Executioner's Song, The - Norman Mailer [9]
Looking around, Gary decided to get out of his polyesters and buy some Levi's. He borrowed a few more bucks from Vern, and Brenda took him to a shopping mall.
He told her that he had never been to anything like this before. It was mind-stopping. He couldn't keep his eyes off the girls. Right in the middle of goggling at them, Gary walked into the ledge of a fountain. If Brenda hadn't grabbed his sleeve, he'd have been in. "You certainly haven't lost your eye," she told him. He had only been gawking at the most beautiful girls. He was nearly all wet, but he had very good taste.
In the Levi's department at Penney's, Gary just stood there. After a while, he said, "Hey, I don't know how to go about this. Are you supposed to take the pants off the shelf, or does somebody issue them to you?"
Brenda really felt sorry for him. "Find the ones you want," she said, "and tell the clerk. If you want to try them on, you can."
"Without paying for them?"
"Oh, yeah, you can try them on first," she said.
Gary's first working day in the shop was good. He was enthusiastic and Vern was not displeased. "Look," Gary said, "I don't know anything about this, but tell me and I'll catch on."
Vern started him on a bench jack, tearing down shoes. The jack was like a metal foot upside down, and Gary would put the shoe on, pry off the sole, take off the heel, remove the nails, pull out the stitching, and generally prepare the top for the new sole and heels. You had to watch not to rip the leather or make a mess for the next man.
Gary was slow, but he did it well. The first few days he had an excellent attitude, humble, pleasant, nice fellow. Vern was getting to like him.
The trouble was to keep him busy. Vern wasn't always able to be teaching. There were rush jobs to get out. The real difficulty was that Vern, and his assistant, Sterling Baker, were used to moving the work between them. It was easier to do it themselves than show a new man how to accomplish something. So Gary had to wait when he really wanted to move on to the next step. If he took a heel off, he wanted to put the new one on. Sometimes twenty minutes would go by before Vern could get back.
Gary would say, "I don't like this standing around and waiting. I feel like a dummy, you know."
The problem, as Vern saw it, was that Gary wanted perfection quickly. Wanted to be able to fix a pair of shoes like Vern could. It just wasn't going to come that way. Vern told him, "You can't learn this immediately."
Gary took it fine. "Well, I know that," he said, but his impatience didn't take long to come back.
Of course, Gary did get on well with Sterling Baker who was about twenty, and the nicest fellow. He didn't raise his voice, had nice looks, and didn't mind talking about shoes. The first couple of days he was there, Gary kept bringing the conversation back to footwear as if he was going to learn everything there was about it. The only time Gary had trouble concentrating was when pretty girls came into the store. "Look at that," he'd say. "I haven't seen anything like that for years."
The girls he liked best, he said, were around twenty. It occurred to Vern that Gary wasn't much older when he said goodbye to the world for thirteen years. He certainly was comfortable becoming friends with a kid like Sterling Baker.
Still, Gary's first date was set up by Vern and Ida with a divorced woman near his own age. Lu Ann Price. When she heard, Brenda said to Johnny, "This has got to be good."
Brenda didn't see Lu Ann as a feasible date for Gary. She was skinny, she had a few kids, and she was awful sure of herself. Her eyes had pink lids. That was a piss-poor combination.
All the same, she was a redhead. Maybe Gary would go for that.
The Damicos had decided Lu Ann was worth a try. There was nobody else they could think of right now, and Lu Ann,