Masquerade by Lowell Cauffiel

Author:Lowell Cauffiel
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Head of Zeus
Published: 2014-11-10T16:00:00+00:00

58

Compensation is the choice of an equal, but different, goal. For example, the 5-foot-4 teenager who can’t make the football team, so he becomes captain of the school debate team. Overcompensation, such as doing it to feel superior, is a symptom of neurosis.

—W. ALAN CANTY,

Henry Ford Community College lectures

A computer room supervisor named Ray Danford glanced at the calendar and decided to phone his old friend Alan Canty. No matter where their lives took them over the past thirty-five years, they always found a way to get in touch in late November, when their birthdays fell only five days apart. Al suggested they meet on a Saturday for lunch.

“Where?”

“How ‘bout Marcus? It’s still there, you know.”

“The Original” Marcus Hamburgers, Ray thought, one of the old hangouts from their late teens. That would be nostalgic. He wondered if the food was still the same.

Not only was the diner dishing up the same small burgers when they met two weeks later, the place looked as though it hadn’t been redecorated since 1949. They sat on stools at the counter and ordered up a bunch.

“The waitress even looks the same,” Al said.

“She may be the same one,” Ray joked.

The two friends had covered a lot of life’s territory since the summer of ’49, when they met. They could have spent the whole lunch reminiscing, but Al’s mind was on current affairs.

“By the way, Ray, I’ve met this girl named Dawn,” he began. “Yeah, a prostitute. She’s from Harper Woods, in fact, but I found her in the Cass Corridor living in an apartment with her boyfriend.”

Al offered up a few more sketchy details of the relationship. He saw this girl frequently. Dawn and her boyfriend were drug addicts. He said he’d worked out a pretty sophisticated schedule to enable the escapade. He’d been seeing her a year.

As the story unfolded, Ray felt as though the oxygen was being sucked from his chest. He sometimes got those attacks. A doctor once told him it was hyperventilation. Finally he had to interrupt.

“Uh-oh, Al,” he said. “I’ve lost my breath.”

When Al saw the frightened look on Ray’s face he started laughing. Soon he was cackling like hell, while Ray struggled to put the brakes on the panic attack. Seeing Al’s reaction helped him pull himself back together.

“What’s so goddamn funny about me losing my breath?” Ray asked.

“Nothing,” he said. “Nothing.”

Al Canty always did have an odd sense of humor, Ray thought. But his laughter had a manic ring to it, as though from someone under heavy stress. Then Al jumped back into his story.

“Ray,” he continued, “they think I’m Al Miller, Dr. Al Miller.”

Al grinned widely. It was an inside joke. Ray knew Al Miller as the race driver Al Canty used to cheer on at the old track at Schoenherr and Eight Mile Road. Miller and his black stocker won most of the races they saw in their teens on the quarter-mile oval. Back then it was billed as the fastest dirt track in the country.

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