Free The Baby Blue Rip-Off by Max Allan Collins Page A

high school days in the company of girls who were easier to get a kiss out of, and whose previous beaux were nonviolent sorts, who carried nary a pocketknife.
    But I never loved any of them like I loved Debbie. You never do, you know. You never love again as you do at thirteen, with so super-charged a combination of idealized adoration and puberty-stirred lust. Once your face clears up, the complexion of love changes too.
    I should’ve kept that in mind when Debbie Nelson née Lee called me up and wanted to come over.

13
    I gargled. Used some sweet-smelling concoction that was designed more to perfume bad breath than to cure sore throats or kill germs. But that was okay; perfumed breath was what I was after. Scent of peppermints and posies beats out that of belched beer any old day.
    I grinned at myself in the bathroom mirror. Frowned. My teeth couldn’t be
that
yellow. I brushed my teeth several times, grinned again: no improvement.
    I sniffed under my arms. Bad news! I whipped off the frayed, cut-off sweatshirt I was wearing, stuffed it in the clothes hamper, climbed out of my rib brace and abandoned it as if faith-healed, soaped my underarms, and sprayed them with Right Guard. I walked to the bedroom to look for a shirt that might be a shade more suave than the frayed relic I’d been wearing. Unfortunately, owning no suave shirts whatever, all I managed to come up with was a bland cream short-sleeve number, but it had a collar and was pressed, so that was something. I got into it and looked at myself in the full-length mirror behind the bedroom door. I didn’t look like Ronald Colman, but then, who does anymore?
    I tidied the trailer. Got all the beer cans picked up and thrown away. It occurred to me that I’d had a hell of a lot ofbeer this afternoon, and that maybe that accounted for my light-headedness.
    But in reality, I knew my feeling light-headed didn’t have a damn thing to do with beer. It had to do with Debbie Lee coming over. The light-headedness had started then: when Debbie Lee (I mean Nelson) called up and said she was coming over.
    I finished tidying the trailer, emptied ashtrays, vacuumed the front room carpet, straightened the books in my brick-and-board bookcase. Then I sat down on the couch. My living quarters and myself were all slicked up. Like a first date. My heart was pounding, adrenalin surging, and I felt like a damn fool.
    Which I was.
    Worse, I knew it. It’s one thing to be a damn fool and unaware, and quite another to be a damn fool, know it, and go idiotically along being one. For instance, I
knew
this house-cleaning and instant revamping of me and my life-style was a silly, half-assed thing to do. As if I still carried the torch for Debbie after all these years! Even if I did still care about her in some cobwebbed corner of my mind, I cared about a person who didn’t exist anymore, right? Yet here I was, sprucing myself up like I expected her to be just the same, a cute little blonde, with big blue eyes, in a fuzzy pink sweater. Hell! She was a housewife, with a kid eleven years old! She wasn’t the thirteen-year-old storybook princess. She was a housewife and a mother, and thirty just like I was.
    The doorbell.
    I answered it, prepared for the shock of what a decade or so might’ve done to Debbie Lee.
    Standing there, in the doorway, was a cute little blonde, with big blue eyes, in a fuzzy pink sweater.
    “Debbie,” I said.
    “Mal,” she said.
    Violins played in my mind; surf crashed against mental beaches.
    “Come in,” I said.
    “Thank you, Mal,” she said. She came in.
    I offered her a spot on the couch and she took it, crossing her short but shapely legs. She was the same. Or seemed to be at first glance anyway. Admittedly, the lighting in my trailer isn’t much better than your average bar and may have put her into a sort of soft focus. Yet there she was: just as cute. She’d never grown any taller, of course; still just under five-foot. She wasn’t dainty, though,