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    The Summer of Apartment X
    The Summer of Apartment X
    The Summer of Apartment X
    Ebook118 pages3 hours

    The Summer of Apartment X

    By Lesley Choyce

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    Lesley Choyce's novella The Summer of Apartment X is a beach book for grownups who remember how they got that way. Fred Winger and his two buddies, Richard and Brian, intend to take the beach resort town by storm. It's the fateful summer between high school and university, early 1970s version. Equipped with two barely mobile cars and a seized-up MG motor, around which Richard wants to build an entire sports car, they plan to rent a suave apartment, get cool jobs, meet girls, and lose their virginity. Dream and reality diverge immediately.

    307 1/2 Hibiscus Street is an old triplex subdivided for summer tenants into a self-contained ghetto. The only window in Apartment X is in the kitchenette, and the entrance is through the outdoor shower used by the entire building. The friends find work: Brian cleans the parking lot and grill of a grease-encrusted burger joint, and Richard preens himself on his lofty — though brief — position as a lifeguard. Fred replaces the drunken usher at the Queen Theatre, where monsters slavering over shrieking blondes and Annette Funicello's bursting brassiere entertain necking teens and "pervs" too timid to patronize real porn flicks. Fred's feelings for his chameleon girlfriend lurch from love to lust to horror, depending on whether she's demurely selling movie tickets, acting out erotic fantasies about saving the world on the back seat of a school bus, or sharing the shower with Brian.

    The Summer of Apartment X lurks in everyone's past: the first foray beyond the view of elders, the first attempt at self-support, the shocking recognition that adulthood involves more than sand, sex, and cars. Lesley Choyce recreates this exhilarating terror in the Technicolor of a B-movie poster, nostalgia undercut at every turn by ebullient humour.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherGoose Lane Editions
    Release dateSep 2, 2014
    ISBN9780864928269
    The Summer of Apartment X
    Author

    Lesley Choyce

    Lesley Choyce is an award-winning author of more than 100 books of literary fiction, short stories, poetry, creative nonfiction, young adult novels and several books in the Orca Soundings line. His works have been shortlisted for the Stephen Leacock Medal for Humour, the White Pine Award and the Governor General’s Literary Award, among others. Lesley lives in Nova Scotia.

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      Book preview

      The Summer of Apartment X - Lesley Choyce

      Delightfully rambunctious...a comedic treat...Cannily deploys and turns on their heads all of the standard elements of the nostalgic coming of age tale...Nobody would want to live in Apartment X, but it’s a fun place to visit. ­— Pottersfield Portfolio

      Realistic characters with dialogue that rings true...a heartfelt story with which many readers will be able to identify. — Canadian Book Review Annual

      The Summer of Apartment X lurks in everyone’s past: the first foray beyond the view of elders, the first attempt at self-support, the shocking recognition that adulthood involves more than sand, sex, and cars. Lesley Choyce recreates this exhilarating terror in the Technicolor of a B-movie poster, nostalgia undercut at every turn by ebullient humour.

      Recent Adult Fiction by Lesley Choyce

      The Republic of Nothing (1994)

      Trap Door to Heaven (1996)

      Dance the Rocks Ashore (1997)

      World Enough (1998)

      Copyright © 1999, 2014 by Lesley Choyce.

      All rights reserved. No part of this work may be reproduced or used in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any retrieval system, without the prior written permission of the publisher. Any requests for photocopying of any part of this book should be directed in writing to the Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency.

      Edited by Banny Belyea.

      Cover illustration by Peter Manchester.

      Book design by Julie Scriver.

      eBook development: WildElement.ca

      Cataloguing date available from Library and Archives Canada.

      ISBN 9780864928269

      Goose Lane Editions acknowledges the generous support of the Canada Council for the Arts, the Government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund (CBF), and the Government of New Brunswick through the Department of Tourism, Heritage and Culture.

      Goose Lane Editions

      500 Beaverbrook Court, Suite 330

      Fredericton, New Brunswick

      CANADA E3B 5X4

      www.gooselane.com

      It’s all the young can do for the old, to shock them and keep them up to date.

      — George Bernard Shaw

      Life is an offensive, directed against the repetitious mechanism of the universe.

      — Alfred North Whitehead

      I am two fools, I know, for loving, and saying so.

      — John Donne

      Contents

      307½ Hibiscus

      All the World’s Monsters

      The Proper Equipment

      A Perfectly Fine Day

      The Legion of Male Virgins Betrayed

      The World of Nerds and Cockroaches;or a Dark Shaft Direct to Hell

      Melanie, Behind Glass

      Spider People from Venus and the Night of the Holy Fender

      Organized Crime Back in Town

      Falling in Love with a Chameleon

      The Plastic Fantastic Lover Meets Mr. Lonely

      Infrared

      307½ Hibiscus

      It was probably my fault that we got a late start at looking for a summer apartment, my fault that we settled into 307½ Hibiscus Avenue. But nobody cursed me for it outright. I didn’t know whether I would stay home for the summer and work at the sled factory or go off to university early to take a summer course in biology to get a head start on the other freshmen. Richard and Brian were already planning to work at the shore this summer, fifty miles away, and they waited for me to decide. You can make good money there. Enough to pay your part of the rent and still save some. You won’t have to live at home, Richard tried to persuade me. I wasn’t impressed.

      You can meet girls, stupid, he added. And you’ll have a place to take them at night.

      I had a vision of a modern third floor apartment overlooking the beach and the sea. Cruising the boardwalk and learning the ropes. I was different from Richard, however, in one respect. He would be looking to get laid. I would be looking to fall in love.

      It all adds up to the same thing, Richard would chant whenever I brought up our differences.

      So they wouldn’t let me into university for the summer ahead of my fall admission anyway. And the bottom dropped out of the sled industry for the first time in thirty years.

      307½ Hibiscus was advertised for a price we could afford, when split three ways, assuming that we could all manage to land jobs hauling dirty dishes. It was the first place we looked at. We simply drove down the day we were ready to move in for the summer. I followed Brian’s 1961 Chevy Biscayne in my disintegrating Volkswagen. Richard went down with Brian, his only claim to automotive hardware being a rust-seized engine from an MGB that he carried along in Brian’s trunk. Richard wouldn’t settle for anything less than an MG. Someone had given him the busted engine, and he hoped to rebuild it in his room over the summer while trying to put his hands on other used MG parts — fenders, trans-axle, windshield, etc. One day he would have enough fragments to recreate the original. For next to nothing. Wait and see.

      Brian’s Chev, like my VW, used massive quantities of oil and started with an asthmatic wheezing that made you think of old men dying. We bought our oil in bulk from garages where mechanics drained it from family cars, let it settle for a week, then sold us the cleaner stuff at the top. Odds were about fifty-fifty that our cars would start at any given moment. With two vehicles, we figured we would never be totally at a loss for transportation.

      Brian was the last of the not-so-bright nice guys, but he required very little for his existence. Richard and I were glad to have him around, believing he would be easy to get along with and wouldn’t want to take up much space. His mother and father were folding up the family anyway and dividing their worldly goods, so Brian was on his own, and this move for him was not necessarily temporary.

      Hibiscus was just off Dahlia, all the streets being named for flowers that could not survive the year here without being taken in for the winter. 307½ came up quickly among the packed-in row of three-storey wood frame summer houses built in the 1920s as three family units. They were now parcelled up into tiny apartments, so that each placid-looking tenement was a veritable ghetto, complete unto itself. They were the kind of houses that my father, the carpenter, would have said were thrown up, held together with spit and string, sometimes less. Apparently they went up before building codes. Landlords now got by through intricate manoeuvrings with the authorities and special classifications that allowed the city to ignore the usual rules. The rooms were not considered occupied for residential purposes if they were rented to tourists on a weekly basis. This meant that leases were drawn up so that you rented by the week, and you were required to be absent from your apartment for at least three hours on a Sunday afternoon before moving back in as if you were a new tenant on Sunday evening. Out of generosity, you were allowed to leave your things in the apartment, just in case you wanted to come back.

      Brian passed right by 307½. He had only first and third gear. No second, no reverse. So he had to circle around the block again while I squeezed in between two ice cream vendors. When Brian came around for a second sweep, he aimed for a slot, the only one available for possibly two miles. Since he was incapable of backing in, he came at it head-on with a radical last-second wrench of the steering wheel that allowed him to minimally graze the front right fender of a pristine Buick while nipping up to brutalize the licence plate of an unsuspect­ing station wagon. But he had, as they were saying these days in California, found his space. At that, his front left tire was rakishly propped on the curb, making the car look like a dog about to take a pee. He belatedly discovered that he had parked in front of the only fire hydrant on the block while effectively blocking two driveways.

      Undaunted, we went to check out 307½, assured that among us we had fifty-one years of experience in the ways of the world and were not about to be fooled by any overly shrewd landlord or lady this bustling shore town had to offer. When no one answered the front door, we walked into a dimly lit hallway that smelled of musk incense and stopped-up toilets. I knocked on the door labelled A. It was a Sunday morning, not past ten o’clock. We had decided that I should be the one to do the talking. Brian had trouble expressing himself in general, and while Richard could be eloquent, he lacked a certain degree of polite objectivity that often made him appear to be a professional and well-practised asshole, which he sometimes was.

      A tall, long-haired, dark-skinned and slightly hung over young woman answered the door. She was wearing a Pepsi-Cola towel. All three of us realized at once that we had come to the right town to live out the summer and the final days of our adolescence in good company.

      Hello. Is the landlord in? I came to inquire about the apartment, I said. Richard cringed at the word inquire.

      The woman adjusted her towel to let us know

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