Tears spill down Frankie’s cheeks as the grainy video plays in choppy spurts underneath the thin sheet of dust dressing his computer screen. A series of links has led him to YouTube and, specifically, the very special episode of Diff’rent Strokes where Arnold and his friend Dudley wander into the sights of a bicycle shop owner with a penchant for young boys and the well-oiled personality of a career seducer of the pubescent. Frankie’s gut lurches in and out to the rhythm of the laugh track—still roaring as Dudley zombies out of the man’s bathroom, shirtless and rubbing his head—and he puts a hand out in front of him, pleading with the video to stop or else he’s going to piss himself.
The credits finally roll, drawing the curtain on the old sitcom and forcing Frankie’s heartbeat back towards its regular rate of ticking and tocking. He rises from his chair and uses the wall to ease his exit from the room as his legs spasm from the last ghosts of laughter fizzing inside his body like a burned-up firework.
He walks into the kitchen and lights a cigarette. The show replays in his mind as fragments of pictures and dialogue. A stray chuckle darts up his throat and causes him to choke on the long drag he just pulled from his cigarette. Through the smoke and tears he vaguely remembers that the actor who played the pedophile also played the part of a repairman in old television spots for Maytag washers and dryers. Frankie smiles at this and tosses his spent butt into the sink. “Quite a range,” he quips to the empty kitchen. “Guy deserves an Emmy.”
#
Lloyd drives down the middle of the street grasping a limp, moist piece of paper. The address that had been carefully transcribed on the top of the page has been smudged into an almost-unrecognizable mess by his thick, yellowing perspiration. His tiny eyes look bloodshot and nervous.
A ball rolls into the street before him, followed by a pink-faced moppet of a girl sprinting after it. Lloyd slams on the brakes and has his window rolled down before the screeching tires can finish sending their echo through the tall oaks that line the sidewalk.
“Look where you’re going, you little bitch!” he bellows, his head poking out of the window, his smoldering ferret eyes glossing-over with anger. The girl abandons her ball and runs through a pricker bush and into her house.
Lloyd shakes his head, pressing the palms of his hands into his eyes and mumbling soft incantations. Stop stop stop they’ll send you back dummy stop stop stop. He throws open the glove box, downs two aspirin dry, and stares at his paper with simmering frustration.
#
Convenient and questionable conclusions—random, but more often the result of some cosmic calculation—distribute themselves freely among the farcical land of television studios and canned laughter, and the banal, less saccharine places we call reality. This is evident in the climax to this story, the culprit here being a house number worn faded from sunshine and rain to look more like a six than an eight. Frankie answers his front door, takes one look at Lloyd in his repairman uniform, and falls to his knees. His face turns the color of a Fuji apple. Laughter rumbles in the hollows of his bones.
Lloyd, his delicate self-esteem collapsing into billowing folds of melted wax in the shadow of the young man laughing at him, three years of progress at the hospital popping and sparking into wisps of ash, brings his heavy boot into Frankie’s mouth and sends him sliding across the linoleum floor.
Frankie keeps laughing, his funny bone having hijacked the rest of his body, pushing back the fear and panic struggling to take the helm. His mind spirals into a whirlwind, and as he chokes on blood and teeth, wet snorts sending sprays into Lloyd’s face, he thinks of Diff’rent Strokes, and how he’ll too be canceled like some old show, dropped from the airwaves summarily, remembered now and again as a relic of nostalgia and good humor.
—
©2009 Paul Edmonds
Paul Edmonds’ recent credits include fiction in Midnight Screaming, Macabre Cadaver, and The Monsters Next Door. He lives in Massachusetts.
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