgasmic or something.”

“Uh, ‘orgasmic’–”

“Mm-hmm, like primal screaming, get it?”

Volley had no idea what primal screaming might be but he had no chance to ask Lindy about it. She hooked the back of his neck with one hand, pulling his open mouth to hers, while with the other she placed one of his hands against her blue-jeaned crotch. Through her body, through her jeans, through the fur-lined glove he was wearing against the night’s bitter cold, he felt the growing vibration of the approaching express train and then it was roaring overhead like a rocket launch and simultaneously Lindy was screaming into his mouth….

Jesus. Now he was beneath that same underpass; momentarily overcome with the memory, he had to pause. He placed an open palm against the stone wall.

There it was again. The first faint rumble.

Volley looked at his watch. One twenty-five. Not likely to be a local at this time of night, especially on a weekend. The rumble grew louder — yeah, an express, the sound not diminishing and the train not slowing down at all. He moved away from the wall, walked the few steps so that he was just clear of the underpass, out under the open sky. The rumble grew. Ahead of him lay the university campus; beneath his feet, the sidewalk shook; behind him in the underpass, in his memory, Lindy reached up and grabbed a handful of his already-thinning hair, put her mouth against his….

Just as the train blasted by overhead (Volley would shortly be telling the cops), he thought he heard a sudden odd sound punctuating the roar and rumble. “Odd like how?” one of the cops would say. “I don’t know, just odd. Weird, like,” Volley would reply, “Kind of a wet kind of crunch, with a splash, like.” Like one of that asshole comedian’s watermelons being pulped with one of those gigantic wooden mallets; kind of a Ppp-loosh! It was followed immediately by a big fat garbage bag full of something coming down, splat, like something hocked up and spat out by a disgusted god into the center of George Street.

But what sent Volley off into a screaming replay of Lindy’s kiss, into a scream — not at all orgasmic — that would leave his voice hoarse and his throat raw and ragged, echoing long after the train had gone, was not the ruptured garbage bag and its awful contents spilling all over the asphalt but this: this thing that landed in his brand-new hair and lodged there.

He shook his head to get the whatever-it-was off, unsuccessfully. Something wet trickled down his neck, soaking his shirt. He reached up with his right hand, Volley did, and grabbed it. Grabbed it, and felt–

Fingers. Cold cold fingers, a, a hand, what the hell–

Volley pulled it from his head, the stiff slightly-curled digits seeming to cling there, tapping for a perverse second at one or more of his scalpic neurosensory nodes. He gaped at it, eyes wide, his mouth at first opening and shutting in silence and then screaming, unable to let go of it though his arm flapped up and down like a railroad brakeman’s signal, screaming, a middle-aged man shaking hands with absolutely no one — screaming, screaming — his thick black hair gleaming wetly, weirdly, in the moonlight.