Wallbanger

A story on college friendship and bad life advice

Ladies like knowing your past. If a woman asks me over dinner or in bed, I’ll talk about my friend Walker and the summer we spent training in the rabbit-punches of romance. Stay clear of clinches in dark corners, he said. Never drop your guard. Walker warned I had a glass chin for love.

“Loosen up, Leftwich. You gotta learn to snap your punches.” Walker sat on my bed one night, critiquing my form as I endeavored to put my fist through the door.

“Bitch, bitch, bitch.” I grunted with each blow. Pounding my knuckles felt better than the steady ache I suffered inside. Carolyn Smathers did not love me after all. Her last words over the phone: “That’s really sweet, but I don’t think so.”

Along with the door workout, Walker encouraged deep howling. “Right out of the solar plexus. Get primal! Let those kinks out of your kundalini.”

I let out yowls that should have chipped the blue of the sky. I threw another roundhouse at the door.

“No, no, no,” Walker chided. “You skin your knuckles when you swing wild. Punch it! Punch it!”

An unloved man will stand before his bedroom door and pound his fists until something breaks — either wood or bone. I threw everything – arm, shoulder, back, heart — into the last blow. The splintered door hung crooked on its hinges. My hand swelled to twice its size. Walker drove me to the campus clinic where the doctor gave me a cast for the two broken fingers and sprained wrist.

“This boy, Walker, he hurt you very badly, didn’t he?” a woman named Diane once asked me.

Her eyes were green and her shoulders bare as we shared our histories over gin fizzes. Later she stroked the back of my right hand. Her questions seemed innocent enough, but I felt vaguely incriminated as I talked about my ex-best friend.

For the record, Walker Braxton Hodges IV stood last in a line of lawyers and politicians. “A man with no first name and a law firm for a signature,” he introduced himself. We split the rent on a house off campus that summer before our senior year. Walker never graduated -- he didn’t even pose for any of the yearbooks that collect dust in the back of my closet, but I keep a picture of him in my head.

The Walkman, a scarecrow with straw hair spiked out with gel and a gold hoop through his left earlobe. His chin was small but always angled out cocksure. His wardrobe consisted of black jackets from the Salvation Army, blue jeans with chewed-out knees, red high-top sneakers, skinny silk ties and a dozen pairs of sunglasses.

I desired to be as nonchalant, as existential, as cool. That June, I audited a fencing class. Swordsmanship would make me as dangerous as Walker. I brought home foils and masks so we could practice our repartee.

“En garde!”

The tip of his foil hissed in the air. Walker, of course, had studied saber under a Hungarian coach in prep school.

Zorro versus Captain Blood. Furiously, we swept through the living room, around the coffee table. Lunge to quarto, parry, riposte to sextet. Walker toyed with me, then whacked the crown of my head.

“Fight fair,” I complained. “Only the tip counts.”

“To the death, villain!” he sneered in a strange accent, probably learned from the Hungarian.

Walker jumped on the couch. I slashed at his feet, but he leapt over my deadly blade, and landed on top of me. Hilt to hilt for several straining seconds. I could smell chili and onions through the mask. I shoved him backwards.

His next charge chased me up the stairs. His flurry raised red welts across my arm, but he could not land his point on my chest. At the top of the landing, I had nowhere to go. I looked for a chandelier to leap to, ala Errol Flynn. I considered a sliding escape down the banister.

Walker lunged high and the tip caught my collarbone. His blade bent in an arc, then snapped. The broken metal snagged the shoulder of my sweatshirt, pinning me to the wall.

Walker peeled away his mask. Sweat pasted his blond hair to his temples. My roomie looked as if he were the one who had been run through. My stomach churned, and I half expected to find blood trickling down my chest when I looked.

“Only a flesh wound,” I said.

“I thought I’d killed you.”

“So did I for a second.”

We quit fencing in the house after that. Instead of the sword, I took up the sonnet, writing about my unrequited love for women I spied at supermarkets and stop lights.. When I showed Walker one of my poems, he countered with a limerick: “There once was a girl at A&P...”

I decided to drop the poetry bit, too.

---

“Did you really?” my future ex-wife asked.

Before we were married, Julie liked hearing about Walker and me in our salad days. “I can’t imagine you doing that.” She studied my face. Julie was a student of profile, convinced that the blows of the past left indelible marks. I never flinched under her scrutiny.

“Yes.” She touched my brow. “I can see that in you.”

But there were some things I never told her or any one. I’m not sure who would understand a story as wild as what happened at the Safari Room.

Walker often commiserated with me at that watering hole, frequented by student jocks hoping to graduate with beer guts and by blue-collar workers retired with veinburst noses. Walker called it the “So-Sorry Room.”

“Forget what’s her face. Forget true love.” Walker poured me a glass from a pitcher of draft. “All you need is to get laid.”

I shook my head, and sipped my beer. I sensed a presence looming over us. A hefty woman swayed by our booth, then plunked her ample Levis down, squeezing me to the wall.

“Want to arm wrestle?” she asked. Her name was Katy, and we saw her regularly at the bar, challenging lesser men to manual combat. A woman with biceps bigger than mine has always scared the bejesus out of me, and that evening, Katy seemed drunker and more intimidating than usual.

I raised my injured hand in its plaster cast, shook my head sadly.

“How about you, hon?” Katy turned a glassy-eyed attention to Walker.

He grinned. “What do I win if I beat you?”

“We’ll see, won’t we?” She said coyly.

I was referee. Their hands locked in mid-air, and I signaled the battle to begin. I thought Walker could take her, but after a few seconds, the tendons popped out in Walker’s neck and his face reddened. Maybe he was toying with her, I thought, just as his arm buckled then collapsed in a sticky puddle of beer.

“I win! I win!” Katy squealed.

I raised my cast to the side of my face — a white blinder to hide my humiliation. Men all along the bar had been watching. Shaking their heads, they turned their attention back to the TV.

Walker routinely cheated in Monopoly and dealt off the bottom of the deck in five-card stud. He was such a bad sport that I had given up any friendly competition with him. I couldn’t believe how well he was taking his loss.

“Rematch later?” Walker rubbed his whipped muscles.

“Any time you want, sport,” Katy gloated.

After she excused herself to got to the “little girls’ room,” Walker leaned over and whispered. “This ain’t over ‘til we hear the fat lady sing.”

Katy returned with another pitcher of beer and pressed me to the wall once again. She was a big girl, but I kept noticing how blue her eyes were, the most delicate shade I’ve ever seen in a woman. Perhaps it was the beer going to my head, but the rub of her thigh against mine evolved from claustrophobic to desirable.

Two pitcher later at 2 a.m., we closed down the place and staggered out into the dark. “The night is still young,” Walker proclaimed. “No more than middle-aged,” I agreed. “What are we waiting for?” Katy giggled. Arm in arm in arm, we lurched down the block to the apartments where Katy lived, up a rickety flight of stairs to the second floor.

She didn’t bother with the lights. In the door and out of our clothes, the three of us wallowed on a queen-sized mattress, a tangle of limbs, mouths and rolls of sweet fat. She stroked my head of brown hair, his of blonde, as we lapped at her breasts. But the heavy plaster on my hand proved awkward in this arrangement. Walker elbowed me out of the proceedings. I rolled off her side and off the side of the bed.

Lying drunk of the floor, I listened to the commotion in the dark. I lifted my mending hand and touched a naked foot. My fingertips stroked the warm sole, but I was unsure whose skin I tickled. No one laughed.

The carpet smelled clean so I stayed there the night. I dreamed Walker was leading me through a slaughterhouse. Pink carcasses hung from the rafters, and soon I lost sight of my friend amid the sides of flesh.

The next morning, our deed sprawled under the knotted sheets. Her long brown hair swept over her broad shoulders. How soft she looked in the morning light. I wanted to touch her to see if she was still alive. Walker was already sliding out from under the covers. We tiptoed around the room, gathering our clothes while Katy gently snored.

Out on the street, Walker lost it. He beat his forehead against a telephone pole, doubled over and slapped his hands against the sidewalk. He couldn’t stop laughing. “Can you believe it? You, me, and the fat lady!”

My back was stiff from sleeping on the floor, my head throbbed with a hangover, and my skin itched under my cast, but I had to smile. Though technically I was still a virgin, it was as far as I’d ever been or have since with a woman blessed with biceps and remarkable blue eyes.

---

“Whatever happened to your friend?” A blonde named Sandy wanted to know. A weekend of steady drizzle at a rented beach house, and she was starting to look bored. I couldn’t rub oil on her shoulders, so I laid it on thick about Walker. How he left makes another good story women always want to hear.

Toward the end of the summer, Walker and I were in the kitchen one midnight. I was telling him about a visitor that afternoon.

“What did this guy want?” Walker asked. He had gotten in late, red-eyed and wired, suffering from the mulches. For his late supper, he devoured potato chips, french onion dip, peanut butter and Oleos over the kitchen sink.

“He didn’t really say,” I said. “Sounded like he was looking for a buy.”

“So what did he look like?”

Long-haired with a Fu Manchu, blue jeans, black Harley t-shirt and a vest the color of a gravy stain, the stranger looked the same as any low-life Walker dealt with in the parking lot of the Safari Room. But this was the first to coming knocking at our front door.

“Probably a narc.” Walker stuffed his mouth with chips.

“How can you tell?”

“You saw a lump in his jeans, right? A narc keeps a Beretta snuck down in his crotch.”

I remembered the narc had kept his hands in his pockets as we talked through the screen door. I replayed the conversation in my mind, going over the transcript the DA would read in court if the undercover agent had been wired. Did I mention anything illegal: MDA, Valium, Percodans, Quaaludes or any of the other pharmaceuticals stashed in the freezer between the ice cube trays and the Rocky Road? Walker once told me all you needed to be a dealer was a refrigerator and an ability to count cash.

“Leftwich, I think you saved my life.” Walker grinned teeth black with Oleos.

Two weeks later when classes started, he was gone, leaving me with an empty refrigerator, the busted door to replace and none of his share of back rent.

---

I’ve heard all sorts of rumors about Walker since.

Everyone who’s met him seems to have a story. Walker was spotted in Mexico, running a heroin lab. He was spied on a Montreal street corner, his body for sale. He was playing bass in an L.A. punk band, Lon Chaney and the Hunchbacks.

My life hasn’t been nearly as interesting. Graduation. Jobs. Marriage. Julie made a thin bride, but I divorced her after she became an anorexic wraith stalking me through the few rooms of our first apartment. I’ve had my share of wall banging and howling and waking the neighbors. I know now if I keep my hands in my pockets, gripping loose change and keys until my fingers hurt, the rage will walk away.

As I outgrew the post-adolescence of my twenties, the stories I heard and told about Walker grew more mythic. One New Year’s Eve, he was mixing martinis in a Manhattan penthouse when a fire broke out dozens of floors below. In the confusion of revelers fleeing down smoky staircases and fire escapes, Walker was last seen headed toward Port Authority with two bottles of Tanqueray tucked under his arm.

His family filed a missing persons report, but I never heard that he turned up again. In seven years, he would be legally dead or he would have made good another escape.

At least I thought so -- until the knock at my front door.

There comes an hour at the end of the day that made you nostalgic, the way the sun slants through bare trees, the golden haze you walk into that looks warm, but always a cold breeze blows through it. I was caught in such a light in my living room when I saw a shadowy figure at the door, a hand held to side of the face to peer through the screen.

“Leftwich? You at home?”

I shook my head in the drowsy light I thought was playing tricks on me. “Walker, is that really you?”

Walker opened the door and stepped into my life again. “Things sure do change.” His voice had the same jaunty tone, but the chin that had seemed perpetually cocked had lost its angle, and burrowed into his wrinkled shirt collar. His hair was starting to thin on top.

“How about a cold one?” I offered like old times, like only a day had passed since I’d last seen him instead of a decade.

Walker grimaced. “How about some water?”

He sat down then struggled forward on the second-hand sofa that always threatened to swallow my guests whole. Between his knees, he set a metallic briefcase, its shiny surface dinged as if by bouncing bullets.

Clearing his throat, he shook out a cigarette from the pack in his shirt pocket. I brought his glass of water and an ashtray. Walker tapped the cigarette on his knee for a full five minutes before he lit up.

Myself, I had quit a few years back, cold turkey, but now I craved one badly.

I couldn’t help but be curious about Walker and what he’d been up to. The resume was spotted, he said: insurance salesman, used cars, carpets on commission, then time shares on the telephone. Sales and marketing consultant was his latest title.

“Been a tough year. You might have noticed I’m not exactly the picture of health.” He pinched his wan cheek. “Got hepatitis from a meatball sub a Greek sold me. Just getting back a human flesh tone now, knock on wood.”

And he did just that – leaned over my wobbly coffee table and rapped the dull finish with his knuckles, a knock that echoed in the darkening room.

“But I’m a businessman.” He balanced the aluminum case on his knees. “You’re my oldest friend, and the last person I ought to be asking this, but I want you to keep an open mind on this. We’re talking real money here.”

I was mentally flipping through my checkbook. Bills had erased last week’s pitiful pay stub, but I saw my hand rounding out big zeroes. After ten years, Walker comes waltzing back in the front door. How could I resist the invitation to dance?

But I tried. “I don’t want to get into anything shady, Walker.”

“Shady? Shady? We’re talking absolutely clean. This stuff is guaranteed.” He drummed the metal sides of his briefcase.

No telling what he was carting into my house: bags of finely cut white powder, thick stacks of money, probably a snub-nosed automatic.

“You still owe me from the last time I saved your ass,” I reminded him. “Remember the narc?”

“Narc?” Walker popped open the locks on top of the case.

“The undercover agent who came to the house?”

Walker looked dumbfounded, then he slowly smiled. “Oh yeah, I’d forgotten all about that. He was just a guy looking to collect some money I owed on a ball game. You thought he was a narc.”

“You said so.”

“I was just a smalltime dealer. I never got that big.”

Walker opened the case and handed me a sales brochure. Dozens of soap samples lined the interior: a carpet cleaner, a car wax compound, industrial strength spot remover, sidewalk cleaner, rust eradicator. Anything to do with the removal of stains, spills, spots no matter how old, Walker’s products were guaranteed to clean or your money back.

“Say you take a few of these.” He stacked samples on my coffee table. “Show ‘em around the office. Tell the neighbors. Everybody needs something cleaned up, some troublesome spot taken care of.”

“You got the wrong guy,” I said. “I wouldn’t know how to live too clean.”

“Hey, it doesn’t look too bad around here,” Walker lied as he glanced around my reduced circumstances.

“Tell that to my girlfriend.”

Walker looked defeated. Restacking the samples inside his case, he closed the metal lid and snapped the locks shut with his thumbs. “The ladies always did like you.”

With a smoky sigh, he snuffed out the cigarette in the ashtray, glanced at his watch. “Well, hey, this has been fun, but I’ve got some miles to make.”

He waved away the brochure I tried to give back. “Keep it. There’s a toll-free number. Here, have some complimentary bath salts.” He tossed the package on the coffee table.

“I can’t help you,” I said. “Sorry.”

“Soap,” he said. “Just think about it.”

At the door, he shifted his briefcase from one fist to the other, then shook my hand. “Good to see you again, Leftwich. We really ought to keep in touch.”

That was the last I saw of Walker Braxton Hodges IV. Standing on the sidewalk before my house, he put on his sunglasses, then tipped them up on his forehead like a visor, uncertain if there was enough glare to matter any more. Hoisting his case of soap, he headed down the street for yet another door, hoping for a sale before the end of the day.

I picked up the bath salts on the table. They would make a good gift for Michelle when I drove over to her apartment later that night. But I wasn’t sure how good an ending Walker had made for my story until I finished telling it in bed.

“Poor guy.” Michelle propped her head up on an elbow, the satin sheet sliding off her white shoulder. “I feel sorry for him.”

“Yeah, he’s down on his luck.” I sat on the edge of the bed, rubbing the soles of my feet against Michelle’s wonderful shag carpet. “I should have done something for him,” I ventured.

She reached over and ran one of her perfect fingernails down my spine. “Now, don’t go feeling so bad. Sounds like you were a better friend to him than he was to you.”

I put on the bathrobe I kept at Michelle’s, cinching the silk belt tight.

“Great legs,” she said.

“It’s my great training.” Grinning, I threw her a feint with my left, a jab with my right.

“Hurry back, champ,” she said.

I danced out the door and down the hall like the world heavyweight champ headed for the spotlighted ring. I jabbed after the long shadows that played on the walls to the bathroom. I was forever grateful to Walker for his instruction: keep moving, don’t drop your guard, never pull a punch. My blows brushed the walls soft as kisses.