When I saw the camera, I knew it was him, the guy—the Polaroid Man that Mrs. Beukes was hiding from. The slick-looking weasel in his white Cadillac convertible, with its red top and red seats. He color-coded like a motherfucker.
I knew that whatever Mrs. Beukes believed about this guy had no basis in fact, of course, that it was a misfire from an engine already choked up and giving out. Yet something she’d said stuck with me: Don’t let him take a picture of you. When I put it all together—when I realized the Polaroid Man was not a senile fantasy but a real dude, standing right in front of me—my back and arms prickled with chill.
“Uh . . . go ahead, mister. I’m listening.”
“Here,” he said. “Take this twenty in and get ’em to light up this pump. My Caddy is thirsty, but I’ll tell you what, kiddo. If there’s any change, it’s all yours. Buy yourself a diet book.”
I didn’t even blush. It was a nasty swipe, but in my distracted state it barely grazed my consciousness.
On second glance I saw that it wasn’t a Polaroid. Not exactly. I knew the devices pretty well—I had taken one apart once—and recognized that this was subtly different. It was, for starters, black with a red face, so it matched the car and the clothes. But also it was just . . . different. Sleeker. It sat on the trunk, within hand’s reach of Mr. Slick, and it was turned slightly away from me, so I couldn’t see the brand name. A Konica? I wondered. What struck me most, right away, was that a Polaroid had a hinged drawer you opened at the front, to slide in a package of instant film. I couldn’t see how this one loaded. The device seemed to be made of one smooth piece.
He saw me eyeing the camera and did a curious thing: He put a protective hand on it, an old lady gripping her purse a little tighter as she walks past some street toughs. He extended the dingy-looking twenty with his other hand.
I came around the rear bumper and reached for the money. My gaze shifted to the writing scrolled up his forearm. I didn’t recognize the alphabet, but it looked similar to Hebrew.
“Cool ink,” I said. “What language is that?”
“Phoenician.”
“What’s it say?”
“It says ‘Don’t fuck with me.’ More or less.”
I tucked the money into my shirt pocket and began to shuffle away from him, moving in reverse. I was too scared of him to turn my back on him.
I wasn’t looking where I was going and veered off course, bumped into the rear fender, and almost fell down. I put a hand on the trunk to steady myself and glanced around, and that was how I saw the photo albums.
There were maybe a dozen of them stacked along the backseat. One of them was open, and I could see Polaroids slid into clear plastic sleeves, four on each sheet. The photos themselves were nothing special. An overlit shot of an old man blowing out the candles on a birthday cake. A rain-bedraggled corgi staring into the camera with tragic, hungry eyes. A muscle-bound dude in a hilariously orange tank top, sitting on the hood of a Trans Am straight out of Knight Rider.
That last one caught my gaze. I felt I vaguely knew the young man in the tank top. I wondered if I’d seen him on TV, if he was a wrestler, had climbed into the ring with the Hulkster to go a few rounds.
“You got a lot of pictures,” I said.
“It’s what I do. I’m a scout.”
“Scout?”
“For the movies. I see an interesting place, I shoot a picture of it. I see an interesting face, I shoot a picture of that.” He lifted one corner of his mouth to show a snaggly tooth. “Why? You wanna be in movies, kid? You want me to take your picture? Hey, you never can tell. Maybe some casting agent will like your face. Next thing you know—Hollywood, baby.” He was fingering the camera in a way I didn’t like, with a kind of twitchy eagerness.
Even in the theoretically more innocent time of the late 1980s, I wasn’t keen to pose for photographs taken by a guy who looked like he bought his clothes at Pedophiles “R” Us. And then there was what Shelly had said to me: Don’t let him take a picture of you. That warning was a poisonous spider with hairy legs, crawling down my spine.
“I don’t think so,” I said. “It might be too hard to fit all of me in one shot.” I gestured with both hands at my paunch, straining against my shirt.
His eyes bulged in his corroded face for an instant, and then he laughed, a raw, horsey sound that was part disbelief, part real hilarity. He pointed a finger at me, thumb cocked like the hammer of a gun. “You’re okay, kid. I like you. Just don’t get lost on the way to the cash register.”
I walked away from him on unsteady legs, and not just because I was escaping a creep with an ugly mouth and an uglier face. I was a rational child. I read Isaac Asimov, hero-worshipped Carl Sagan, and felt a certain spiritual affinity with Andy Griffith’s Matlock. I knew that Shelly Beukes’s ideas about the Polaroid Man (only I was already thinking of him as the Phoenician) were the addled fantasies of a mind sliding apart. Her warnings shouldn’t have rated a second thought—but they did. They had, in the last few moments, assumed an almost oracular power and worried me as much as it would’ve worried me to learn I had Seat 13 on Flight 1313 on Friday the 13th (and never mind that 13 is a pretty cool number, not just a prime or a Fibonacci but also an emirp, which means it stays prime if you reverse the digits and make it 31).
I got inside the mini-mart, dug the money out of my shirt pocket, and dropped it on the counter.
“Put it on Pump Ten for the nice guy in the Caddy,” I said to Mrs. Matsuzaka, who stood behind the register alongside her kid, Yoshi.
Only no one ever called him Yoshi except her; he went by Mat, one t. Mat had a shaved head and long, ropy arms, and he affected a laconic surfer-dude ease. He was five years older than me and heading off to Berkeley at the end of the summer. He was looking to put his parents out of business by inventing a car that didn’t need gas.
“Hey, Fags,” he said, and tossed me a nod, which cheered me up some. Yeah, all right, he called me Fags—but I didn’t take it person ally. To most kids that was just my name. That may sound savagely homophobic now—and it was!—but in 1988, the era of AIDS and Eddie Murphy, calling someone a fag or a queer was considered high wit. By the standards of the day, Mat was a model of sensitivity. He read Popular Mechanics faithfully, cover to cover, and sometimes when I wandered into the Mobil mini-mart, he’d give me one of his back issues, because he’d seen something in there he thought I’d dig: a prototype jet pack or a personal one-man submarine. I don’t want to misrepresent him. We weren’t friends. He was seventeen and cool. I was thirteen and desperately uncool. A friendship between us was about as likely as my scoring a date with Tawny Kitaen. But I believe he felt a certain pitying affection for me and had a nebulous urge to look after me, maybe because we were both circuitheads at heart. I was grateful for any kindness from other kids in those days.