Beach Reads: Out of His League

By Gerry Coleman |  Illustration by Darcy Kelly-Laviolette

“Love is a zero-sum game. Pretty much.”
– Billy Olsen

When Billy Olsen first saw her, he behaved oddly, like a Cubist painting tumbling down a staircase. 

It was Tuesday evening and it was The Parrot on Ninety-First Street off Fifth. Its sole décor statement was a stuffed parrot in a cage hanging in cigarette smoke from the ceiling. This was not the place to take a date nor find a snug corner to brood in—too much light, too loud, substandard bar food, and flat pitchers of beer. It was a hangout to waste a few hours and punch in another day toward the weekend. 

People hung out with friends, some pushed tables together. Modern 60s-70s folksy pop music was on the juke box. Simon and Garfunkel, Dylan, The Doors. Weekday nights were about nothing—talk, listen to the music, leave early, get up for school or work in the morning.

He looked at her through a three-ringed pretzel as she sat with her girlfriends at a table on the other end of the room. She was pretty and on the quiet side. She wore a red bandito-looking serape fringed at the ends that she fiddled with. Her chestnut brown eyes were highlighted by coral shadows of teal and cobalt blue under black penciled eyebrows. She was perfect. Maybe a little too. A cloud lid hung overhead the Mid-Atlantic states like a beaten tin ceiling: no stars, no snow, no wind. The clouds hovered for three days or moved from west to east in pace with the spinning planet, as if the earth were preparing for the monster Blizzard of 1967 that hit Brooklyn early Tuesday afternoon. It raged outside. They were inside.  

Outside, the neighborhood was losing a bout of gentrification to pseudo-sophisticated eateries and woody pubs operating along the avenues with gas fireplaces named after romantic, mystical things or places—The Salmon of Truth, The Silver Apple of The Moon, Where The Water Lilies Grow. The old beer-and-ball gin mills on the side streets, known by family names like Kelly’s and Mueller’s, were being sold off by grandchildren and banks in receivership to real estate companies. The longstanding family-run Italiano joints—offering great food for a couple of bucks and authentic, poorly painted murals of villages under mountain cliffs on the lapping Mediterranean—were likewise being replaced by expensive Northern Italian affairs with valet parking, frozen butter patties in cardboard squares, and tiny porcelain spoons for the Parmigiano in white cups with lids. The Villa Bellini had a dwarf dressed like a gentleman on a gin bottle to greet customers at the door. The Parrot stuck to the working class, backstreet tradition—for the upwardly mobile young singles and college crowd. 

Billy went to The Parrot’s only window to cover a better eyeful of the girl.

The sill was a death destination for leafy, formerly flying insects to pile up prior to the weekly sweep-up. He held the blinds back with his head and turned red next to the Rheingold Extra Dry sign. After staring at her too long, he made a porthole with the heel of his palm in the condensation and squinted through the aperture into the unnatural neon redness. Billy looked through a life-sized reflection of his eye, which appeared outside in the blizzard, and imagined pigeons puffed along the cliff ledges of the apartments above the avenue, as snow curled around and into their hidden crevices and rims. The headlights of a black sedan doing 8 mph down the middle of the street made the snow whiter, fall thicker, more severely angled in front of it. Its ice-thickened windshield wipers thumped to the ghost-wagon jangle of snow chains long after the car disappeared into the storm.  

His friends, Eddie and Kevin, presented their glasses like nestlings when he brought back the second pitcher from the bar. Billy’s mind was not his own.

He considered the salt pieces on the pretzel while looking at the girl again. Janis Joplin was complaining about something in the background—Awah Awah Awah—while his friends discussed how the Yankees sucked. Each salt crystal was a tiny, white marbled geometric fragment that glowed dully from inside when angled in the artificial light. He wondered how it was done—getting the salt on the pretzel distributed evenly across the circumference of the rings. It was as though little workers attached each crystal separately. Intertwined, salted infinity loops tied in a bow.  He conceded the Yanks were not good. 

Kevin poured salt into the pitcher to give the impression of carbonation. Outside the volume and intensity of snow and gale had flattened the high features of the earth and houses over Dyker Heights, Bensonhurst, and Canarsie into Coney Island. The pulsebeat of the Belt Parkway along the curve of the shoreline clotted to a near halt.  

The girl and her friends came back every Tuesday night, always sitting at the same seats at the same table. She listened patiently, attending to her girlfriends—her smile fixed during humorous stories or frowning throughout if sad. When she spoke, her comments were introduced by disclaimers and facial modifiers she titled into: 

“I don’t know, perhaps….” 

“I guess, I think….” 

Billy found that sweet. She had an extra tooth in front of her incisors that picked up smudges of bright red or pink lipstick. She felt out of place. Perhaps she was out of place. Sometimes she would rustle for a moment, then reconnect with her friends. But the quality that leaped out, that was beyond interpretation—she was in a fashion universe of her own. One week it was a roaring twenties flapper dress with a long stole around her shoulders and a pulled down Gatsby hat on her head; the next she would arrive in a bright, curtainy Indian sari. Diaphanous like see-through clouds. The Parrot was filled with people in jeans and t-shirts or sweaters, while she tried out her imitation Tang Dynasty retro with flowing dragon sleeves for the first cool, breezy Wednesday night of autumn.

She was out of his league.    

It was important to be in his league. Shoot too high, he was looking for trouble down the road. Go low, he already lost. He was more comfortable when his dates and he were comfortable, in the same league. He had dates with girls with acne, for example, who applied foundation make-ups that would not necessarily match their natural facial coloration. By the time they were back at the girl’s door at end of the evening, her face would be cracked like the desert sands. But, suppose, just before he kissed her, the girl nudged forward a little teddy bear tongue from between her lips, ever so slightly. What pimples? Suppose she lifted her shoulder tips and tilted her face to await Billy’s first embrace. He was glad to accommodate to the inconvenience of the blemishes and the flaking make-up if the girl was that nice. Being in his league was a series of compromises and offsetting compensations, but he was hardly perfect. The girls on the receiving end did the same assets-to-liabilities assessments. His hair was thinning at twenty-one. He frequently suffered cognitive fogginess and was prone to dark maroon to childishly impish mood swings.

One Tuesday night, while Eddie explained how his Army Reserve meeting went, Billy checked her out through a pretzel ring to see what she was wearing, when she appeared in the middle of a loop looking at him. He made “Hi” with his lips. She made 

“Hi” back. He smiled. She looked away. When he least expected it, he was in front of her. She was alone at her table. Perhaps that was why he got up.

“Hi. Sorry for spying at you through the pretzel. Your outfit is very nice. What is it, a poncho?”  

“I guess it’s a poncho. Or a wrap, perhaps.”

“Sorry, I’m Billy Olsen.” He offered his hand.

Her left hand offered from under the wrap. “Hello Billy Olsen.” She was Gabriella.  

They talked about ponchos and wraps and sun colors, things Billy knew nothing about. When her girlfriends came back, he returned to his table. Before he left for the night, he looked for her through a pretzel to say “Bye,” but she was gone. 

Next Wednesday, taking the great circle route to the bar with noticeable nonchalance by her table, he said, “Hey, Gabriella. Nice cape, I think?”

“A cape. Maybe a blanket.”  

“I believe it’s a cape.”  

“Could be.”     

It was a blanket, Lakota in design. A star quilt with reds, yellows, oranges clipped with a clasp to hold it together with her head in the middle.

Taking Bill’s lead, the guys carried their chairs to encamp at the girls’ table in a coordinated, peaceful occupation. They mostly had girlfriends, but it was not that kind of move. The Parrot was not that kind of place. The Parrot wasn’t particularly any kind of place. Random conversation sparked—people knew other people who knew someone else. This and that. Billy kept an eye on Gabriella, even though she was out of his league, even though he didn’t expect a promotion any time soon. Kevin lit a joint. Teddy and Sal were behind the bar. They were cool. Kev was cool. He took a toke and backhanded it waist high under the table to the girl to his left. The joint passed cupped by giver to receiver to preserve the flame around the table. It was accepted to gift to the next, some declined—no offense—passing it on by the wettened tip. Others made it glow red in the grottoes of their palms. Peace be with you. When it came to Billy he took a draw, hoping not to fall into a coughing fit, which he did. Gabriella’s left hand came from under her Lakota blanket to rescue it into a lingering pull passed her brilliant red lips and extra teeth into her lungs which she held. Kevin drove some of them home in his father’s 1960 Studebaker Lark. Billy Olsen and Gabriella were piled in the backseat with a girlfriend in between. He tried to make contact, but Gabriella was happy enough to be the center of his attention from a safe distance. John Lennon and The Plastic Ono Band joined them on Fourth Avenue jacked loud by Kevin, who swayed with the wheel and they all sang and weaved together like the moon, the sun, and the stars along Marine Avenue onto Ninety-Seventh Street. The Verrazzano Bridge’s red warning lights blinked in the sea fog leading cars and trucks over the black waters of The Narrows in and out of The City and into the dark toward America.  

Billy Olsen looked into Gabriella’s face from the vantage of her girlfriend’s lap, who continued to shine on and on and on while he bombarded Gabriella with battalions of photons emanating from his eyes, which he was unaware did not work that way, but so it felt to him, and so it felt to her. His eyes were bland blue, like the Brooklyn night sky above the streetlights.

He leaned through Gabriella’s girlfriend, who parted to allow them to be next to each other. “Tell me a story about you,” he whispered. Billy Olsen had waited long enough. “You could make it up and I promise to believe you.”

“I don’t have a story about me. At least I can’t think of one,” she said as if she had been asked the question many times before.

“I can’t think of a story either,” he said.

Which was a lie, so he told her how last year he went to Newark to visit Stephen Crane’s grave. His arm was as close as he dared on the back of the seat over her shoulder. He told her how the rain whipped into his face. How he knew Crane’s poems by heart. They were short and there weren’t many, and he recited several standing over what was left of Crane under the ground. How one was about leaping to his death into the limitless universe in the white arms of his love, if the fall was a long, long way. Billy Olsen was thinking of her, was what he was trying to project. 

“Just me and Crane. The rain turned to snow crusting my head and shoulders and Crane’s grave white,” he said.  

Her sketched eyeline pushed mysteriously into her forehead and her hair sparkled down his arm like a living thing in the blur of the passing buildings, the bridge, and the empty streets, in the heavy musk of the car, and the promise of everlasting life. He wanted to live reflected in her brown eyes, bury his face in the unwinding curls and starling tints of black and copper of her hair. 

Billy winced with joy as they looked out the window as Brooklyn flew by. Four cauldrons of sewer gas rose miasmically at each intersection. 

Kevin pulled up to an apartment building, turned to the backseat, his arm incidentally dropping over the shoulder of the girl in the front seat. “Here we are. Out you go.” 

And out they were on the sidewalk. Billy had a long hike home. He had a brief chat with Gabriella, while her girlfriend fled shivering into their apartment building.

“Maybe see you next week?” he asked.

She suggested come up stairs with her eyes without realizing. When they were alone in the elevator, there was no worrying about what would happen. They were calm, very calm. 

The apartment door was ajar when they got to her floor. Music came from her girlfriend’s room. They were alone on the sofa. Her hair hung down around her face. He touched the clasp of her Lakota blanket, which opened to reveal a red blouse. Very nice. Her right arm was willowy and handless, like the bud of an un-blossomed flower. Gabriella touched Billy’s cheek. 

She had beautiful eyes.                                      

About the Author

Gerry Coleman was born and raised in Brooklyn, New York. He taught writing for almost forty years at Union County College in Cranford, New Jersey. Since retiring to Oldsmar, Florida seven years ago, he helps organize writing workshops at WordSmitten Media in St. Petersburg and is working on a collection of short fiction set in Vietnam era Brooklyn.