True Love Balls

A story by Keith Croes

"Up for a bash tonight?"

"Nah. I just broke up with Agnes."

"Who?"

"Agnes."

"Agnes of the wonderful butt? Not much up top, though."

"No, not much up top. Sid, I gotta go."

"'Bout time. How long were you seeing her? Six, eight years?"

"Right. Try months."

"Come onnnnn! We got a thing at the Belmont tonight. A real bash, babe. You know that latest program you wrote? It's True Love Night at the Belmont. What timing! Somebody there just right for you, McClancy!"

Self-focusing biosensory program.

"What?"

"Ya gotta see it, man! Put chips inside balls 'bout the size of a ping-pong ball? Everyone gets one on the way in--blue for guys, pink for chicks. Touch the balls together and if they glow, you got a match, brother! True love! True Love Balls! There's someone there for you, McClancy!"

"How much memory?"

"Shit, I don't know. Stuffed them full of cellular."

"You stuffed them full of cellular matrix memory gel?"

"Yeah. Me and a pal over at NetComp."

"How d'ya know they work?"

"Took a couple over to Rosie and her new buddy."

"Your ex-wife?"

"Yeah. Mr. and Mrs. Perfect. Things glowed like new headlights. You oughta see it, man!"

"Stuffed them full of cellular, huh?"

"Twenty percent of a 30 dollar cover times what, eight, nine hundred people? 'Course, half of that's yours, babe. You wrote the program!"

"Right."

Tiny muscles bulged in Joe Clancy's temples. He thought of his favorite shirt wadded up around a ketchup stain in the laundry basket.

Sid Valentine leaned at a precipitous angle against the bar, one Italian shoe propped up on the footrest of a plush leather stool the color of raw liver. He appeared to be rubbing his dick on the seat. His arm semaphored a wild, spastic pattern across the room. "Let him in! Let him in!"

Joe smiled at the natty behemoth blocking the door and eased by, nodding.

"Hey!"

He turned slowly. Random crooked teeth gaped in a face like a battering ram wearing a bowtie and something pressed into his hand.

"Oh, yeah. Thanks." He put the ball in his pocket. Sid was slanting even more--hanging, almost levitating--toward the dour middle-aged man behind the bar. "The odds against finding the right woman--scientists have figured it out--now get this, babe, a million to one...at least."

Joe gave a little wave near his chest. "Hi, Mr. Deery." The man nodded, looking like one of Santa's elves in a white shirt and red vest, one thick forearm disappearing into a large stainless steel jigger. "Light beer?"

Joe nodded and slid onto a barstool, noticing a document of some kind on the bar near Sid's elbow, and glanced up to his profile, shadow of beard so dark and smooth it looked painted on and generous proboscis now homed in on the club's owner.

"What we do is facilitate the search, lower the odds, know what I mean?" He regarded Joe for the first time. "Got your ball, McClancy? Here she comes. Hey, Cindy!" His hand sought his pocket. "We're made for each other, babe!"

The tall brunette stopped and extended a pink ball at the end of a hairy bare arm, her head lolling skeptically toward the ceiling. Ed Deery placed a coaster in front of Joe, topped it with a mug of beer and stood behind the bar with his hands on his hips, watching. Sid stumbled slightly, righted himself with a sudden athletic effort and his fist came out of his pocket and up to his mouth. He kissed the ball loudly and held it toward the woman.

"Foxy lady, light of my life, future mother of my children, stand back ladies and gentlemen! There could be an explosion!"

The balls met with a click. She laughed and walked off. Sid turned toward the bar. "There was a little glow there, wasn't there?"

"Thanks, Mr. Deery," Joe said, raising the mug.

"Not everyone's as lucky as you and Ruth, Ed," Sid began, resuming his lean. "What is it, 20 years now?"

"Twenty-five." The man wiped his hands on a bar rag.

"One in a million, Ed. At least. Some statistician figured it out. Can I have a refill on this? McClancy, where's your ball? Get your ball out, man. Look, here she comes. True love, babe." Ed returned with a tiny drink sprouting a huge swizzle stick. Sid made a face in Joe's direction, whispered: "Jesus, look at these scrawny fucking drinks."

Joe watched the crowd.

"Five bucks," he heard Ed say behind him.

"What?" Sid adopted a look of incredulity.

"Fifty percent of the cover and you want free drinks?"

"Keep a tab, Ed, Jesus." And then louder in his ear: "I think it glowed a little there with Cindy, didn't it?"

Joe put the back of his hand up against Sid's chest. "Get a load of this, Valentine."

Sid turned and they both watched quietly. Men and women milled with a genial, steady purpose through the giant room, True Love Balls touching, touching, moving on, and here and there a bright glow and laughter.

"Holy shit."

"Bigger than you know, babe. Here, sign this--" His palm twisted the document around to face Joe.

"What is it?"

He half-nudged, half-carried a pen toward Joe across the bar. "Ed's going to back us. He gets half the profit, we split the rest."

"How much is he coming up with?"

"Fifty-thousand."

"That's how many balls?"

"Uh, lots. Lots and lots."

"This isn't another dead-pet weather-station deal, is it?"

Sid spat in his drink, splashing it up his spacious nostrils. "Hey, come onnnn!"

"Tesla-turbine programmable surfdisks?"

"So there was some radiation leakage!"

"Vaginal moisture alarms?"

"Look around you, McClancy."

Joe stared at the crowd. "What about distribution?"

"Production, distribution, it won't be a problem." The head was shaking, the beard charcoal-smooth, like black face.

Joe sat for a moment, blinking. "Okay." He took the pen and locked into Sid's darting eyes. Sid smiled weakly. "But you never lie to me again, understand?"

"What?" Again the incredulous face.

"You told me we were getting thirty percent of the gate, remember?"

"Hey, I woulda told you! I didn't get a chance to tell you!"

"Never again, right?"

The burnt-cork face nodded furiously.

The Rain Forest always did it to him. Too damned high. Squirting like a pea through a pod, 96 floors up the express elevator--"Rain Forest" it said on the button in the lobby of the Marriott--it always made Joe feel as if he'd already had a drink or two. Spongy chairs the disconcerting synthetic fleshtone of a Caucasian mannequin taking him too low and too far backward, and each with a low, water-spotted, bronze-framed, shin-banging imbecility of a glass table as he sank back, back, down, dizzy, chairs designed for the unconscious. He fought among the folds, then gave up. A woman sat down in one next to him.

"Uhnngggga," he said.

She looked completely comfortable in a dress, white or nearly white, with two thin straps over the shoulders. Her hair was cross-thatched silver and purple, a braid within each block. Perfect ears. Freckles on porcelain skin, a little pug nose and Catholic school written all over an Irish mouth.

Stomach muscles tightening, Joe brought himself upright. When he was nearly vertical he stuck out his hand. "Joe Clancy."

She laughed and took it. "Kathy McDevitt."

"I just got here, actually. I mean, I'm not drunk or anything. How do you sit in these things?"

A thin waitress appeared, poised like a fisher loon at her order keypad.

"Uh, light beer, please. And uh--" He pointed toward the woman.

She politely displayed something green in a glass. "I'm fine, thank you." The waitress disappeared.

"So, got your True Love Ball?" The pink globe was in her hand, rolling slowly among slender, stroking fingers. Metallic sparkles on the nails. And, between her bare arms, wonderful, wonderful breasts, sharp but wobbly full and angling down like bean bags begging to be weighed in an open palm, nipples pressing against the almost-white dress in their petulant endeavor to be off in two slightly different directions.

He slapped the chest pockets of his jacket, then dug into his lap. Someone had handed him one of the blue balls on the way in, dizzy off the elevator. He leaned back in the chair again, back, back, patting his front pants pockets, then up, his hips arching up and he groped behind for his back pockets.

"I thought--"

"There it is."

He followed her pointing arm to the glass tabletop, the light blue ball near the base of a vase of dried plants.

"Yeah. Geeze." His stomach muscles worked again and he recognized that he was doing a sit-up. "I knew I had one."

He snatched it and held it toward her, his brain turgid in the socket of his skull, hot and giddy and gorged on thousands of years of racial memory, the incomprehensible lineage that had brought her to an adjacent chair. She glowed reddish. "I invented these," he said absently in a voice that sounded far away.

"No!" She froze. "Did you really?"

"Yeah. Me and my partner."

"Everyone at Villanova is going wild for these things," she said breathlessly.

"Yeah?"

"Wow!" She examined the ball briefly. "I know a guy who's into sales. Specialty shelving?"

"Uh-huh..."

"Commercial shelving, like for businesses?" Her face adopted a greedy, demented little expression, like a leprechaun come upon some shiny forest treasure. "He makes good money--" She shrugged. "--but in the long term, I don't know. I think he's peaked, income-wise."

"Uh-huh. You, uh, go to Villanova?"

"Just graduated. What's your name again?" She sipped the green drink.

"Joe."

She looked satisfied.

Somebody brushed by his shoulder. "Well, Kathy--"

"Are you making big money off these?" Skinny fingers twiddled the pink True Love Ball.

The waitress showed up with his beer. He transferred his ball to his left hand and took the bottle in his right. "They're going good in the city, a few places in Jersey, down in Delaware."

"Let's do it!" Her arm locked happily into extension and wavered at him, fully half of the pink ball exposed in her clutching grasp. Joe thought of a stripper who once stopped with her pelvis at eye level in front of him and displayed her clitoris in a similar manner.

"Okay." He took a hefty slug of beer and placed the bottle down with a click, trying to align its base with a circular water spot. Returning his ball to his right hand, he leaned toward her, and his ball touched hers with a surprising flash. The shadows of her metallic braids cleft her head with jagged gashes, and she laughed the sniggering laugh of a nun who had just discerned some poor boy's dirty little secret.

"Well, I gotta go," Joe said. He exited the low seat by doing the difficult half of a deep knee bend, up, up, left joint cracking, and headed unsteadily toward the DJ where he thought Sid might be, where the music and laughter were. That's all he really wanted, most of the time.

Joe answered the door in his jockey shorts. It was Sid.

"Hey, babe," Sid whispered. "Can we come in?"

The door opened a little wider. Sid had one arm around a tall, familiar brunette and the other around a reluctant dirty blonde.

"You know Cindy," he hissed loudly. "This is Arlene." He squeezed the blonde against him.

Holding the door open, Joe retreated into the shadows.

"After you." Sid guided the women ahead of him into the apartment.

"It's three o'clock," Joe said dryly as Sid passed by.

Sid halted, urging the women onward with his hands on their rumps. "Make yourself comfortable, ladies."

The women continued toward the living room and Sid stood squinting at Joe in the small entryway. "God, you have sexy legs," he whispered loud enough for the women to hear. They giggled. Paper and fabric rustled.

"What's going on?"

Sid lowered his voice. "Arlene wanted to meet you."

"I was sleeping."

"You need your sleep, babe, no doubt about it."

"You could've called."

"I know. I'm an asshole. There wouldn't be any fucking chance that you'd want to have a drink with a beautiful fucking woman, would there?"

Joe sat finally in his bathrobe on the couch. He had made three weak drinks in the kitchen and, after an instant's consideration, a stiff one for himself. He yawned.

Sid sprawled on the floor next to Cindy with one elbow on the coffee table. His beard was dark as soot in the dim room. "Don't do that," he said.

"Sorry."

"This is the genius who thought it up," he announced with a half-hearted sweep of his drink. Arlene smiled at Joe from the other end of the couch.

"I wrote the program," Joe mumbled. "I meant it as a possible psychological testing or screening tool."

"Psycho...!" Sid convulsed. "Psycho...!" Loud, happy bubbles sputtered from his mouth. "Psychological screening tool!" he managed, wallowing in a clamor of wild, goofy hoots. Joe smiled.

Sid hooked an arm around Cindy's neck. "I guess we're just out of luck, sweetheart," he said, then drew her toward him and kissed her.

Joe looked at Arlene. She had her shoes off and her legs tucked up under her on the cushion.

"Tell him," Cindy said.

Still giggling, Sid nuzzled his chin against his loosened tie.

She shoved against his shoulder. "Tell him," she said.

"Tell him," Joe agreed.

Sid found his drink on the coffee table and held it aloft. "This is a celebration, McClancy. I couldn't stand the thought of you not joining in. Tonight we made it." The drink came forward dangerously. "We're going nationwide, babe, a distribution agreement with the largest bar supply franchise in the country. That is, if you feel like coming along."

Joe realized suddenly that he had one of the blue balls in his hand.

"How much?"

"As they say--" Sid glanced warily at the two women. "--the agreement was made for an undisclosed sum." Then he came up quickly to his knees and stuck his sooty face into Joe's. "But there are mucho zeroes," he whispered somberly. "Ooooooooooh so many zeroes."

"Geeze," Joe said.

"Yeah!" Cindy barked it and held out her glass. "Yeah!"

"I don't know, Sid."

"Yeah!"

Glasses ticked all around. Reaching into a shiny red purse, Arlene drew his attention. "Wanna give it a try?" His pulse quickened at the voice: intelligence, breeding, passion as deep as an artesian well. He caught a whiff of her then and came to some kind of decision. Her hand backed out of the purse carrying a pink ball.

"Are you staying tonight?"

"Sure."

He shrugged. "Then why bother?"

Within a month True Love Balls were winking like knowing Cupids in saloons throughout the country. Sid and Joe had flown together to New York and L.A. to appear on the major talk shows, and the gabby people publications had done the predictable interviews.

"One last order and we reach our first big plateau, brother."

They sat in Joe's apartment. Sid scribbled in a notebook. Joe wore his bathrobe and paged through a copy of USA Today.

"Ahhh!" he gargled. "Look at this! Four couples getting married, standing at the altar holding True Love Balls together. Look at that color, Sid! Geeze."

Sid hooted and the phone began bleating. "One more order and we're free to go retail, babe."

Eyes glued to the eight glowing faces in the photo, Joe fumbled for the phone. "Hello."

Sid chortled again and shook his head.

"Slow down, Mr. Deery. What? Yeah. Uh-huh."

Sid glanced over. Joe listened for a long time and hung up without a word. "We've got to get to the Belmont. Now." He looked down. "What time is it?"

"Two."

"In the afternoon?"

"Yeah."

"Geeze."

Ed Deery's head floated angrily above a row of brown cardboard boxes on the bar. "These are from Spazzioli. The same thing's happening at the Rain Forest."

"Jesus, Ed, give us a beer."

Sid and Joe sat on the liver-colored stools with two boxes pushed apart like a break between buildings. They listened to the pressurized hiss of the tap and Ed appeared in front of them with a full mug in each hand. Joe withdrew his arm from the nearest box where it had been trolling idly through a sea of balls.

"Want a coaster?" he sneered.

"There's gotta be an explanation," Sid said.

"The same thing's happening at Pulsations, the same thing's happening in Jersey at the Troc East. We don't need an explanation, we need a lawyer."

He disappeared down the bar.

"We'll fix it, Ed. Chill out a little, why don't you?"

The sound of the tap again and a mumble came to them from behind the boxes. "To top it off, Ruth left me."

"What?"

The man returned to the open space ahead of them, foam on his upper lip. "Took off yesterday to stay with her sister. Till she can get her life back in order." The three looked at each other. Ed drank.

"That sucks, Ed."

"As if all we had was a fucking mess."

He placed his empty mug on the bar.

"We almost had a riot here last night. The balls don't fucking work anymore. Shit, I saw it coming. The last week or two, the things just haven't been going off as much. Now, nothing. Wait'll the distributor finds out. We're duck shit."

They looked at each other again.

"I'll be in my office," Ed said finally. "I'm going to cancel any more orders until the dust settles on this. If it doesn't bury us."

They waited for the door to close behind him.

"Too much memory." Joe emptied the mug into his skyward face, then smacked his lips loudly. "Too bad about Ruth," he belched.

Sid stood, withdrew a blue ball from an open box, and walked on echoing footsteps down and around to the other side of the bar, crouching under the hinged countertop where the waitresses pick up drinks. Meeting Joe's eyes briefly, he picked up Joe's empty mug and disappeared toward the beer taps. The foamy hiss came.

He returned and placed the overflowing mug in front of Joe. "Fuck-a-buncha-Ruths. Whaddaya mean, too much memory?"

"Thanks." Joe clutched the mug. "Another week and none of these things are gonna work." He shook his head. "Too late to do anything about it now. Even if we could fix them, you think the distributor would listen?"

Sid retrieved his own mug, still half full, and finished it off on the way to the taps, refilled it. Surrounded by echoes, he returned to his seat next to Joe.

"What went wrong?" he said, staring straight ahead. Their reflections huddled together between brown cardboard boxes and liquor bottles off the mirrored wall behind the cash register.

Joe shrugged. "It's a self-focusing program. It just expands until it occupies all available memory. At first, the balls could match people up just on general personality similarities. Gradually, they required a better and better match. They got more and more...focused."

"So now--?"

"How often do they go off? Who knows? One in a million, maybe?"

Sid made a honking sound that reverberated vigorously around the club, across tables holding overturned chairs with upturned legs poking through slices of sunlight toward the ceiling. "That's no better than--"

"--Than chance alone. Than fate itself. That's what the mathematicians say."

"McClancy, don't tell me this shit, babe! We can't live with those kinda odds. How can we live with those kinda odds, man? No one can live with those kinda odds! Shit! And the cellular--doesn't that stuff communicate with itself?"

"Any used ball brought within, oh, fifteen meters of any new ball with the same basic program and you'd have complete transfer of memory. And there's old balls all over the lab."

Sid took a long draught, then fell into a coughing fit. "We're...we're duck shit," he croaked at last.

"Back where we started."

They sat sipping for a long time in dead quiet punctuated by Sid's hacks, neither of them accustomed to seeing the bar in the slanting afternoon sun through the high windows around the room.

"You like Arlene?" Sid asked.

"Yeah. A lot."

"Yeah. Cindy's okay too."

Joe rose and walked around the bar, drawing them both another beer. "Here's to the job search," he toasted between the boxes.

Ignoring the proffered glass, Sid for some reason held out a blue ball and Joe laughed, placing his mug back down on the bar and reciprocating with a blue ball of his own. In the dimness of the Belmont, the two orbs cast a weird fluorescence on their surprised faces.

THE END

MORE STORIES BY KEITH CROES

keith@croes.com