A CONFEDERACY OF PONCES

A Picaresque Odyssey

One hot day, when I was an eighteen-year-old bleach blonde deathrocker student at San Francisco State, the totally sub-par, craptastic vehicle I drove at the time  — a silver Plymouth Champ I inherited from my mother — broke down on the side of the road near the college. 

Since I had no cellphone, or anything useful whatsoever, I stood around stupidly next to the car, staring at the passing traffic.   

A car pulled up in front of me — an older beige Mercedes, covered with dust — and an entirely discombobulated flounder of a man got out to talk to me.  He was large, swollen and frowsy, with a mess of curly hair and  ill-fitting preppy clothes that stuck out at weird angles. He seemed to emanate clouds of psychic lint and sawdust like Pig Pen from Peanuts. 

“Do you need some assistance?”  He asked.  

Since I was in no position to question the origins or intentions of this odd male specimen, and he reminded me of Ignatius O’Reilly, the hapless protagonist of “Confederacy of Dunces,” (“My valve!”) and he seemed relatively safe, because he was driving a dirty beige Mercedes… I confessed I did need assistance. 

From the back pocket of his voluminous khaki pants he produced a misshapen wallet bursting with receipts, and tweezed out a somewhat bent and overthumbed calling card, which read:

Clayton Cubit Cartwright III

(that or thereabouts.) 

“My home is nearby!” He said, in a loud, jangling voice.  “You can use my AAA card and the phone there.”  

So I did something I had never done before, and got into this complete stranger’s car, because the sun was beating down on the side of the road and I wanted the episode to be over with.   Like his wallet, the Mercedes was also chock full of random paperwork and stray receipts.  

He drove me to what at some point in the seventies must have been a fairly posh condominium with lots of shag carpeting and spider plants and bean bag orgies.  

He opened the door, and shouted, “Mother!” 

The decor was the spiral rattan and ochre of a bygone era.  The mother, a misty, murmuring figure smoking in the kitchen at the back of the house, did not make more of an appearance, but must at some point had been someone’s flairing hostess of a wife.  The house, Clayton Cubit Cartwright III was keen to point out, was filled with giant, squacking and whistling cockatiels in large brass cages.

Clayton, he explained, had been consumed by a project that had become a passion.  A dentist of his acquaintance suspected that one of his longtime employees had been embezzling from him, so Clayton had made it his personal mission to pore over 45,000 pages of line items — every charge ever made by this poor elderly dental receptionist.  Clayton had found (he announced this with greatest triumph) that over a period of something like 11 years she had embezzled around $18,000.  

This seemed like an acceptable embezzlement amount to me, for an 11 year employee — the dentist might have given it to her as a retirement bonus (but then, that kind of thinking is what had gotten me fired from the 7-11).  Clayton, however, was crowing and preening  his feathers like one of the the nearby skreeling cockatiels, as if his tireless, thankless research had convicted the Zodiac killer.  He loathed this receptionist for her crimes against his dentist with a bloodthirsty zeal, and reveled while talking about “nailing” her. 

However errant this strange knight, he was true to his word; Clayton called AAA with his card on my behalf, and drove me back to my lamentable vehicle to await the tow truck.  I deduced that the Mercedes was Clayton’s cage, and the receipts littering the floor were his feathers. 

 It was then that I got handed off by one strange man and into the truck of another. 

This AAA tow truck guy was something else - a real Latino landshark of a variety I’d never met before.  He was a shiny, caramel brown Paul Newman with a thick Central American accent.  He was probably in his mid forties, but looked like he’d been carved by Italians - absolutely rippling musculature, which was clearly why he was wearing a white wifebeater shirt.  His wavy black hair was gelled into a kind of early Elvis coif.  With searing masculinity he easily threw hooks on my car and lifted it into a completely helpless towing position, exuding animal magnetism and a kind of primal rock star musk. 

“Sonny” was a beautiful man and he knew it — a real panther.  I could only imagine the percentage of women like me by the side of the road this guy had expertly banged like a stone cold playboy.  I found him kind of fascinating, and then I realized that we had been driving around for over an hour.   He kept finding excuses not to drop me off. 

“Take it eeeeasy,” he said, producing a large joint.  

We drove around in the tow truck in the late afternoon, passing the joint back and forth, staring through the windshield with the blue shadows just starting to cut into the day and the sky taking on an apricot hue. 

“Do ju find that marihuana….arouses ju sexually?” He finally asked. 

“Nah,”  I said. “Not particularly.” 

While I could appreciate him as a sexual commodity, I had no interest in him as a plaything — it wasn’t my style.  I did on some level appreciate that he was down with the idea of throwing me one.  He clearly considered such dalliances his specialty, and I thought it somewhat kind of him to offer.  I did finally put my foot down and made him drive me to my boyfriend’s house. 

I don’t know if he was sorry to see me leave, but he made one more effort at connection. 

“Ju could find me at night, and I will get you some white staff.”

“Some what?” 

“Ju know, white staff.”

“Oh…WHITE STUFF,” I said, finally figuring it out. 

“Yah. White staff.” 

“Thanks,” I said, putting his card in my bag. 

 I never saw either man ever again. 

CINTRA WILSON IS ACCEPTING OIL-PAINTING PORTRAIT COMMISSIONS.

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