Free Maverick Jetpants in the City of Quality by Bill Peters Page A

easily.
    â€œI just hope Necro’s not out there, you know, committing arson or anything,” I say.
    But how can you not lean back, twist your mustache and swirl your wine when you watch Lip Cheese’s face, sliding downward like an egg thrown against a window.
    â€œBut I just ate Dinosaur with him and Weapons of Mankind the other day,” he says.
    Spirit Bunny has now wandered into the restaurant, standing near our table and staring upward, mouth open, at the TVs showing a music video of what I guess is Annie Lennox. Spirit Bunny’s hair is dark and she’s much tanner up close—a rough, beat-up tan. Her version of eye contact, I guess, is staring three inches above us.
    â€œI feel so lost when I come in here!” Spirit Bunny says, apparently, to us.
    â€œPeople always tell me I look lost! People called me Rain Man in high school!” Lip Cheese says, laughing where he should be breathing, unable to leave his hair alone.
    â€œI know!” she says. “I was at the post office, where I’ll go downtown, and people will hand me things, like ‘Here, hold this,’ because they need me to hold on to their belongings for them—like cabbage, or CD players, or just bags of things.” She rubs her right eye, where capillaries have exploded into a small, red tree. “Earlier this afternoon, these guys who looked like lacrosse players pulled up to me in their van. They’re like: ‘You want to come to Irondequoit Bay?’ Because I’m thinking I can share my things if nobody comes back to pick them up.”
    She runs her left index finger and thumb over a long strand of hair. “But these guys, in this van, they dropped me off outside Midtown, and they’re like, ‘Just wait here.’ I gave one of them a back rub for the entire ride, and they never came back!”
    â€œI don’t think I’ve ever had a back rub,” Lip Cheese says.
    So I tune out at this point because Lip Cheese proceeds to tell any one of his stories about his brother: the ticket scalping; the single six-hour-long VCR tape his brother gave him that contained snippets from the green-line stir-fry of the scrambled Playboy channel. Because the only way Lip Cheese will do anything at all in life is through his brother’s stories.
    â€œAnd when my brother was stationed in Guam, he stopped cars at checkpoints, even if they had a headlight out, and he’d take their marijuana or, if they had it, their snacks!”
    Which he says way too excitedly. And after Lip Cheesepays for our food, Spirit Bunny says: “So, you gentlemen don’t by any chance have a car to drive a lady home in?”
    Lip Cheese’s face scatters. He looks at me like: Life or Death: “Sure we do!”
    Of course, the second I think: Oh, I’ll only have to make a ten-minute drive, this girl tells us she lives seven million light-years away: in Buffalo! I can’t even tell if the fog on my windows is from Lip Cheese’s sweat or from outside.
    The street where Spirit Bunny lives manages to hoist a loaf of frumped-up storefronts before crumbling into the rest of the city. Her apartment building has two floors, with a goopy coat of white paint on the cinder blocks. Cars are parked along the parking lot curb, engines idling, headlights on. A woman in curlers and a poofy overcoat yells something into one of their windows. We walk up a metal staircase to the second floor’s concrete balcony. Fluorescent lights flinch above the doors, and immediately Spirit Bunny takes off her day voice.
    â€œYou guys are troopers, man. Troopers!” she gravels, talking a little faster, a chain-smoking and used-needle tone. She works the key into her door, whose lock and doorknob are mounted on a metal panel. “You guys like to party?”
    A deadbolt thunks heavily. “They found a head in that river over there,” she says, pointing somewhere to where, apparently, there is a