Buffalo Noir by Ed Park Brigid Hughes

Author:Ed Park, Brigid Hughes [Ed Park, Brigid Hughes]
Format: epub
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

Chicken Noodle’s Night Out

BY JOHN WRAY & BROOKE COSTELLO

Anchor Bar

In the faux-Gothic dining hall of my North Buffalo prep school hung a painting of a kid who’d died young. Nobody knew how he’d died, exactly, but his watery eyes and primly parted straw-colored hair didn’t speak too highly for his constitution. I always suspected he’d expired from an acute attack of privilege.

It was under this painting, at the end of lunch period on the first day of senior year, that Christian “Chicken Noodle” Potelesse told me the story of his own brush with mortality, in the form of two plus-size women, a stretch Buick LeSabre, and a man by the name of Rick James. Noodle had never talked to me before, not even to tell me to get out of his way; but on that morning—the morning after the Incident—he clutched at my sleeve like a Victorian urchin, pale and bruised and diminished, and held me there until he’d told his tale. It was plain to see that he’d gotten his ass kicked, but that wasn’t what gave me the willies: his eyes had a sunken, haunted look to them, as if the person heretofore known as “Christian Potelesse” were no longer in permanent residence. Here’s the story, as far as I can recollect it.

Chicken Noodle was sitting in the Anchor Bar, suffering through a date with a girl too smart for him by half, when the door to Main Street blew open and The Man Himself rolled in with his standard entourage: two girls on one arm and his wife on the other. He’d just been released from Folsom Prison (yes, that Folsom Prison), but you wouldn’t have known it from his Panavision grin. When he came through the door everyone in the place stood up and clapped. It made no difference that James and his brand-new wife, Anne Hijazi, had just done two years for kidnapping, rape, and aggravated assault; Buffalo has ever stayed true to its own.

The girls didn’t seem to mind either, as far as Chicken Noodle could tell. James had composed nearly three hundred songs during his time in jail; maybe he’d promised them a backing track or two. They were heavy and surly in a way that Noodle didn’t mind at all. His own date was an honest-to-goodness college girl from Medaille (he’d shown her his fake ID to prove he was going on twenty-two), but the James girls were about eighteen times more interesting. They looked as though they ate boys like Noodle for breakfast, raw and whole, with a chaser of lightbulbs and gin.

The house band was smoky and fierce—James came mostly for the music, though Noodle didn’t know that yet—and the girl from Medaille (whose name was allegedly Delia) was clapping along, which was slightly embarrassing. Noodle didn’t mind, though, or at least not too much, because it got the James posse’s attention. He actually thought he saw James wink at him, though he had to admit to me, later, that it seemed unlikely.

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