DONUTS

Caswell Levin didn’t used to be like this. He used to be smart and sometimes talked about a German philosopher, Hegel, and then something happened and he quit college and quit everything and moved into a beach apartment to live off his rich dad and become a pervert. He’s huge, six-feet-six and hairy, and one time he hit me on the head with a tennis racket, which could’ve been fatal, he really clocked me. I got mad and swore I wouldn’t see him again, but this morning I did. I drove down from Oakland and knocked on his door thinking maybe something new happened to him, but it hasn’t, though I’ve ended up staying anyway, pushing everything out of the spare room, and now it’s just my junk in there, some clothes and things.

It’s hot. It’s three in the afternoon. I peer down from his balcony, squinting, seeing who’s at the pool, maybe some nice people down there, then I come back inside and see he’s dragged the long clear cord of the phone around the corner and under the bathroom door.. I hear him swishing around in the tub, and I want to break in and make him explain what he thinks he’s doing, except I know what he’s doing: he’s calling up strange women out of the phone book. He’ll get one on the line and ask for Judy or Laurie or some such spur of the moment name, and when they tell him it’s the wrong number, he says, “Wait a sec, you sound familiar.” It’s surprising how many get sucked in, but he can be smooth. He’ll start asking questions, like what school you went to, you married, keeping them on the line, and he even meets some of them.

Instead of curtains, Caswell has maroon blankets hung up around the apartment, duct-taped over the windows. The telephone book is all swollen and warped from falling in the tub. He has no shame.

“Turmoil,” he says.

“Turmoil?”

Naked, he tucks another maroon blankets in as if it were a towel and turns his back to me and lights a cigarette from a pack on the kitchen counter, where a platoon of empty packs lay twisted. I step through a rash of newspapers contorted along the carpet and take a seat on his beat-up couch left behind by the previous tenant.

“So this is LA living.”

“Screw you, you think I like it?” he says. Smoking, he begins to move, the edge of the blanket trailing him on the floor. “I’m over at UCLA yesterday, and I see this ad on the bulletin board. This chick wants to sell her stereo, and it says ‘Call Kim.’ I called, told her I’d come over sometime. She lives in a dorm somewhere. I’ll call her right now. What do you say? She’s Chinese. You up to it? You can be there in twenty minutes, I’ll give you directions.”

I remember how I parked my car about three feet from the curb, a sign that I’m intending to abruptly leave, but rather than get up right away, which I sort of want to and don’t want to, I lean over the coffee table and blow off flecks of ash, though there’s nothing to be done about the dots of dried ketchup.

“Take it easy, I’m not going anywhere,” I tell him. “Why don’t you sit down?”

“So what’re you doing here, anyway?”

“Why don’t you sit down for a second?”

“What for? Listen, you got any dough? We’ll go get something to eat, I’ll write you a check.”

He goes behind the counter to check inside the refrigerator, then he comes back in, the blanket held up around the sail of his belly.

“You shoulda been here a couple months ago, I was in shape.”

“Yeah, what happened?”

“Rita—”

“Your mother?”

“Her brains are Maypo.”

Sitting, he has a bald spot on the apex of his skull; in front, his hairline juts forward like the Cape of Good Hope. His arms and legs are short, out of proportion with his long trunk. When we were kids, his limbs reminded me of a dinosaur, the limbs of Tyrannosaurs Rex. Back then, we’d play basketball in his driveway, shooting and talking at the same time, paying more attention to the talking than the shooting. In the tenth grade, at the same high school, he sat next to me on the bench of the JV team. We both thought we should be starting. I liked to shoot long high set shots from way out, the corners or the top of the key, while Caswell liked to use his bulk inside. When he got in, he always fouled.

“So what made you leave home?” I ask.

“You like this place?”

“I like what you’ve done with it.”

“I invited Rita down for a visit.”

“What happened? Gimme the details.”

“I almost decked Siggy one night, that’s what happened.”

Sigfrid Levin, his father, is short, stout, a lawyer who owns at least three health clubs. “They called the cops,” Caswell says.

“They called the cops?”

“Oh, yeah, I wrecked my mother’s Lincoln.”

“The same night?”

“No, a few weeks before. I totaled it.” He flicks ash, missing the coffee tin. “I ran into a mailbox at fifty miles an hour. There were letters everywhere.”

He gets back up for the refrigerator. Looking in, his lips stick out past the rest of his face. He closes it, then douses his latest butt under the faucet and immediately lights a new one off the burner.

“There’s your details,” he says. Smoking, he looks off at nothing. Something is being looked at inside, though, the wheels are turning. With Caswell, they’re always turning, examining. After high school, his family moved south to LA, and I came down for visits, staying in one of the two or three extra bedrooms upstairs in their big new house. During my last visit two years ago his parents were away. Caswell did nothing all day long: he read the sports, smoked cigarettes, and ate whatever was in sight (he’d ballooned to two-eighty). For three weird days we raced after each other—he was acting particularly loony, sucking on frozen waffles, driving on the wrong side of the street—until it ended when I slammed the screen door in his face after he used his tennis racket on my head.

“So,” I say. “Now you’re here.”

“Three packs a day.”

“Shit, Caswell.”

He dresses finally, and we drive through the neighborhood in his car, not paying attention to the Dodgers game on the radio. Then he gets the idea of going to Brentwood for dinner. He wants his father and mother to see me, me to tell them I’m going to law school at UCLA this fall, to show them what nice a kid I turned out to be, to impress them so they’ll look at him and feel guilty. And he tells me I better go along with it. I laugh at the idea, but he’s serious. We drive all the way to their neighborhood, their street. He parks a few houses down. Then he tells me don’t get out, and we sit in the car. Then he starts the engine again, and we drive away.

“I need to eat and drink,” he says, and he makes a sudden turn off the boulevard and parks his car in two spots in the Burger King lot. Inside, our burgers and cokes come in no time, but we have to wait for fries. The girl who serves us is about sixteen and cute, garbed in orange. “What beach you hang out at?” Caswell asks her.

He reaches into the bag and fishes out a burger, which he socks down in three bites right at the counter. The girl says, “Your fries should be here in just a minute.” He asks for another coke, and while she’s getting that he reaches into the bag for his second burger. A drop of ketchup lands on his baggy pants, a drop, two drops, onto the tile floor. The girl hands him the Coke. He tries sticking the straw into the little hole in the lid, making hasty stabs, until at last he whips off the lid. On the way out of Burger King his sneaker smears the drops.

Caswell holds a bar of cheddar cheese in the kitchen, its cellophane wrapping scrunched down. He takes several bites, then he sets it back on the counter. I’ve seen him eat raw hot dogs before; he doesn’t have the patience to cook them.

Later that night, he starts up with me.

“See that bat,” he says, indicating the black Louisville Slugger in the corner. “I was making spaghetti the other night—I make it every night, eat it with ketchup. I’m boiling the noodles, but I don’t have any cigarettes. So I leave for the store, and when I get back, there’s this big racket. It’s the smoke alarm going crazy.”

“You didn’t turn off the noodles?”

“I didn’t know. The store’s only a couple blocks away.”

“What happened?”

Triumphant, he stands. He retrieves the bat and begins these half cuts.

“I smashed the fucking nutty thing to a pulp,” he says.

I look up and see the crater where the smoke alarm had been.

“Cool it,” I say, because the cuts come too close to my head.

“Lopes is up at the plate,” he says.

“You better stop.”

“He swings—“

He smacks me hard on my shoulder, a shocking blow. He thinks it’s funny and fends me off with the bat, then he makes for his bedroom, where he has a mattress on the floor and the sheets scattered. He runs in there like a ninny and shuts the door. On the other side, he blocks me from barging in. With his heft he’s immovable. I give up and he comes back out, but he’s all wound up. He goes into the kitchen and sips tap water and then back to his bedroom, yanking out drawers, and then the kitchen again, then in the bathroom, flushing the toilet. Room to room, he’s everywhere, loud, talking about calling the Chinese girl or going to wrestling at the Forum to see Two Ton Tommy, asking me what my plans are, if I’m going to keep working in this restaurant where I sometimes work, or apply to grad school. He doesn’t give me a chance to answer. He’s back on his parents and how they used to leash him to a tree so that he wouldn’t wander off. “That was their biggest mistake,” I say, but he doesn’t get the joke; he’s dancing in front of me, jabbing, ducking and feigning all around. On the couch, I nudge my foot forward, about to stand, but he’s too quick. He’s on top of me like Two Ton Tommy. He begins a kind of mock-humping. I’m pinned and can do nothing. Above me, the jagged crater of the smoke alarm has plastic edges like teeth. I’m being eaten, diminished by his whirlwind. He shoves my face into the crevice of the couch, then, suddenly standing, he tugs me up, forcing a flame in my shoulder where he hit me. He swings a wild fist and barely misses my chin. His forehead grows sweaty and his eyes glisten like a dog’s. He tries to hold onto the blanket, his penis bopping when it falls. “C’mer,” he says, chasing me naked. “Get over here, Jezus.” Reaching, he grabs like a blind man, until finally I call him an asshole pervert and beat it outside.

Going down the motel-style stairway, the metal steps ringing, I walk around the swimming pool and onto the sidewalk to my car. I need to go back for my sleeping bag. Instead I keep walking a few blocks to a store and buy a sixteen ounce can of beer. Back upstairs in the apartment, the lights are out. He’s in the bathroom and has the phone. In the spare room, I take off my jeans and roll them up for a pillow. I hear him talking, and I know it isn’t over, he’ll be back. Gulping the last sip of beer, I throw the empty into the corner.

The apartment is black and quiet when I wake. In the living room, switching on the overhead light, the brightness stings my eyes. On the kitchen counter is the bar of cheddar cheese, the bites staring at me.

No, it isn’t over. It’s early morning, just barely light. I’m in the sleeping bag now. He drags me in it, weaving me along the carpet, then he goes out. I hear him in the bathroom and smell the cigarettes. Then he’s in the living room; he’s back and forth: the kitchen, then turning on the TV loud, the bath tub running. He drags me around some more, though I’m not even fully awake yet. Later, I’m where he’s left me, three feet from the wall, which reminds me of my car and my impending departure. I hear the TV still on, and him in the tub. Then he’s back in, wearing only his underpants, the crotch bagging down. He pulls me again. There’s no resisting. I let him drag the bag right off me.

“Okay,” he says. “Donuts.”

An hour later, we’re in his car, making sudden stops, Caswell jerking the wheel this way and that, whipping around corners. He has on Hush Puppies without the laces and a pair of baggy Chinos. At the beach, he won’t stop. We drive down Wilshire. Traffic is heavy. Everyone is trying to move. He turns off onto a side street and drives farther.

“Shut-up,” he says, when I tell him I’m leaving soon as we get back. “You just got here.” “I’m going.”

“So what’s stopping you?”

“You.”

“Hey, I’m with you. Where do you want to go?”

Noon, and I still haven’t left. In the bathroom, his shaver goes on. I wait for him on the couch. I’ll get up in a minute, roll up my sleeping bag and say goodbye, though he’ll tell me to stick around, hang for another day or two. But I’ll slip outside, into the sunshine, to my car and the freeway and back home to Oakland at eighty miles per hour. Though I don’t know it at the time, I won’t see Caswell Levin again.

Not for several years, anyway. We’ll talk on the phone, and then one spring afternoon he’ll show up in Oakland out of the blue. Thereafter, he’ll be the one visiting me, every year or so, both of us approaching middle-age, seeing him worse than I ever knew him to be: talking non-stop and not listening to a word I say, still about his mother and father—Rita and Siggy.

On his most recent visit, we’ll stand in the foyer—me, living in an apartment somewhere, graybearded in the new century, neither of us married; Caswell will have never even held a job, parceling out his money, Bar Mitzvah money he’ll call it, built up over the years. Living not in an apartment anymore but traveling around on, of all things, buses, staying in different places, furnished rooms, a few months or six months, depending, then going to someplace else, and always returning to Oakland. In the foyer, I’ll tell him not to come back anymore, which will be a mean thing to say. I’ll turn away from him, because he’ll be asking too much, wanting to be put up for a day or a week. Wanting rides, wanting all my time. Through the locked glass door, he’ll ask to just let him in for one second, but I’ll keep going down the hallway, away from him.

But of course, sitting on his couch, I don’t know any of that yet—or maybe I do, sensing it inside me, just not the details. Through the bathroom door, his razor hums. He shaves two or three times a day. Tired of waiting, I hop up and call to him that it’s time. It gets quiet then. I hear him running a bath.

by Luke Tennis