Mike Itaya
I Knew Conway Boom: Toot Maudlin’s True Hollywood Story
I knew Conway Boom. He was glorious. The real article. Hanes underoos. Buns of steel. Spanish fly. And for a period between the spring and fall of ’93, I tried very, very hard to fuck him. Problem being, he didn’t seem to care if I lived or died. And living in his dispassion was as lonely as the moon.
Which is why I had to go for it.
That fall I threw a wrap party for Cop Movie at my dojang. Box wine. Two types of cheese. A brand-spankin’ Hitachi boombox. Then our co-star, Burt McHands, showed up, and the first thing he did was take a King Kong shit in my can. And he was all—from inside my bathroom—“I don’t think anyone should come in here again.”
That’s when Conway Boom (who was also legendary for kicking down doors) kicked down my apartment door. From inside my half-bath, McHands said: “I have a drinking problem.”
“McHandsy, that you?” Conway yelled. “C.B. has got the funky feels about this commode-abode.” He held up my best box of wine, chugged the remainder, and massaged his areolas.
“So, you know what looks great on Conway Boom?” I drained my Solo cup and chucked it on the ground. “Me.” I framed my face with my fingers. I was going for it, before anyone else showed up.
Conway looked at me with bored concern like I’d just swallowed a mouthful of spiders. He picked up the block cheese, sniffed it, then dropped it like a turd on the table. He yawned right in my face. His breath smelled as bad as I felt.
“Don’t do it, C.B.,” McHands said, still in the can. “She bought shitty cheese.”
I kicked my bathroom’s plasterboard door.
“I’m worried about Burt,” C.B. said.
“He’s fine, everybody’s fine.”
“He just told your hand towels he has a drinking problem,” C.B. said, as if I hadn’t just said he was fine.
I pushed play on my Hitachi boomer. To “Thriller,” I furiously shook my fanny.
Conway stared at me like I had snakes coming out of my clothes.
“That sucked grapes,” McHands said.
Conway cleaned his cuticles with the arrogance of the handsome-bored.
“Sorry, but I never boogie for free.”
I pulled out a Jefferson and handed it over. C.B. examined the mint, holding it up beneath my flickering fixture. He passed it under the door hole to McHands, who inspected the bill for a long time before saying, “It’s real, C.B.”
Conway shrugged: “Let’s get retrosexual.”
This was all before a lot of things happened, long before Conway got me blackballed from the Cop Movie franchise, and before (but not long before) Conway left me alone in a Motel 6 under an assumed name with rather significant room charges.
Before all that: We boogied like I’d never boogied before.
We danced across the face of the moon.
Mike Itaya lives in southern Alabama, where he works in a library. His work appears in New Orleans Review, BULL, and Storm Cellar, and has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. He holds an MFA in Fiction from Pacific University.
